Om Shanti Om

a fab entertaining film it is funny and serious with excellent songs and favvvvvvvv so watch it i loved it!! priyaxx

I was shocked when I saw the commercials.They were very good and I was like I "I HAVE TO WATCH THIS MOVIE"!When i saw it it was very cool.I liked how shah rukh and shreyas did the hair flip thing like rajesh kapoor.It was very funny!I Liked the second half better.It was more this century-like.The songs were amazing.Vishal and Shekhar did a very good job with music!Overall the movie was great!

OMO is a film which is different in a lot of ways to traditional cinema, to some extent it makes a mockery of the cinema and to some extent it takes you on a emotional yet light roller coaster. first of all its something you have not seen in a while. The concept of re-incarnation while looks absurd today is astonishingly executed in such a beautifull and light manner that one almost never bothers about it, and that is where the direction comes, this film has some of the most vibrant color schemes and set designs you will see, sharukh plays his part to perfectiona dn deepa gets the debut of a lifetime, the rest of the support cast is very good and Arjun ram pal fits in the shoes of the 60's villian we almost had forgotten, but as soon as you are halfway through the film, the modern day celebrity life is viewed in contrastt to the  old and this is where the magic of OMO starts, it has wondefull music, huge star power, hunor at its best, it gets you a peek in the celebrity world.

The film also takes a lot of thematic elements from "singing in the rain:. although it can be my opinion but the resemblence in uncanny. 

All in all OMO is brilliant, in every aspect, it has everything a blockbuster shold have and it can pass you boring sunday afternoon into full bloom in house family entertainment. 

OM SHANTI OM IS A GREAT MOVIE STARRING SUPERSTAR SRK AND NEWCOMER DOE EYED DAMSEL DEEPIKA PADUKONE. ITS ABOUT HOW THEY MET AND HOW A TRAGEDY OCCURED WHEN BOTH DIED LATER AGAIN IN THE PROCESS OF REBITH BOTH TOOK BIRTH AND AGAIN MET.

        ITS KNOWN TO ALL OF US THAT THERE IS SOMEBODY AT SOME PART OF THE WORLD WHO IS BORN FOR US ONLY US. SIMILARLY SANDE KE LIYE BHI OM KAPOOR BANA THA.

                            THE SONGS AND DANCE ARE EXCELLENT. SPECIALLY IN THE SONG  DHOOM TANANA DEEPIKA ANS SRK'S GAME OF BADMINTON WAS SIMPLY OSSUM.

GOOD JOB DEEPIKA.

OM SHANTI OM

(2007, Hindi, 162 minutes)

Directed by Farah Khan; Produced by Gauri Khan and Red Chilies Entertainment Story: Farah Khan; Screenplay: Mushtaq Sheikh and Farah Khan; Dialogue: Mayur Puri; Lyrics: Javed Akhtar; Music: Vishal-Shekhar; Choreography: Farah Khan; Cinematographer: V. Manikandan; Sound Design: Nakul Kamte; Art Direction: Sabu Cyril; Costumes: Karan Johar, Manish Malhotra, Sanjiv Mulchandani

Farah Khan’s second film as director is an extravagant tribute to the industry she grew up loving, and in which she has—after the massive success of this film—confirmed her position as a leading director (becoming the first woman to achieve this stature). Its complex and ingenious storyline manages to simultaneously succeed in three registers: as delicious parody, sincere homage, and (in its own right) powerfully engaging melodrama. Yet to say all this is barely to hint at the delights that OM SHANTI OM (hereafter “OSO”) offers to Hindi cinephiles. Liberally peppering the screenplay, from the get-go, with allusions to films, stars, and directors of the past, with witty double entendres, and with fully-acknowledged tropes, the director and her team seem to wink at us and declare, “Now watch as, through the magic of Hindi cinema, we make you care about these timeworn clichés all over again!” That they pull this off, in spades, to the accompaniment of a uniformly memorable score and gorgeous visuals, is an amazing achievement that results in one of the most exuberantly entertaining films in recent memory.

  On the level of narrative, OSO is a story of betrayal, murder, and revenge featuring a reincarnated hero. Merely to say this, in the Bombay cinematic context, immediately brings to mind (at least) two watershed predecessors: 1958’s MADHUMATI, starring Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala, the most commercially successful film of the great Bengali director Bimal Roy; and 1980’s KARZ, with Rishi Kapoor and Simi Grewal, one of the biggest hits of Subhash Ghai; indeed, both films are lovingly referenced. The latter was clearly a key text for director Khan as a youngster, and OSO opens with an imaginary and digitally-tweaked recreation of the shooting of one of its most celebrated musical numbers: the disco extravaganza “Mere umar ke” (“O youths of my generation!”) performed by silver-lamé suited Rishi Kapoor and a bevy of item girls atop a giant rotating 33-rpm record, being filmed by director Subhash Ghai (in a Ghai-like cameo as himself), and with both Farah and Shah Rukh placed among the on-set crowd of adoring fan-extras singing along with the song’s chorus (which is, of course, the mantra-phrase “Om shanti om”), and then dissing each other about the unlikelihood of one day becoming, respectively, a director and a star—and all this, mind you, in a five-minute teaser-plus-credit sequence. (Despite the Ghai tribute here, the film confirms that director Khan’s work so far may fit best in the cinematic lineage of the great Manmohan Desai, and, as with one of his frenetic multi-starrers, you are well advised not to blink during OSO’s opening sequence —or thereafter.)

