KYA YEHI PYAAR HAI

produced by Allu Arvind / directed by K. Murali Mohan Rao / starring Amisha Patel, Aftab Shivdasani, & Jackie Shroff / music by Sajid-Wajid / lyrics by Jalees Rashid & Ajay Jhingran

Warning: We're breaking from standard policy to include spoilers in this review.
However, we feel that nothing could really spoil this movie . And we mean that in a bad way.

     Rahul (Aftab Shivdasani) is madly in love with Sandhya (Amisha Patel), and has been for four years. He gets up an hour earlier every morning just so he can take the same bus she does. He tells his friends, very seriously, that he can't live without her. It would be very sweet, except that he's never spoken to her in his life.  Get out your restraining orders, everyone -- the fun's just beginning!

   Finally Sandhya gets a little creeped out by this psycho trailing her around, retrieving and caressing the trash she drops, and undressing her with his slack-jawed, drooling leer. She tells him that 1) she has no interest in him; 2) she will never be interested in him; and 3) in case he didn't get the point already, to piss off. After such a thorough dressing down, most guys -- face it, anyone except the mentally deranged -- would leave her alone. But poor Rahul doesn't listen to a word she's saying. Yes, that's right; he's so in love with this girl that when his true love finally speaks to him, he literally hears not a word because he's too distracted by her lips. Evidently, it's supposed to be romantic that he's more interested in her physical charms than in what she has to say.

   Movies have a history of making women the passive objects of the male gaze, but this is plain creepy, particularly since we know he's supposed to be the hero. A gentle word of advice: most women don't go weak in the knees at the prospect of being utterly disregarded as a thinking human being. Confidential to Rahul: if you're more concerned with her lipliner than her words, this is not love. Actually, check the dictionary -- there's a word for what it is, though in Bollywood, it usually only applies to cabaret dancers. (Of course, if these dancers are only working to support an ailing mother and/or orphaned younger sibling, it will immediately transmute to love when the hero discovers said circumstances.)

   Anyway, blah blah blah for the next two hours. We do discover that Sandhya's father is a nasty drunk who enjoys tormenting his wife and lighting people on fire; that Rahul loves Sandhya so much that, after witnessing her dad's pyrotechnics, he's still willing to risk getting her incinerated (grounding is so passé) by crawling in her window and hiding out in her bedroom (and staying, even after she demands that he leave). Oh, we also discover that Sandhya's main goal in life is to win the top medal in her college class and get a good job, thereby enabling herself and her mother to escape from one of the psychos, if not both.

   Everything supposedly comes to a head when Rahul's female friend Neha, a matchmaker who would make the Fiddler's hair stand on end, concocts a plot to force Sandhya to get together with Rahul: she forges a tape of Rahul and Sandhya having an intimate "lover's chat" and plans to play it in front of the whole school, therein stripping Sandhya of her reputation so all she'll have left is Rahul's love. Rahul cannot bear the idea of his true love being so dishonored (we have to wonder if it's because he wouldn't want to be seen with a "fallen" girl), for which his friends admire and adore him. Wow! The stalker has a moral or two! Color us impressed.

   But Sandhya keeps rejecting Rahul (though she is haunted by a particularly poignant shot of him being beaten bloody by her dad; why, we don't know, since we would have overseen the beating, had we been there. But maybe the director is trying to give Sandhya some depth -- say, by hinting at a repressed sadist streak?). In return for spurning him, she receives various lectures about how cold-hearted she is to focus on her studies instead of humoring this stranger's inexplicable obsession with her. (She's also criticized for calling the Taj Mahal a mausoleum -- thus proving political correctness has conquered India along with Britney Spears.) When things with Psycho Dad get too heated, she and her mother flee the city. So Psycho Boy goes off to stalk her down, and while he's away, his brother is killed trying to find him. Rahul, naturally, blames Sandhya -- after all, he can't be held responsible for the consequences of his own stalking.

   Sandhya is happy that Rahul has gotten the message -- until, that is, Neha comes along, angry that Sandhya has managed to escape Psycho Boy's lecherous attentions. She reveals that Rahul wouldn't let her play the forged tape and destroy Sandhya's reputation. Poof! Two and a half hours have passed, so Sandhya must be in love! After all, even if Rahul has tormented and harassed her for four years, he still cares enough not to frame her as a whore! She finds him and confesses her love -- and Rahul rejects her! That's right -- if he doesn't have to stalk her anymore, he's not interested! (That's okay, though, because you're not interested either -- you're watching in fast-forward while you think about dinner.) Sandhya persists (she learned her wooing techniques from him, after all), saying she knows he'll come around, and declares that she will wait for him at the bus stop where he has ambushed her every morning for the last four years.

    Meanwhile, is Rahul going to meet her? No! After Sandhya has been reviled time and again for her dedication to school and career, we now see Rahul choose a job over love -- and be celebrated for it by all his smarmy friends! This is where the film hits its high point. As Sandhya waits at the bus stop, the scene freezes and a narrator pops out of the woodwork to informs us that he hopes we understood the moral of the story. Note to screenwriter (if he's still alive; we suspect he's a crack addict): if you have to explain what your film was about, you probably should trash the whole thing. Anyway, the important lesson we should take away? Life isn't all about love, especially when you're young. Honoring your parents and friends is more important. Gee, isn't that what Sandhya tried to do? Guess it doesn't count when it's a girl!

- reviewed by Meredith