3 hours Ago By Subhash K Jha
Yeh Zindagi Ka Safar is a flawed film. It starts off with some clumsily written introductory sequences. But just before we say “Oops, wrong number!” Tanuja Chandra manages to hold it.
Suddenly the heroine Serena (Ameesha Patel)’s identity is threatened. Serena discovers she isn’t her father’s daughter. A stirring, if at times sterile search begins which takes her to Ooty to meet her biological mother (Nafisa Ali, still beautiful but alienated from the sur of mainstream cinema).
As Serena’s horrific origins are revealed, we get swept into her past tense and present agonized. ALSO READ: Did Ameesha Patel Confirm Dating Nirvaan Birla? Gadar 2 Actress Drops Romantic Pic From Dubai Getaway With 'Darling' Though her first three films—the excellent Dushman, the flawed but watchable Sangharsh and Yeh Zindagi Ka Safar—didn’t work at the box office. Tanuja Chandra’s films exude a stylish socially relevant elan.
The plot is constantly searching and probing into the urban diaspora, looking for reasons to make life worth living in spite of scummy surface. Like her previous two films, Yeh Zindagi..
. takes on a brutal theme—rape and illegitimate motherhood. To an extent Tanuja dilutes and sanitizes the theme to try and make the end-product boxoffice-friendly.
The diffusive lens lessens the pain of the wounded womb, but does nothing to elevate the film’s intrinsic values. Fortunately, though this is a female-oriented serious subject, the songs and leading man do not stick out like sore thumbs. Daboo Malik’s mild melodies are sensibly woven into the plot.
There are no song breaks in this film, thank God! Instead the well worded melodies carry the film forward. Jimmy Shergill’s role as the cocky scribe endows a jaunty joie de vivre to the narration. In his romantic sequences Shergil reminds us of the early Rishi Kapoor.
He sure has come a long way from his days of Mohabbatein. In the unconditional support that he offers the female protagonist, Shergil reminds us of Raj Kiran in Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth and Aman Verma in Tanuja’s Sangharsh. Like Kajol in Tanuja Chandra’s Dushman and Preity Zinta in Sangharsh, Ameesha has a role to die for in Yeh Zindagi Ka Safar.
Her performance as the girl in search of her biological identity careens between chic elegance and inadequate drama. In the emotionally charged sequences such as the one where her character is rejected by her mother or where she charges after her mother’s rapist like a neo-Jhansi Ki Rani, Amisha simply fails to rise to the occasion. Like the larger-than-strife villains that Ashutosh Rana played in Tanuja Chandra’s earlier two films, theatre actor Ehsaan Khan as the megalomaniacal cop and selfappointed nation–cleanser is frighteningly evil.
For a woman filmmaker, Tanuja Chandra seems awfully enamoured by the dark side of life. Thanks to Manoj Gupta’s cinematography, Gappa Chakraborty’s art work and Daboo Malik’s songs the going never gets tough in Tanuja’s film, even when the tough heroine gets going to crack the the corrosive caucus eating into our social system. Tanuja must be congratulated for touching on thorny topics such as rape and illegitimacy, journalistic ethics and the victimization of the minority Christian communities by self-appointed neo-Nazis.
Suicidally, Tanuja cuts into her own meaty plot by adding extraneous juices to the dish. The climax on a speeding truck with Shergil and Patel beating the villainous police commissioner to a pulp is laughably out of place. It serves as a reminder of how far into the distance the safar into cinematics can take even the most wary traveller.
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