The theme of the recurrent recycling of lives and storylines—a reality of the modern film industry that echoes Indian metaphysics and folk narrative—continues, and we will soon find our principal characters involved in shooting a spectacular movie titled “Om Shanti Om,” a drama involving rebirth, the production of which will be aborted and then resumed three decades later by the reincarnation of one of them. Given that the duplicate hero is named, in both births, Om, and is in love with/haunted by a single heroine named Shanti, the title formula acquires yet another layer of meaning.

Hero number one is Om Prakash Makhija (Shahrukh Khan), a peppy, film-smitten “junior artist” (bit player or extra) in a late-‘70s film factory called “RC Studios,” the ostensible site of the soundstage location for the opening KARZ shoot. But the allusion, of course, is to Raj Kapoor’s “RK Studios” of two decades earlier, and its campus is a wildly nostalgic evocation of the long-dead studio era in Bombay cinema, with fountains, gardens, and gorgeously-lit art-deco buildings and statuary: a pastel-tinted revivification of the “Ajanta Studios” of Guru Dutt’s KAAGAZ KE PHOOL (1959).

Om and his indefatigable buddy Pappu (the charming Shreyas Talpade) wander blissfully through this theme-park in polyester-mod attire (Om’s includes a Desai-like pendant of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian talismans), appearing as extras in parodied filmic scenes, while dreaming of stardom and, equally improbably, of a match-up for Om with his fantasied “girlfriend,” the starlet Shanti Priya (radiantly incarnated by newcomer Deepika Padukone, albeit this successful fashion model is a good ten kilos too light for a ‘70s heroine), and interacting-cum-overacting with Om’s adoring “junior-artiste” mom (Kirron Kher), who has never quite recovered from her failure to secure the role of Anarkali in MUGHAL-E-AZAM (1960). Om’s dreams are stymied, Pappu feels, by his awkward surname (makhi means “housefly” in Hindi) and he urges him to assume the moniker “Kapoor,” like that of their idol, the stocky and bouffant-coifed Rajesh Kapoor (Jawed Sheikh).

But Om’s fortunes take a turn when he and Pappu, doubly impersonating Manoj Kumar (who briefly protested this satire of his patriotism and penchant for hiding his face behind one raised hand!), crash the premiere of Shanti’s new film Dreamy Girl. Becoming entangled in her diaphanous dupatta, Om gets to gaze close-up at his beloved to the accompaniment of the lovely ballad "Ajab si" (“In your eyes, there’s a strange magic”). This is soon followed by the film-within-a-filmsong "Dhoom taana," ostensibly from Dreamy Girl, but in fact a tour-de-force of period-parodying choreography and costumes, glittering sets, and digital effects that seamlessly pair Shanti with the appropriately youthful Sunil Dutt, Rajesh Khanna, and Jeetendra—whose place, in each sequence, is then assumed in fantasy by the spectatorial Om.

And when he subsequently saves Shanti from an out-of-control haystack conflagration during an outdoor shoot (recapitulating Sunil Dutt’s reputed rescue of Nargis on Mehboob Khan’s MOTHER INDIA set, which led to their love and later marriage), and then convinces her that he is a star of Tamil cinema (via a hilarious sendup of a Rajnikant-style “western”), she favors him with an evening of her company: a dream date that he and Pappu mount on a soundstage to the accompaniment of the romantic "Main agar kahoon" (“If I say…”), offering up another lavish bouquet of cinematic quotations (including, to my eyes at least, Gene Kelly’s similar wooing of Debbie Reynolds in SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN).

Too soon, Om’s romantic hopes are shattered by the discovery, through an accidentally-overheard dressing-room conversation, that Shanti loves another: the dashing producer Mukesh Mehra (Arjun Rampal), an ambitious cad to whom she has unwisely given both her heart and her body, though he has kept their “marriage” a secret in order to pursue a more advantageous engagement to a film-financier’s daughter.

Mehra dreams of making “Om Shanti Om,” the most lavish Bombay talkie of all time, with a palatial set suggestive of the European baroque (and of Judge Raghunath’s mansion in AWARA), but when this is thwarted by Shanti’s revelation that she is pregnant with his child, the producer adopts the fiendish strategy of eliminating both her and the set of his now-doomed feature. In the truly breathtaking sequence that ends the first half of the film, Om tries heroically to save her, only to himself expire from multiple injuries—in the very hospital in which superstar Kapoor’s wife is simultaneously giving birth to a son. Amazingly, the Desai-like climactic collision of wildly improbable coincidence and high tragedy leaves both unscathed, and ready for more action “thirty years later,” after the Interval. 

