Nazar

Director: Soni Razdan
Cast: Meera, Ashmit Patel, Koel Purie, Alyy Khan

3/10

A lonely singer driving down on a spooky night runs into the corpse of a woman and starts seeing things. Any signs of an Indo-Pak bonhomie in sight? No? But Nazar has been touted as the biggest thing to have happened to Bollywood-Lollywood ties, with many border-breaking firsts to its credit. While Meera became the first Pakistani actor to star in an Indian film, the movie itself, after kissing goodbye to controversy, is headed for a screening in Pakistan.

A great boost to Indo-Pak reel relations, no doubt, but what in real terms? An inspired version of the Madhuri Dixit-Jackie Shroff starrer, 100 Days, that itself was inspired from another film? Meera has great screen presence, no doubt, but she is certainly no Madhuri. And it would perhaps be too much to expect the wooden Ashmit to act, waterfalls and dreams be damned.

Like another film on vision which has raised the hackles of the medical fraternity, this one might have the bar girls, their doors to a livelihood already shut, up in arms. While that had a cornea transplant, this too involves a ‘transplant’ ? of occult faculties, that is. Bar girls drop dead every day, but not before one of them passes on her ‘powers’ to Meera, who can then see the murders happen, much before they actually do. Psychiatrist-friend Alyy Khan tries his best to calm her and, in between, profess his love, but it’s cop Ashmit who walks away with the lady’s heart.

And colleague Koel Purie’s case. An encounter with a soothsayer and many more murders later, Meera finally comes face to face with her own death ? and the truth. If Soni Razdan gets any points for keeping the killer a mystery till the end, she fritters them away with the nonsense on AIDS that follows.

At a time when every attempt to remove the stigma of AIDS counts, when Mumbai’s bar girls are bearing the brunt of an overzealous moral police, wonder what the Bhatt camp is up to.

Sonali Chakraborty