Jazbaa

Jazbaa could have been shot with a green hue for two reasons. One, to send a strong message about preserving the environment. And two, as an aesthetic measure—to celebrate the return of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan to the screen by matching the colour of her eyes with the lens filters.

So where does that leave Irrfan Khan, with his expressive eyes? It leaves him trying to make sense of a nonsensical adaptation of the Korean thriller Seven Days. He does this by avoiding conversation with his co-actors, talking instead to himself, and sometimes to the audience. At one point he makes a profound statement, saying that when you do not have trust in a relationship and claim to have network problems with your cell phone, it is a sure sign you are playing games. This throwaway line does not seem part of the script. He seems to have made it up on the spot.

Which does indicate that Jazbaa is pretty directionless for much of its running time. The paper-thin plot is about hotshot lawyer Anuradha Verma (Bachchan) who has never lost a case. One day, for no apparent reason that her colleagues can understand, she accepts the brief of a felon. The audience knows that her daughter has been kidnapped and she is being blackmailed into defending this criminal in court.

It is only her friend Inspector Yohan (Khan), currently suspended on charges of corruption, who figures out why she has agreed to accept this ‘open and shut’ case of a brutal rape and murder of a young woman. It says something about the hollow content of this film when an actress of Shabana Azmi’s calibre turns up as the mother of the victim and starts hamming away about the pain of motherhood.

So at least two excellent actors have been cast in important roles in Jazbaa, but to no discernible effect. There’s just one fetching scene in this entire film, when a German Shepherd turns up to play ‘fetch’. The rest of the cast, alas, play dead.

Aishwarya Rai BachchanIrrfan KhanJazbaaSanjay GuptaShabana Azmi