Now, the hapless Om Prakash has become superstar Om Kapoor, a.k.a. “O.K.,” the callow and self-centered scion of a film dynasty, ensconced in the very mansion outside which (in his former life) he delivered a mock Filmfare award-acceptance speech to a group of street urchins. His face looks the same, albeit with a less-greasy hairstyle, and his wrist tattoo of “om” has mysteriously endured as a shadowy burn scar.

His body, however, has morphed—as those of all Bombay heroes did beginning in the late ‘80s—into a Buff Hunk (a real physical transformation that reportedly took the forty-two-year old SRK six grueling weeks of training to effect). The results are shown off in the “item” song “Dard-e-disco” (“The pain of disco”), which O.K. insists on inserting as a “dream sequence” into the climax of a hokey melodrama in which he plays a blind and deaf cripple attending his beloved’s marriage to another man. Costumed by SRK-devotee and director Karan Johar, this pounding take on Bombay cinema’s recent fetishization of the male body is (like OSO in general) simultaneously hilarious parody and exemplary specimen-of-the-genre.

But like the “Om shanti om” song in KARZ, it also triggers the hero’s frightening flashbacks to his former life and death, which intensify when he attends a location shoot—for a cheesy superhero flick called “Mohabbat Man” (“Love-Man”)—in the burned-out ruins of RC Studios. The alternation of campy comedy and gathering drama continues through an amazing sendup of the Filmfare awards (complete with good-spirited cameos by Abhishek Bachchan and Akshay Kumar, spoofing themselves), at which O.K. wins “Best Actor,” followed by a celebrity bash that (with thirty-one real stars in boogeying attendance during the wildly-danceable song "Deewangi deewangi" [“craziness”], with another reprised chorus of “om shanti om”) considerably outdoes Manmohan Desai’s similar party scene in NASEEB.

Yet this “item,” too (which drove Indian theater audiences into a frenzy of cheering as each new star appeared), smoothly returns to the developing plot, with the sinister entrance of Mukesh Mehra, now gray-haired and foreign-returned (after a successful career as a producer in that Other big film industry) and eager to undertake Om’s next project. The hero recognizes his and Shanti’s nemesis, and soon finds his way back to Mother Makhija’s flat, to reunite with her and with Pappu; Kirron Kher’s teary performance here naturally evokes Durga Khote’s in KARZ, as a seemingly demented old woman who has clung for decades to the belief that her long-dead son will one day return.

It remains to bring the villain to justice…but how? The evidence of a reincarnated witness will hardly hold up in court! Om and Pappu contrive a scheme that requires convincing the producer to bankroll a revival of the Om Shanti Om project, complete with a rebuilt set in the blackened studio ruins, and Sandhya/“Sandy,” a clueless young thing from Bangalore, drafted to impersonate the ghost of Shanti.

The dazzling final song, "Daastaan-e-om shanti om" (“The saga of Om Shanti Om”), in which the hero recreates Shanti’s betrayal and murder, occurs on the set’s grand staircase, blending melody and lyrics that skillfully reference those of the comparable song sequence in KARZ ("Ek haseena thi," “There was a young beauty”) along with visuals that seem to nod at Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Phantom of the Opera. The surprising denouement that follows, however, amply displays the director’s own karz (“debt”) to the great Bimal Roy and his haunting MADHUMATI.

OSO as narrative and spectacle is such engrossing entertainment that its pure pleasure seemed, on my first few viewings, to overwhelm any critical reflection, yet some intriguing subtexts have since come to mind. Farah Khan’s rise from innovative choreographer (e.g., of DIL SE and numerous other films, and of the London and Broadway musical “Bombay Dreams”) to leading director, has been brokered by her friend Shah Rukh Khan, whose production company financed both her films. Their close relationship is palpable in the film’s loving treatment of its star, and one may even detect a hint, in the respective incarnations of Om, of SRK’s own biography: his metamorphosis from a Delhi-based unknown, lacking a film-dynasty pedigree, to King Khan, the dominant male star of Bombay since 1995.

Then, too, the film’s insider parody of the Hindi film industry, densely intertextual and deliciously smart, stands in stark contrast to the cheap-shot satire of a film like Deepa Mehta’s HOLLYWOOD-BOLLYWOOD (2002), which panders to every Western journalistic cliché about the alleged “mindless dream factories” of Bombay—the same sort of condescension exemplified by the odious chapter on the industry in Pico Iyer’s pop-travelogue Video Night in Kathmandu (1989). Instead, OSO affectionately celebrates the energy and heartbeat of the cinema that billions love, and its principals manage to combine a kind of desi innocence with a plucky pride. Everything about the film exudes confidence: Farah Khan’s in her director’s role (ironically exemplified by her ongoing gags about the irrelevance of directors in star-driven Bombay, even as she crafts what is, from start to finish, quintessentially a director’s film, with every frame carefully filled with remarkable details), and the industry’s confidence in itself as purveyor of glossy and globally-consumed entertainment that occasionally, as here, rises to greatness. It is no secret that most people in the Bombay film business despise the media label “Bollywood,” with its suggestion of a derivative phenomenon, and SRK has publicly stated this (in an interview in Nasreen Munni Kabir’s documentary, The Inner World of Shah Rukh Khan). Yet the term has now acquired too much global brand recognition to be altogether avoided. And so it is a particularly nice moment in OSO when the slimy Mukesh Mehra, power-lunching with Om Kapoor in a restaurant looking out at the Bombay skyline, responds to the star’s calling him “Mukesh” by saying, “Call me Mike. Everyone in Hollywood does.” Then, when “Mike” directs a remark to “Om,” the latter ripostes, “Call me ‘O.K.’ Everyone in …Bollywood… does”—with a slight pause that seems to both savor and distance this label—which is here strategically deployed in a verbal duel with a traitor who has abandoned both Shanti and the Motherland. Vah! How else to end than with: Jai Hind! and Jai Farah Khan!

