It's the year '98. Enter Nagesh Kukunoor, new kid on the block, chemical engineer with a flair for chic direction, who breathes a fresh air of life into the rotting Bollywood movie scene abuzz with the Kuch-Kuch-Hota-Hais of the Here's-another-one-with-the-story-in-the-title ilk. Fast forward to the year 2006. Bollywood hasn't changed much, living to its complete glory with KANKs and other tosh. But sadly, Kukunoor has. Dor, which literally means a string, possibly signals an end a string of movies that examined un-conventional and hushed down mores in a contemporary Indian society. Movies that had a trademark un-slick editing, with some sense of youthful arrogance, and evinced a thought provoking interlude of dialog amongst an audience hungry for some food-for-thought. But sorry, Dor doesn't belong to this category.
Dor starts off with Zeenat(Gul Panag) being courted by lover Aamir, running parallel to the story of Meera(Ayesha Takia) and Shankar soaking up in conjugal bliss in some god forsaken location in Rajasthan(more about this later). Oh, and BTW, from whatever few Indian movies I have seen, can we please leave the love making scenes to be the sole proprietary of Mani Ratnam movies? Others possibly never seem to get past the stage of screening something hopelessly imbecile, featuring giggling couples caressing each other as an excuse for sex. Anyways, it comes to pass that Shankar and Aamir must leave their newly wed brides and set abound for a distant land to earn a decent living for families back home. While Zeenat, who has married Aamir clandestinely without much apparent societal support, manages to eventually win the trust and affection of her in-laws; Meera is stuck in a traditional Rajput household, stifled by feudal anarchy that is the wont of such traditions. As days pass by, we see both wives communicating with hubby beloved and counting days for their return.
All of a sudden, tragedy strikes, a-la Bollywood style. Shankar has died in a freak accident involving his roommate Aamir who has purportedly pushed him from the tenth floor or so we are told by an official from the ministry of External Affairs, Govt. of India, who makes a trip all the to this village in Himachal that has random coordinates. Now wait Mr. Screenplay-writer unless you've apriory presumed that the audience to be comprised of completely brain-dead morons who possess subnormal IQs no loser would ever believe in that preposterous gibberish of MEA officials dropping by at your home to relay some arbitrary news. Thank heavens they didn't veer the story in the direction of an omni possible barbarian genocide in form of an India Pakistan war as a resultant of a sitter of a politician traveling all the way to break news to a petty laborer's family. It's high time the audience demanded that we are not to be intravenously fed on this humdrum crap. But on second thoughts, maybe we have already been numbly delusion-ed into accepting this as an integral part of pop-culture that Bollywood epitomizes and that is what coaxes us into silent acceptance of such trite. Moving on, our friendly devoted MEA official informs that the only way Aamir can be saved from the impending conviction and eventual sentence, is when the victim(Shankar)'s widow signs a bond of amnesty for Aamir.
Once this connection between the two couples is established(all this happens in the first half-an-hour), figuring out how stale the rest of storyline is going to be, I would reckon, isn't exactly as complicated as modeling the flow of 2 dimensional energy waves through an anisotropic media in the form of a partial differential equation.
Chug-chugging forward exactly as predicted above, the rest of the movie bounces and rebounds over your now-so-dead neural system and you just sit through it blank and coldly numb like a victim of a gang rape who went to Khandala expecting the sweet serenades of her romancing lover, and instead found this gang of lust-hungry vultures pouncing on her one after the other till a point where she felt no pain, because it was already blanked out from the utter despondency caused from the resultant betrayal
Zeenat sets out on a wild goose hunt for Meera and her only referential document is a lone photograph of Shankar and Aamir. She bumps into a so-called "beherupia" a petty thief(Shreyas Talpade) who doubles up as a limply humorous mimicry artist, and this ultimately accounts for whatever little "paisa-vasool" the movie could succor. They manage to spot out Shankar's place by making vain attempts at playing Sherlock Holmes, and a friendship ensues between Meera and Zeenat, whence the latter teaches the former courses like "women's Lib 101" and "self-belief for dummies" and "seven effective ways of taking controls over the reins of your life". Heck, if I had really wanted a philosophy lecture, I could park my posterior at home and tune into Aastha channel free of cost and that way I don't have to stand irritating people who come to the movies with little kids that get impatient and start wailing their lungs out.
