The most noticeable feature of Umrao Jaan is  Aishwarya Rai’s dancing fingers.
 

Vaibhavi Merchant, the film's choreographer, will now be known for introducing a unique form of dancing to Hindi films – anguli naach.  J.P.Dutta’s masterpiece will also be remembered for using motifs like ‘batashas’ and ‘champa kal*’ to generate a flood of hot and humid emotions.

* A manually operated water pump that works when you push its lever down or ‘champon’ it. That is why the name ‘champa kal’. The version shown in the film is a modern one that may have been introduced around 1975 in South Indian villages.

There is also this bizarre ‘til’ business that has been turned into a ‘taad’ in the story. Aish falls out of Jr. B’s favour because Suniel Shetty tells him that he had seen the ‘til’ (a black beauty spot) on her thigh. Jr. B takes it as a betrayal of his faith by her. Yaani ki Aish, yaani ki Umrao Jaan, zaroor soi hogi Suniel Shetty ke saath. Is it part of Ruswa’s story? If it is so, Umrao Jaan is no historical figure. She is a figment of Ruswa’s imagination who invented cheap romantic and sleazy tales like these to please his friends and patrons. By the way, can men really keep track of tils and other such marks on the lower body of their women? I don't think so. Who would bother about such pinhead size issues in those blind passionate moments?

Why are people bickering about why the film was shot in Rajasthan and not in Lucknow? What difference would it make? Dutta has not shown slow moving camel caravans in the great desert of Thar anyway. Eighty percent of the film is shot indoors. Outdoor scenes include a few shots of an open aaramgah and a garden with a pool, a mustard field, a dusty road, a small bridge over a village culvert, exterior of a dilapidated house and its iron gates, bullock cart rides, a road that passes by the brothel run by Shabana Azmi, reminiscent of the sets in American westerns, that makes it easy for the tawaifs to call passers-by to extract the latest buzz about their love interests.

You did not have to go to Lucknow or Rajasthan to shoot all this. You could do this in Mumbai’s Essel Studio, the Film City, and other convenient and cost-effective locations. Dutta Saheb took his unit to Rajasthan as a bonus or probably he felt that a change in geography would spur sizzling chemistry between Aish and Jr. B, leading to the physics of lovemaking, followed by the recreation of history.
 
 

 This history begins with the abduction of a little girl Ameeran from Faizabad, her final induction into tawaifhood as Umrao Jaan in Lucknow, and how she survives a failed love affair, a rape, and the mutiny of 1857, to tell her tale -- sitting inside a domed structure, in semi-darkness, obscured behind bamboo curtains -- to an old man called Ruswa, who speaks his mugged-up Urdu lines in a funny laborious sort of way. This botched up tale of a lonely Tawaif does not engage the audiences emotionally and the film falters and flops.

J.P. Dutta and his father have this great penchant to educate audiences on the subtle nuances of the subject of their films with liberal use of film footage. In LOC, it was the theory of ‘five regulation soldiers having to carry a dead and injured man down’. This became the centrepiece of the film on Kargil war. Umrao Jaan educates you on  what is the tell-tale signal if someone has died in a Muslim household. ‘Agar kisi ki khaat ulti kahdi ho, to samajh lo woh mar gaya.’ If a man’s cot is kept upside down, it signifies his death. Now, we know the genealogy of the phrase ‘Ulti khaat khada karna’,  thanks to the Dutta Parivar of filmmakers, historians, and educators.

Nothing works in this film. Nothing. The script, the dialogues, the songs, the dances, the editing, and the music - it is sub-standard attempt all the way. Every scene is flawed, sloppily conceived, and underdeveloped, and except for Shabana and few others, the performances of actors are pitiable and pedestrian. Cinematography also works in patches, largely in controlled indoor set-ups.

J.P. Dutta seems to have lost his sense of cinema completely. He has made a film like ‘Hathyar’ in the past that had wonderful characterisations and performances. The great decline that started with Border and turned into a free fall in LOC, has reached a pathetic and deathly end in Umarao Jaan.
 

 

What does he do as a director on the sets? Can't he notice the offhand and trite performances of his actors? Does he brief them well? His actors deliver Urdu couplets and dialogues like they were born in Russia with no sense of poetry. They needed serious training and rehearsals. They should have been given their dialogues in advance and made to sit with a good Urdu teacher to understand the subtleties and nuances of the language and the import of their lines, that contained very little substance anyway. How can they emote in a film of this kind if they cannot speak correctly?

He should have seen the problems in Aishwarya’s dancing. It was out of tune with the musical score and her overdone hast mudras hogged all the limelight. She looked emaciated, unappealing, and old in many shots thanks to the harsh studio lighting of her face. Her costume in the mujra in front of her home audience was downright bad. The cap did not suit her face but it was there, made more prominent in film posters and publicity.

The flashback narrative style simply adds to the footage without achieving any specific objective. It slows the film’s pace, and instead of introducing elements of pathos and a sense of history being retold, gives a comic touch to the story. High flown Urdu lines in Aishwarya’s thin childlike voice sound incredibly ludicrous.
 
 

I feel sad for all the actors in the film. They have been treated like junior artistes, with underdeveloped roles, left to do their own things, with no help from the director. It only shows that Dutta didn’t have a definite vision of his own. He was making a cover version of the earlier Umrao Jaan. But why? Why Umrao Jaan? There are other films that could have been copied with very little effort, with no need to research and recreate history. If he wanted to make a magnificent historical and an epic, he had to have an equally grand vision and the capacity and commitment to turn it into a reality.

In the last laps of their careers, filmmakers and actors develop this pathological love for grandeur, grand gesturing, and grandiloquence. Big B went into retirement around the time it infected him and when he returned, he had fully recovered. He is carrying on well with his extended shelf life, keeping the disease at bay. Dutta entered the dangerous phase with Border. The box office success of the film turned his head so much that even after the gigantic failure of LOC, he refused to see the writing on the wall.
 

Can he change now after the ignominious fiasco of Umrao Jaan? He may not. This is a highly debilitating, dangerous, and delusional disease. You feel like Shahjahan whose life is not fulfilled unless he builds his Tajmahal, which literally means digging and decorating your own grave.

Or has Dutta dug a well decorated and hyped financial grave for the guys who bought the film's distribution rights for astronomical figures in the hope that they will be delivered a Taj Mahal of a film by the great director? If true, it is an interesting example of a filmmaker turning into a confidence trickster.

And who are his ultimate victims? The cinema going audiences, the common people, who pay for the follies and the lavish junkets of all the hovering dogs of the world - the politicians, the bureaucrats, the bankers, the businessmen, the corporates, and the cons of all hues and colours.

RKS

Archive of Film Reviews & Other Issues