OM SHANTI OM

(2007, Hindi, 162 minutes)

Directed by Farah Khan; Produced by Gauri Khan and Red Chilies Entertainment Story: Farah Khan; Screenplay: Mushtaq Sheikh and Farah Khan; Dialogue: Mayur Puri; Lyrics: Javed Akhtar; Music: Vishal-Shekhar; Choreography: Farah Khan; Cinematographer: V. Manikandan; Sound Design: Nakul Kamte; Art Direction: Sabu Cyril; Costumes: Karan Johar, Manish Malhotra, Sanjiv Mulchandani

Farah Khan’s second film as director is an extravagant tribute to the industry she grew up loving, and in which she has—after the massive success of this film—confirmed her position as a leading director (becoming the first woman to achieve this stature). Its complex and ingenious storyline manages to simultaneously succeed in three registers: as delicious parody, sincere homage, and (in its own right) powerfully engaging melodrama. Yet to say all this is barely to hint at the delights that OM SHANTI OM (hereafter “OSO”) offers to Hindi cinephiles. Liberally peppering the screenplay, from the get-go, with allusions to films, stars, and directors of the past, with witty double entendres, and with fully-acknowledged tropes, the director and her team seem to wink at us and declare, “Now watch as, through the magic of Hindi cinema, we make you care about these timeworn clichés all over again!” That they pull this off, in spades, to the accompaniment of a uniformly memorable score and gorgeous visuals, is an amazing achievement that results in one of the most exuberantly entertaining films in recent memory.

  On the level of narrative, OSO is a story of betrayal, murder, and revenge featuring a reincarnated hero. Merely to say this, in the Bombay cinematic context, immediately brings to mind (at least) two watershed predecessors: 1958’s MADHUMATI, starring Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala, the most commercially successful film of the great Bengali director Bimal Roy; and 1980’s KARZ, with Rishi Kapoor and Simi Grewal, one of the biggest hits of Subhash Ghai; indeed, both films are lovingly referenced. The latter was clearly a key text for director Khan as a youngster, and OSO opens with an imaginary and digitally-tweaked recreation of the shooting of one of its most celebrated musical numbers: the disco extravaganza “Mere umar ke” (“O youths of my generation!”) performed by silver-lamé suited Rishi Kapoor and a bevy of item girls atop a giant rotating 33-rpm record, being filmed by director Subhash Ghai (in a Ghai-like cameo as himself), and with both Farah and Shah Rukh placed among the on-set crowd of adoring fan-extras singing along with the song’s chorus (which is, of course, the mantra-phrase “Om shanti om”), and then dissing each other about the unlikelihood of one day becoming, respectively, a director and a star—and all this, mind you, in a five-minute teaser-plus-credit sequence. (Despite the Ghai tribute here, the film confirms that director Khan’s work so far may fit best in the cinematic lineage of the great Manmohan Desai, and, as with one of his frenetic multi-starrers, you are well advised not to blink during OSO’s opening sequence —or thereafter.)

The theme of the recurrent recycling of lives and storylines—a reality of the modern film industry that echoes Indian metaphysics and folk narrative—continues, and we will soon find our principal characters involved in shooting a spectacular movie titled “Om Shanti Om,” a drama involving rebirth, the production of which will be aborted and then resumed three decades later by the reincarnation of one of them. Given that the duplicate hero is named, in both births, Om, and is in love with/haunted by a single heroine named Shanti, the title formula acquires yet another layer of meaning.

Hero number one is Om Prakash Makhija (Shahrukh Khan), a peppy, film-smitten “junior artist” (bit player or extra) in a late-‘70s film factory called “RC Studios,” the ostensible site of the soundstage location for the opening KARZ shoot. But the allusion, of course, is to Raj Kapoor’s “RK Studios” of two decades earlier, and its campus is a wildly nostalgic evocation of the long-dead studio era in Bombay cinema, with fountains, gardens, and gorgeously-lit art-deco buildings and statuary: a pastel-tinted revivification of the “Ajanta Studios” of Guru Dutt’s KAAGAZ KE PHOOL (1959).