Spoiler Warning:
The movie ultimately ends in a DDLJ style, with Meera handing the signed document over to Zeenat and then boarding the speeding train, leaving behind a life of unscrupulous hostility and a flesh trading father-in-law for whom self pride and inanimate ancestral property is more important than the "maan-mariyada" of the daughter-in-law. Now don't blame me for a climax spoiler, because I firmly opine that a movie with loopholes resulting from lack of homework and research(No Rajashthani pronounces the name Chopra as "Chop-ra" it's "Chop-da"...), blatantly melodramatic screenplay, extremely predictable storyline and a cornucopia of mushy poop doesn't deserve anything better than this in the first place.
Dor starts off with Zeenat(Gul Panag) being courted by lover Aamir, running parallel to the story of Meera(Ayesha Takia) and Shankar soaking up in conjugal bliss in some god forsaken location in Rajasthan(more about this later). Oh, and BTW, from whatever few Indian movies I have seen, can we please leave the love making scenes to be the sole proprietary of Mani Ratnam movies? Others possibly never seem to get past the stage of screening something hopelessly imbecile, featuring giggling couples caressing each other as an excuse for sex. Anyways, it comes to pass that Shankar and Aamir must leave their newly wed brides and set abound for a distant land to earn a decent living for families back home. While Zeenat, who has married Aamir clandestinely without much apparent societal support, manages to eventually win the trust and affection of her in-laws; Meera is stuck in a traditional Rajput household, stifled by feudal anarchy that is the wont of such traditions. As days pass by, we see both wives communicating with hubby beloved and counting days for their return.
All of a sudden, tragedy strikes, a-la Bollywood style. Shankar has died in a freak accident involving his roommate Aamir who has purportedly pushed him from the tenth floor or so we are told by an official from the ministry of External Affairs, Govt. of India, who makes a trip all the to this village in Himachal that has random coordinates. Now wait Mr. Screenplay-writer unless you've apriory presumed that the audience to be comprised of completely brain-dead morons who possess subnormal IQs no loser would ever believe in that preposterous gibberish of MEA officials dropping by at your home to relay some arbitrary news. Thank heavens they didn't veer the story in the direction of an omni possible barbarian genocide in form of an India Pakistan war as a resultant of a sitter of a politician traveling all the way to break news to a petty laborer's family. It's high time the audience demanded that we are not to be intravenously fed on this humdrum crap. But on second thoughts, maybe we have already been numbly delusion-ed into accepting this as an integral part of pop-culture that Bollywood epitomizes and that is what coaxes us into silent acceptance of such trite. Moving on, our friendly devoted MEA official informs that the only way Aamir can be saved from the impending conviction and eventual sentence, is when the victim(Shankar)'s widow signs a bond of amnesty for Aamir.
Once this connection between the two couples is established(all this happens in the first half-an-hour), figuring out how stale the rest of storyline is going to be, I would reckon, isn't exactly as complicated as modeling the flow of 2 dimensional energy waves through an anisotropic media in the form of a partial differential equation.
Chug-chugging forward exactly as predicted above, the rest of the movie bounces and rebounds over your now-so-dead neural system and you just sit through it blank and coldly numb like a victim of a gang rape who went to Khandala expecting the sweet serenades of her romancing lover, and instead found this gang of lust-hungry vultures pouncing on her one after the other till a point where she felt no pain, because it was already blanked out from the utter despondency caused from the resultant betrayal
Zeenat sets out on a wild goose hunt for Meera and her only referential document is a lone photograph of Shankar and Aamir. She bumps into a so-called "beherupia" a petty thief(Shreyas Talpade) who doubles up as a limply humorous mimicry artist, and this ultimately accounts for whatever little "paisa-vasool" the movie could succor. They manage to spot out Shankar's place by making vain attempts at playing Sherlock Holmes, and a friendship ensues between Meera and Zeenat, whence the latter teaches the former courses like "women's Lib 101" and "self-belief for dummies" and "seven effective ways of taking controls over the reins of your life". Heck, if I had really wanted a philosophy lecture, I could park my posterior at home and tune into Aastha channel free of cost and that way I don't have to stand irritating people who come to the movies with little kids that get impatient and start wailing their lungs out.
Spoiler Warning:
The movie ultimately ends in a DDLJ style, with Meera handing the signed document over to Zeenat and then boarding the speeding train, leaving behind a life of unscrupulous hostility and a flesh trading father-in-law for whom self pride and inanimate ancestral property is more important than the "maan-mariyada" of the daughter-in-law. Now don't blame me for a climax spoiler, because I firmly opine that a movie with loopholes resulting from lack of homework and research(No Rajashthani pronounces the name Chopra as "Chop-ra" it's "Chop-da"...), blatantly melodramatic screenplay, extremely predictable storyline and a cornucopia of mushy poop doesn't deserve anything better than this in the first place.