Movie Review :jashnn

No filmmaker sets out to make a lousy film, that much I'm willing to believe. But if your film doesn't have one single merit, how dare you expect it to work?

Jashnn, which releases at cinemas this weekend, is a film with no perceivable merit. It has a silly excuse for a plot, some of the poorest actors you could possibly assemble, and just about average music. No wonder it's such a punishment to endure.

Adhyayan Suman, the most stiff young newcomer since Harman Baweja, stars as a wannabe musician who's waiting for his big break, but bides his time arguing with girls in coffee shops meanwhile. His sister, played by Rock On's Shahana Goswami is the stay-at-home mistress of a married businessman (played by one Humayun Saeed) who pays the bills for the fancy house that Shahana and Adhyayan live in. When Adhyayan starts dating Anjana Sukhani, a Boston-returned bimbo who happens to be the sister of Shahana's boyfriend, all hell breaks loose.



An old-fashioned morality tale with stereotypes for characters, Jashnn fails miserably because the drama's so predictable and most of the performances so embarrassing. Adhyayan Suman, looking silly with that frizzy mop of hair, can't pull off the simplest of scenes without breaking into hysteria, and Anjana Sukhani has precisely one expression. Humayun Saeed, the villain of this piece, yells most of the time but he's got a blank look plastered across his face.

A one-line premise that's reluctantly stretched into an unconvincing screenplay, Jashnn belongs to that pantheon of bad '80s melodramas where characters say horrible things to each other and then spend the rest of the movie regretting it.

Directed by Raksha Mistry and Hasnain Hyderabadwala, the pair who helmed such previous duds as The Killer and The Train, both starring Emraan Hashmi by the way, Jashnn is a fiasco of the highest order. Judged purely by what you see on screen, it's evident the director-duo doesn't have a fingernail's worth of skill at telling a credible story. The film collapses like a house of cards; it's only strength being a reasonably convincing performance by Shahana Goswami who comes off as gifted as Shabana Azmi when compared to the rest of these jokers.



Because the zero rating is reserved for objectionable films, I'm going with a generous one out of five for Jashnn. The film's title means celebration. I can safely say that was wishful thinking on the part of its makers.