Om and his indefatigable buddy Pappu (the charming Shreyas Talpade) wander blissfully through this theme-park in polyester-mod attire (Om’s includes a Desai-like pendant of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian talismans), appearing as extras in parodied filmic scenes, while dreaming of stardom and, equally improbably, of a match-up for Om with his fantasied “girlfriend,” the starlet Shanti Priya (radiantly incarnated by newcomer Deepika Padukone, albeit this successful fashion model is a good ten kilos too light for a ‘70s heroine), and interacting-cum-overacting with Om’s adoring “junior-artiste” mom (Kirron Kher), who has never quite recovered from her failure to secure the role of Anarkali in MUGHAL-E-AZAM (1960). Om’s dreams are stymied, Pappu feels, by his awkward surname (makhi means “housefly” in Hindi) and he urges him to assume the moniker “Kapoor,” like that of their idol, the stocky and bouffant-coifed Rajesh Kapoor (Jawed Sheikh).

But Om’s fortunes take a turn when he and Pappu, doubly impersonating Manoj Kumar (who briefly protested this satire of his patriotism and penchant for hiding his face behind one raised hand!), crash the premiere of Shanti’s new film Dreamy Girl. Becoming entangled in her diaphanous dupatta, Om gets to gaze close-up at his beloved to the accompaniment of the lovely ballad "Ajab si" (“In your eyes, there’s a strange magic”). This is soon followed by the film-within-a-filmsong "Dhoom taana," ostensibly from Dreamy Girl, but in fact a tour-de-force of period-parodying choreography and costumes, glittering sets, and digital effects that seamlessly pair Shanti with the appropriately youthful Sunil Dutt, Rajesh Khanna, and Jeetendra—whose place, in each sequence, is then assumed in fantasy by the spectatorial Om.

And when he subsequently saves Shanti from an out-of-control haystack conflagration during an outdoor shoot (recapitulating Sunil Dutt’s reputed rescue of Nargis on Mehboob Khan’s MOTHER INDIA set, which led to their love and later marriage), and then convinces her that he is a star of Tamil cinema (via a hilarious sendup of a Rajnikant-style “western”), she favors him with an evening of her company: a dream date that he and Pappu mount on a soundstage to the accompaniment of the romantic "Main agar kahoon" (“If I say…”), offering up another lavish bouquet of cinematic quotations (including, to my eyes at least, Gene Kelly’s similar wooing of Debbie Reynolds in SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN).

Too soon, Om’s romantic hopes are shattered by the discovery, through an accidentally-overheard dressing-room conversation, that Shanti loves another: the dashing producer Mukesh Mehra (Arjun Rampal), an ambitious cad to whom she has unwisely given both her heart and her body, though he has kept their “marriage” a secret in order to pursue a more advantageous engagement to a film-financier’s daughter.

Mehra dreams of making “Om Shanti Om,” the most lavish Bombay talkie of all time, with a palatial set suggestive of the European baroque (and of Judge Raghunath’s mansion in AWARA), but when this is thwarted by Shanti’s revelation that she is pregnant with his child, the producer adopts the fiendish strategy of eliminating both her and the set of his now-doomed feature. In the truly breathtaking sequence that ends the first half of the film, Om tries heroically to save her, only to himself expire from multiple injuries—in the very hospital in which superstar Kapoor’s wife is simultaneously giving birth to a son. Amazingly, the Desai-like climactic collision of wildly improbable coincidence and high tragedy leaves both unscathed, and ready for more action “thirty years later,” after the Interval. 

Now, the hapless Om Prakash has become superstar Om Kapoor, a.k.a. “O.K.,” the callow and self-centered scion of a film dynasty, ensconced in the very mansion outside which (in his former life) he delivered a mock Filmfare award-acceptance speech to a group of street urchins. His face looks the same, albeit with a less-greasy hairstyle, and his wrist tattoo of “om” has mysteriously endured as a shadowy burn scar.

His body, however, has morphed—as those of all Bombay heroes did beginning in the late ‘80s—into a Buff Hunk (a real physical transformation that reportedly took the forty-two-year old SRK six grueling weeks of training to effect). The results are shown off in the “item” song “Dard-e-disco” (“The pain of disco”), which O.K. insists on inserting as a “dream sequence” into the climax of a hokey melodrama in which he plays a blind and deaf cripple attending his beloved’s marriage to another man. Costumed by SRK-devotee and director Karan Johar, this pounding take on Bombay cinema’s recent fetishization of the male body is (like OSO in general) simultaneously hilarious parody and exemplary specimen-of-the-genre.

But like the “Om shanti om” song in KARZ, it also triggers the hero’s frightening flashbacks to his former life and death, which intensify when he attends a location shoot—for a cheesy superhero flick called “Mohabbat Man” (“Love-Man”)—in the burned-out ruins of RC Studios. The alternation of campy comedy and gathering drama continues through an amazing sendup of the Filmfare awards (complete with good-spirited cameos by Abhishek Bachchan and Akshay Kumar, spoofing themselves), at which O.K. wins “Best Actor,” followed by a celebrity bash that (with thirty-one real stars in boogeying attendance during the wildly-danceable song "Deewangi deewangi" [“craziness”], with another reprised chorus of “om shanti om”) considerably outdoes Manmohan Desai’s similar party scene in NASEEB.

