<i>I See You</i> - Only 'downs', no 'ups'?

By: Subhash K. Jha, IndiaFM
Monday, January 01, 2007
Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan flit across the screen during the credit titles. They were being kind.

Dress designer Manish Malhotra has the easiest job in this quaint but dead film about a comatose girl whose spirit visits a talk-show host's swanky pad in London. She looks as bored as a ghost who has seen a living person who can touch her. The cleverest thing about Suresh Nair's script is the talk-show title British Raj ...You see, Raj is our hero Arjun Rampal's name. Clever clever!

It's a name much in favour in our films. Remember Shah Rukh Khan in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge? Like that spectacular success I See You too is set in London. Cinematographer Ashok Mehta shoots London with a mix of touristic delight and resident ennui. Music composer Vishal-Shekhar comes up with rock-rich sounds that provide a welcome intrusion. Somewhere between the two extremes of delight and ennui resides the core of this failed but sweet tender love story between a womanizer and a ghost.

Arjun Rampal is an actor I've always thought capable of charisma on screen. As producer he offers himself a plum chance. Unfortunatelly the plum just leaves us glum. A deathly stillness occupies the heart of the plot. And if you have watched the film Hollywood film Just Like Heaven you know where this Hindi version is coming from.

Most of the film is set in the hero Raj's apartment, far prettier and vivacious then newcomer Vipasha who plays the ghost with unnerving calmness. What is she thinking???What was debutant director Vivek Aggarwal thinking???? Scenes between Rampal and the debutante are absolutely zero in chemistry. Seldom have we come across a pair so devoid of a romantic link.

The fringe players, mainly derived from the original Hollywood film, include a corrupt doctor who sells organs , a British cop who's so obsessed with Hindi film he speaks Hindi through Hindi film titles, the comatose girl's mom who darts dirty looks at Raj(maybe she doesn't like what she sees) , a talk-show co-hostess who shows so much leg cleavage and vacuous smiles you wonder if she's advertising for strip poker, and last but not the least, the hero's friend who gets beaten up by his wife every night.

Only God knows what the husband-beating wife wants from her husband...or why this film was made in the first place! An exercise in supreme self-indulgence I See You tells us nothing about London, near-fatal illnesses and self-obsessed talk-show hosts that we really wish to know.

There must be a good reason to see I See You. Right now I can't think of any.

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