Main Aurr Mrs Khanna

Better do the ‘Main Aur Meri Tanhai’ thing than endure this soppy recession-riddled romance.

A misleading title if there ever was one, Main Aurr Mrs Khanna is not about a fling. Marital fidelity is alive and kicking in the film and ‘messing around’ is just a hypothetical notion that the characters play around with to provide a script. Mr and Mrs Khanna in Melbourne, Australia, face the recession blues. So Mr Khanna (Salman Khan) buys two air tickets, one for himself to Singapore and the other for his wife to Delhi, and thence to her home in Dalhousie. But till she gets her boarding pass at Melbourne airport, Mrs Khanna (Kareena Kapoor) is under the impression that she is flying with hubby to Singapore.  Shell shocked, she is marooned in tears and doesn’t take her flight. 

Enter the overseas bachelor hanging by the skin of his teeth to his job at the departure lounge. Smitten by Mrs K,  Akash (Sohail Khan) helps her get a job at the airport and when questions are asked about her work permit, suggests she marry him (‘nakli shaadi’). Mrs Khanna agrees. Clearly, director Prem Soni has done his research on one of the causes of working-class Australian hostility to Indian immigrants in Melbourne and Sydney. The film’s fault lines lie elsewhere.

The problem with the film is entirely directorial. Soni doesn’t have the foggiest notion of film grammar. Instead of allowing the actors in the film to speak their lines as in a conversation, he applies deafening background music to every significant line spoken, turning the big screen into an idiot box. The only thing missing is the canned laughter and the commercial breaks.

But the terminal blow is the shockingly bad performances from ‘A’ grade actors. Everyone is half dead, just going through the motions. It takes a vibrant cameo by Preity Zinta, playing a Pakistani diva, to provide artificial resuscitation, before the movie slumps back into the flat liner it starts off as.

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Ajit Duara