19 Oct 2006 - Jaan-E-Mann

OPM*

Presents - Jaan-E-Mann - Geometry Fail :(


Love triangles can be complicated. Especially if you failed geometry in school.

Indian film makers, for long, have relied on love triangles to give them story angles. It is rarely though that film makers have attempted anything more complicated.
For example, the love quadrilateral or the love polygon. Or the severely interesting, Love Pyramid, where the object of love is at the top and everyone else is at the bottom. The top of the pyramid is usually inhabited by women of breathtaking beauty who do not necessarily suffer from asthma. Examples include Greta Garbo, and closer home, divas like Madhubala. These people are at no disadvantage even if they are geometrically challenged.
At the bottom of the pyramid though, it is a very different story. The bottom is usually inhabited by men of negligible or no character. Examples include but are not limited to Me. The big problem with being at the bottom of the pyramid is that, like Tutankhamen, one is usually dead. (Proven by the fact that I am, almost always, a dead bore)

There are several interestingly geometric love plots which are rare and enthralling. One, which is found only in America, is called the Love Pentagon. It is a big secret and is kept undercover most of the time except once when Bill and Monica visited.

If it is difficult for film makers to come up with complicated love geometry, it is just as bad for characters stuck in straightforward love triangles. This is because one has to know whether one has the right-angle on the triangle and since Pythagoras is dead there is no longer any hypoteNews to explain it.
All these struggles are well documented in tomorrow’s release Jaan-e-mann.

Jaan-E-Mann is, obviously, about three people. It starts off ten years in the past on a college campus.


Salman plays Jaan, a 40 year old man masquerading as a college student. He is losing hair and has developed a fetish for rock-star hairstyles. Hence the masquerading, to enable wearing wigs. As a college student who has 40 years of life experience he has several advantages over his 20 year old peers. For one, he has watched far more sitcoms and knows many more jokes. This makes him a great hit with the girls in college.

Akshay plays Mann, an 18 year old genius with dreams of being a mover and shaker on the stock exchange someday and a really bad haircut. He comes from a lower middle class background and having been deprived of basic necessities in life like Cable Tv, he has never watched any ‘Friends’ or ‘Will and Grace’. As a result, he knows no jokes at all and hence gets flustered every time he meets a girl, which fortunately is only twice(once a mannequin and the other a rajasthani puppet)

Preity Zinta plays E, the youngest of 5 siblings. Her 4 older sisters, A, B, C and D are played by relatively unknown actors who do not even know the basic alphabet of acting. Since the movie begins in the period when the Internet Revolution started in India, email, e-commerce and E become the craze of the college.

Both Jaan and Mann have email ids but pass out (of college) before they can express their love for E(to her, not to each other)

Ten years later, in the present day, things have changed. Broadband rates have, happily, hit a new low.

E has a completely new wardrobe. Mann is a successful stock-broker and has a 300 dollar haircut. Jaan has a nine year old son, Naan, and has had hair-weaving done. Anupam Kher does a brilliant job as Jaan’s son Naan and is instrumental in bringing our protagonists together again thus:

Naan: How are babies born??
Jaan: Errr… Storks deliver them at the doorstep…
Naan: I want to go to the Stock Exchange NOW!! Waaaahhh!!

Jaan and son make their way to the Stock Market as Mann walks down from his cabin to grab a vada-pav for lunch. E happens to be at the stock market for reasons known only to the scriptwriter. Ten years after they last met; our lead characters meet each other again in a stock Yash Raj movie scene.

Its fireworks all over again for Jaan and Mann, but mostly because it is Diwali. Jaan, to keep his chances of dating E alive, claims that Naan is only his dwarf friend. Mann, who hasn’t watched any sitcoms yet, doesn’t say anything at all. Naan thinks E is a stork and proceeds to try to pluck some feathers. Jaan explains this act by saying that Naan is a dwarf who plays a clown in Boris Karloff’s circus. At the mention of a clown, E runs away screaming her name over and over again. It turns out that she is coulrophobic.

What follows is an entertaining tragi-comedy of errors that can only be watched, not described in words. This was the reason they worked without a script in the first place!

As a tribute to geometric genius through the ages, here is a conundrum for you folks: There are two kinds of lines. One is the straight line. Which is the other kind of line?

* Objects in the Preview Mirror may appear sillier than they are.

Disclaimer: Characters in the above story are not based on any characters in the film. Any resemblance or humour is pure luck.
**OPM appears in the Thursday edition of Bangalore BIAS and previews a Friday release