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REVIEW: KOI · MIL GAYA (I FOUND SOMEONE)
(Rakesh Roshan, 2003)
Reviewed by
GRADY HENDRIX
a Film Comment online exclusive
Three years after director Rakesh Roshan, composer Rajesh Roshan (his brother), and actor Hrithik Roshan (his son) made the smash hit Kaho Naa · Pyar Hai (Say This Is Love), the trio is back with Koi · Mil Gaya (I Found Someone), billed as Bollywood's first sci-fi movie and released internationally under the prestigious banner of Yash Raj Productions. Kaho Naa · Pyar Hai propelled Hrithik to superstardom, making him a lone Hindi hero in a majority Hindu country whose film industry is dominated by Muslim actors (Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Salman Khan). Squeaky-clean, thin-sliced beefcake, he dances like 'Nsync, but since becoming a celebrity, he has been set on idle, his career consisting mostly of wasted opportunities (aside from a few notable character roles playing terrorists). Koi · Mil Gaya garnered plenty of publicity over the course of its 18-month production, thanks to its sci-fi plot, foreign (Australian) special-effects team, and huge budget - but most of all because it marked the reunion of the team that last made good use of Hrithik.
Hrithik plays Rohit, a good-looking, kind, and respectful 20-year-old, who is also retarded, the result of a tragic car accident (his dad, played by Rakesh Roshan, crashes after seeing a UFO, killing himself and sending his pregnant wife sailing through the air). Now, mother (screen-legend Rekha) and son live in an Alpine village in Northern India, with Rohit eternally trapped in seventh grade, zipping around on his Razor scooter with a multiethnic gang of 11-year-olds, while teary-eyed Rekha bites her knuckles on the sidelines.
Things get a little queasy when Rohit meets cute with the daughter of the local tax collector, Nisha (Preity Zinta). In Bollywood, where kissing is rarely shown onscreen, sexuality has been displaced onto pretty much everything else, so when the lovebirds do a soft-shoe number in the rain, well, the audience gets the picture. As the romance improbably develops, a sense of impending doom descends: movie logic dictates that the hour is approaching when love must make itself known, but one of the partners is severely mentally handicapped. How can this be happening in a mass-market film?
Never fear. Pre-immolation, Rohit's dad was jamming SETI-style with distant aliens on his Commodore 64. Now, Rohit wants Nisha to teach him how to use his dad's old computer, which means that we can count on a pack of aliens to deliver some cosmic intervention just in the nick of time. Salvation arrives in the form of Jadoo, who looks like a smaller, bluer version of the alien from M. Night Shyamalan's Signs crossbred with a dolphin. Stranded on earth, he's rescued from stray dogs by Nisha and Rohit.
Thanks to his healing powers, Jadoo quickly alleviates the audience unease about Rohit and Nisha's romance, transforming Rohit from handicapped to handicappable. Phew! The intermission arrives with a freeze-frame of Jadoo and Rohit clasping hands, revealing that they share the same deformity: two thumbs on their right hand. Within the narrative, this is a source of bonding between alien and movie star; beyond, it's instant mainstreaming of freak-show marketing. Not since Tod Browning's Freaks (or perhaps Dan Akroyd exposing his own webbed feet in 1974's The Groove Tube) has so much screen time been devoted to celebrity deformity. The marketing angle is reinforced by the fact that Jadoo's double thumb is usually seen wrapped around a can of Coke. From E.T. to Mac and Me, it's an ironclad rule that whenever aliens get trapped on earth, product placement will surely follow. Whether it's corporate hubris (an advanced alien culture will find our junk food irresistible) or corporate optimism (imagine the intergalactic demand for Reese's Pieces), marketers see aliens less as interstellar ambassadors of goodwill than as potential customers to be plied with free samples.
Largely made up of scenarios abducted from Steven Spielberg's brain - a little Jaws here, some Close Encounters of the Third Kind there, a lot of E.T. all over - Koi · Mil Gaya hops from plot point to plot point (now Nisha's roughneck boyfriend is challenging Rohit to a basketball match; now the government is sniffing after Jadoo; now there's a scooter chase) with relentless hyperactivity. If you don't like one story line, relax - another one will be along in a minute. By all rights, this movie shouldn't be as watchable as it is. But the actors zoom in on their roles with the commitment of laser-guided missiles, and Hrithik delivers the performance of his career. His transformation from mentally handicapped naïf to muscular hero and (Flowers for Algernon-style) back again is shamefully compelling, and in the musical numbers he's as limber as Ray Bolger's Scarecrow. As the end credits approach, one gradually realizes that the immense overall entertainment value of this movie far outstrips the sum of its extremely suspect parts.
But that's the power of Bollywood: it wrings industrial-grade entertainment from even the most compromised material. Ultimately, Koi · Mil Gaya is moviemaking as an act of faith: the creators have complete confidence that their flimsy material will hold up for its two-hour-and-forty-five-minute running time, and so it does. In a summer where entertainment is so sparse that a single performance can carry a three-hour movie (Pirates of the Caribbean), Koi·Mil Gaya is an embarrassment of riches. Sure, it's mockable, it's silly, it's cloaked in a cloying miasma of cute, but its off-handed facility with pop-cinema conventions, spiced up with some jarring stylistic disconnects, delivers the most mind-bending entertainment experience of the season. This is commercial moviemaking taken to its logical, mondo mercantilist conclusion. In an alternate universe, Variety is already heralding its boffo opening weekend.
Grady Hendrix is one of the founders and co-programmers of Subway Cinema, www.subwaycinema.com.
© 2003 by Grady Hendrix
