It's that moment in the plot when the narrative is just warming up. Vivek Oberoi plays a happy-go-lucky roving eyed cynic who has lost his money and tickets and must sell tea on the train to make his way back from Coorg in Karnataka to Mumbai.
Oberoi sparkles as the dude masquerading as a tea vendor who spins a boy-meets-girl yarn replete with sound effects to the desperate director on the train (Samir Karnik himself doing a Hitchcock and a Ghai so prematurely in the narrative, and his career!) and the lovely lady who has her head buried in a romantic novel.
Just think of the irony of the situation. A director stuck on a scene takes the help of a tea seller on a train to bail him out!
Arjun (the tea vendor) later befriends and banters with his repressed house guest Diya (Aishwarya Rai).
Ah, they don't make love stories like they used to. They try, though. Debutante Samir Karnik gets the bubble, banter and other courtship rituals in place.
"Kyun....Ho Gaya Na!" is certainly posh in presentation. The sets (done in polished teak colors) and the outdoors (verdant greens barely hiding the blush on Rai's romantic cheeks) are tonic to the eyes. And the choreography, especially in the Broadway-styled, "Pyar mein sau uljhane" number, is captivating.
If you stop and look at the gonna-be lovers as Arjun and Diya and not as Oberoi and Rai, you are likely to view things without pain and with mild pleasure.
This isn't the first film to dwell on the gender war as seen through the eyes of two totally antithetical human beings. In Yash Chopra's "Dil To Pagal Hai" Madhuri Dixit looked lovelorn and luminous as she waited for ideal love to strike her staid life.
Aishwarya Rai in "Kyun...Ho Gaya Na!" is a product of the Chopra-Dixit school of romantics. She gazes into a space that's far beyond camera range. Dreamy and a bit spaced out, her character is a perfect foil to the unstoppable Arjun who treats life as an ongoing prank.
Not just Oberoi and Rai but also Oberoi and his screen-dad Om Puri share quite a few crisply written dialogues and moments. Check out the sequence where papa and son must wash dishes because it's the domestic help's evening out. ...It's a giggle and a scream!
Or the sequence where the giddy-headed Diya imagines Arjun draping her swan-like neck with jewellery. The silken and silently rapturous progression of that sequence from high romance to a glorious guffaw (when Arjun finally breaks the spell with, "Don't you ever bathe, or else why do you use so much perfume?") is airy and effortless.
It's the second-half that lets the actors and the audience down. Everything falls apart once Bachchan appears on the scene. Playing a wickedly benign busybody all-purpose uncle to a brood of kids (including our resident Orphan Annie - Aishwarya), the mega-actor's role in the plot is merely peripheral and redundant. Where you'd want the two lovers to sort out their differences on their own (like Saif and Rani did in "Hum Tum") Uncle steps in with his boisterous bravado. Cupid never seemed more stupid.
The scenes with the kids meant to be cute, are acutely annoying. As Arjun struggles to overcome his reservations about romantic love you wish the narrative would give them space to obtain a romantic pace.
The rhythm of narration in the second-half is uneven and often pointless. Sequences such as Bachchan and Oberoi sharing drunken love-confidences or dance steps are a trifle irritating.
Fate, you feel, is cruel to the lovers. But the scriptwriter is worse. While the lovers' games in the first-half are wispy and likeable they do nothing but impair the narrative
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