Yet this “item,” too (which drove Indian theater audiences into a frenzy of cheering as each new star appeared), smoothly returns to the developing plot, with the sinister entrance of Mukesh Mehra, now gray-haired and foreign-returned (after a successful career as a producer in that Other big film industry) and eager to undertake Om’s next project. The hero recognizes his and Shanti’s nemesis, and soon finds his way back to Mother Makhija’s flat, to reunite with her and with Pappu; Kirron Kher’s teary performance here naturally evokes Durga Khote’s in KARZ, as a seemingly demented old woman who has clung for decades to the belief that her long-dead son will one day return.

It remains to bring the villain to justice…but how? The evidence of a reincarnated witness will hardly hold up in court! Om and Pappu contrive a scheme that requires convincing the producer to bankroll a revival of the Om Shanti Om project, complete with a rebuilt set in the blackened studio ruins, and Sandhya/“Sandy,” a clueless young thing from Bangalore, drafted to impersonate the ghost of Shanti.

The dazzling final song, "Daastaan-e-om shanti om" (“The saga of Om Shanti Om”), in which the hero recreates Shanti’s betrayal and murder, occurs on the set’s grand staircase, blending melody and lyrics that skillfully reference those of the comparable song sequence in KARZ ("Ek haseena thi," “There was a young beauty”) along with visuals that seem to nod at Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Phantom of the Opera. The surprising denouement that follows, however, amply displays the director’s own karz (“debt”) to the great Bimal Roy and his haunting MADHUMATI.

OSO as narrative and spectacle is such engrossing entertainment that its pure pleasure seemed, on my first few viewings, to overwhelm any critical reflection, yet some intriguing subtexts have since come to mind. Farah Khan’s rise from innovative choreographer (e.g., of DIL SE and numerous other films, and of the London and Broadway musical “Bombay Dreams”) to leading director, has been brokered by her friend Shah Rukh Khan, whose production company financed both her films. Their close relationship is palpable in the film’s loving treatment of its star, and one may even detect a hint, in the respective incarnations of Om, of SRK’s own biography: his metamorphosis from a Delhi-based unknown, lacking a film-dynasty pedigree, to King Khan, the dominant male star of Bombay since 1995.

Then, too, the film’s insider parody of the Hindi film industry, densely intertextual and deliciously smart, stands in stark contrast to the cheap-shot satire of a film like Deepa Mehta’s HOLLYWOOD-BOLLYWOOD (2002), which panders to every Western journalistic cliché about the alleged “mindless dream factories” of Bombay—the same sort of condescension exemplified by the odious chapter on the industry in Pico Iyer’s pop-travelogue Video Night in Kathmandu (1989). Instead, OSO affectionately celebrates the energy and heartbeat of the cinema that billions love, and its principals manage to combine a kind of desi innocence with a plucky pride. Everything about the film exudes confidence: Farah Khan’s in her director’s role (ironically exemplified by her ongoing gags about the irrelevance of directors in star-driven Bombay, even as she crafts what is, from start to finish, quintessentially a director’s film, with every frame carefully filled with remarkable details), and the industry’s confidence in itself as purveyor of glossy and globally-consumed entertainment that occasionally, as here, rises to greatness. It is no secret that most people in the Bombay film business despise the media label “Bollywood,” with its suggestion of a derivative phenomenon, and SRK has publicly stated this (in an interview in Nasreen Munni Kabir’s documentary, The Inner World of Shah Rukh Khan). Yet the term has now acquired too much global brand recognition to be altogether avoided. And so it is a particularly nice moment in OSO when the slimy Mukesh Mehra, power-lunching with Om Kapoor in a restaurant looking out at the Bombay skyline, responds to the star’s calling him “Mukesh” by saying, “Call me Mike. Everyone in Hollywood does.” Then, when “Mike” directs a remark to “Om,” the latter ripostes, “Call me ‘O.K.’ Everyone in …Bollywood… does”—with a slight pause that seems to both savor and distance this label—which is here strategically deployed in a verbal duel with a traitor who has abandoned both Shanti and the Motherland. Vah! How else to end than with: Jai Hind! and Jai Farah Khan!

OM SHANTI OM

(2007, Hindi, 162 minutes)

Directed by Farah Khan; Produced by Gauri Khan and Red Chilies Entertainment Story: Farah Khan; Screenplay: Mushtaq Sheikh and Farah Khan; Dialogue: Mayur Puri; Lyrics: Javed Akhtar; Music: Vishal-Shekhar; Choreography: Farah Khan; Cinematographer: V. Manikandan; Sound Design: Nakul Kamte; Art Direction: Sabu Cyril; Costumes: Karan Johar, Manish Malhotra, Sanjiv Mulchandani

Farah Khan’s second film as director is an extravagant tribute to the industry she grew up loving, and in which she has—after the massive success of this film—confirmed her position as a leading director (becoming the first woman to achieve this stature). Its complex and ingenious storyline manages to simultaneously succeed in three registers: as delicious parody, sincere homage, and (in its own right) powerfully engaging melodrama. Yet to say all this is barely to hint at the delights that OM SHANTI OM (hereafter “OSO”) offers to Hindi cinephiles. Liberally peppering the screenplay, from the get-go, with allusions to films, stars, and directors of the past, with witty double entendres, and with fully-acknowledged tropes, the director and her team seem to wink at us and declare, “Now watch as, through the magic of Hindi cinema, we make you care about these timeworn clichés all over again!” That they pull this off, in spades, to the accompaniment of a uniformly memorable score and gorgeous visuals, is an amazing achievement that results in one of the most exuberantly entertaining films in recent memory.

  On the level of narrative, OSO is a story of betrayal, murder, and revenge featuring a reincarnated hero. Merely to say this, in the Bombay cinematic context, immediately brings to mind (at least) two watershed predecessors: 1958’s MADHUMATI, starring Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala, the most commercially successful film of the great Bengali director Bimal Roy; and 1980’s KARZ, with Rishi Kapoor and Simi Grewal, one of the biggest hits of Subhash Ghai; indeed, both films are lovingly referenced. The latter was clearly a key text for director Khan as a youngster, and OSO opens with an imaginary and digitally-tweaked recreation of the shooting of one of its most celebrated musical numbers: the disco extravaganza “Mere umar ke” (“O youths of my generation!”) performed by silver-lamé suited Rishi Kapoor and a bevy of item girls atop a giant rotating 33-rpm record, being filmed by director Subhash Ghai (in a Ghai-like cameo as himself), and with both Farah and Shah Rukh placed among the on-set crowd of adoring fan-extras singing along with the song’s chorus (which is, of course, the mantra-phrase “Om shanti om”), and then dissing each other about the unlikelihood of one day becoming, respectively, a director and a star—and all this, mind you, in a five-minute teaser-plus-credit sequence. (Despite the Ghai tribute here, the film confirms that director Khan’s work so far may fit best in the cinematic lineage of the great Manmohan Desai, and, as with one of his frenetic multi-starrers, you are well advised not to blink during OSO’s opening sequence —or thereafter.)

The theme of the recurrent recycling of lives and storylines—a reality of the modern film industry that echoes Indian metaphysics and folk narrative—continues, and we will soon find our principal characters involved in shooting a spectacular movie titled “Om Shanti Om,” a drama involving rebirth, the production of which will be aborted and then resumed three decades later by the reincarnation of one of them. Given that the duplicate hero is named, in both births, Om, and is in love with/haunted by a single heroine named Shanti, the title formula acquires yet another layer of meaning.

Hero number one is Om Prakash Makhija (Shahrukh Khan), a peppy, film-smitten “junior artist” (bit player or extra) in a late-‘70s film factory called “RC Studios,” the ostensible site of the soundstage location for the opening KARZ shoot. But the allusion, of course, is to Raj Kapoor’s “RK Studios” of two decades earlier, and its campus is a wildly nostalgic evocation of the long-dead studio era in Bombay cinema, with fountains, gardens, and gorgeously-lit art-deco buildings and statuary: a pastel-tinted revivification of the “Ajanta Studios” of Guru Dutt’s KAAGAZ KE PHOOL (1959).

Om and his indefatigable buddy Pappu (the charming Shreyas Talpade) wander blissfully through this theme-park in polyester-mod attire (Om’s includes a Desai-like pendant of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian talismans), appearing as extras in parodied filmic scenes, while dreaming of stardom and, equally improbably, of a match-up for Om with his fantasied “girlfriend,” the starlet Shanti Priya (radiantly incarnated by newcomer Deepika Padukone, albeit this successful fashion model is a good ten kilos too light for a ‘70s heroine), and interacting-cum-overacting with Om’s adoring “junior-artiste” mom (Kirron Kher), who has never quite recovered from her failure to secure the role of Anarkali in MUGHAL-E-AZAM (1960). Om’s dreams are stymied, Pappu feels, by his awkward surname (makhi means “housefly” in Hindi) and he urges him to assume the moniker “Kapoor,” like that of their idol, the stocky and bouffant-coifed Rajesh Kapoor (Jawed Sheikh).

But Om’s fortunes take a turn when he and Pappu, doubly impersonating Manoj Kumar (who briefly protested this satire of his patriotism and penchant for hiding his face behind one raised hand!), crash the premiere of Shanti’s new film Dreamy Girl. Becoming entangled in her diaphanous dupatta, Om gets to gaze close-up at his beloved to the accompaniment of the lovely ballad "Ajab si" (“In your eyes, there’s a strange magic”). This is soon followed by the film-within-a-filmsong "Dhoom taana," ostensibly from Dreamy Girl, but in fact a tour-de-force of period-parodying choreography and costumes, glittering sets, and digital effects that seamlessly pair Shanti with the appropriately youthful Sunil Dutt, Rajesh Khanna, and Jeetendra—whose place, in each sequence, is then assumed in fantasy by the spectatorial Om.

And when he subsequently saves Shanti from an out-of-control haystack conflagration during an outdoor shoot (recapitulating Sunil Dutt’s reputed rescue of Nargis on Mehboob Khan’s MOTHER INDIA set, which led to their love and later marriage), and then convinces her that he is a star of Tamil cinema (via a hilarious sendup of a Rajnikant-style “western”), she favors him with an evening of her company: a dream date that he and Pappu mount on a soundstage to the accompaniment of the romantic "Main agar kahoon" (“If I say…”), offering up another lavish bouquet of cinematic quotations (including, to my eyes at least, Gene Kelly’s similar wooing of Debbie Reynolds in SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN).

Too soon, Om’s romantic hopes are shattered by the discovery, through an accidentally-overheard dressing-room conversation, that Shanti loves another: the dashing producer Mukesh Mehra (Arjun Rampal), an ambitious cad to whom she has unwisely given both her heart and her body, though he has kept their “marriage” a secret in order to pursue a more advantageous engagement to a film-financier’s daughter.

Mehra dreams of making “Om Shanti Om,” the most lavish Bombay talkie of all time, with a palatial set suggestive of the European baroque (and of Judge Raghunath’s mansion in AWARA), but when this is thwarted by Shanti’s revelation that she is pregnant with his child, the producer adopts the fiendish strategy of eliminating both her and the set of his now-doomed feature. In the truly breathtaking sequence that ends the first half of the film, Om tries heroically to save her, only to himself expire from multiple injuries—in the very hospital in which superstar Kapoor’s wife is simultaneously giving birth to a son. Amazingly, the Desai-like climactic collision of wildly improbable coincidence and high tragedy leaves both unscathed, and ready for more action “thirty years later,” after the Interval. 

Now, the hapless Om Prakash has become superstar Om Kapoor, a.k.a. “O.K.,” the callow and self-centered scion of a film dynasty, ensconced in the very mansion outside which (in his former life) he delivered a mock Filmfare award-acceptance speech to a group of street urchins. His face looks the same, albeit with a less-greasy hairstyle, and his wrist tattoo of “om” has mysteriously endured as a shadowy burn scar.

His body, however, has morphed—as those of all Bombay heroes did beginning in the late ‘80s—into a Buff Hunk (a real physical transformation that reportedly took the forty-two-year old SRK six grueling weeks of training to effect). The results are shown off in the “item” song “Dard-e-disco” (“The pain of disco”), which O.K. insists on inserting as a “dream sequence” into the climax of a hokey melodrama in which he plays a blind and deaf cripple attending his beloved’s marriage to another man. Costumed by SRK-devotee and director Karan Johar, this pounding take on Bombay cinema’s recent fetishization of the male body is (like OSO in general) simultaneously hilarious parody and exemplary specimen-of-the-genre.

But like the “Om shanti om” song in KARZ, it also triggers the hero’s frightening flashbacks to his former life and death, which intensify when he attends a location shoot—for a cheesy superhero flick called “Mohabbat Man” (“Love-Man”)—in the burned-out ruins of RC Studios. The alternation of campy comedy and gathering drama continues through an amazing sendup of the Filmfare awards (complete with good-spirited cameos by Abhishek Bachchan and Akshay Kumar, spoofing themselves), at which O.K. wins “Best Actor,” followed by a celebrity bash that (with thirty-one real stars in boogeying attendance during the wildly-danceable song "Deewangi deewangi" [“craziness”], with another reprised chorus of “om shanti om”) considerably outdoes Manmohan Desai’s similar party scene in NASEEB.

Yet this “item,” too (which drove Indian theater audiences into a frenzy of cheering as each new star appeared), smoothly returns to the developing plot, with the sinister entrance of Mukesh Mehra, now gray-haired and foreign-returned (after a successful career as a producer in that Other big film industry) and eager to undertake Om’s next project. The hero recognizes his and Shanti’s nemesis, and soon finds his way back to Mother Makhija’s flat, to reunite with her and with Pappu; Kirron Kher’s teary performance here naturally evokes Durga Khote’s in KARZ, as a seemingly demented old woman who has clung for decades to the belief that her long-dead son will one day return.

It remains to bring the villain to justice…but how? The evidence of a reincarnated witness will hardly hold up in court! Om and Pappu contrive a scheme that requires convincing the producer to bankroll a revival of the Om Shanti Om project, complete with a rebuilt set in the blackened studio ruins, and Sandhya/“Sandy,” a clueless young thing from Bangalore, drafted to impersonate the ghost of Shanti.

The dazzling final song, "Daastaan-e-om shanti om" (“The saga of Om Shanti Om”), in which the hero recreates Shanti’s betrayal and murder, occurs on the set’s grand staircase, blending melody and lyrics that skillfully reference those of the comparable song sequence in KARZ ("Ek haseena thi," “There was a young beauty”) along with visuals that seem to nod at Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Phantom of the Opera. The surprising denouement that follows, however, amply displays the director’s own karz (“debt”) to the great Bimal Roy and his haunting MADHUMATI.

OSO as narrative and spectacle is such engrossing entertainment that its pure pleasure seemed, on my first few viewings, to overwhelm any critical reflection, yet some intriguing subtexts have since come to mind. Farah Khan’s rise from innovative choreographer (e.g., of DIL SE and numerous other films, and of the London and Broadway musical “Bombay Dreams”) to leading director, has been brokered by her friend Shah Rukh Khan, whose production company financed both her films. Their close relationship is palpable in the film’s loving treatment of its star, and one may even detect a hint, in the respective incarnations of Om, of SRK’s own biography: his metamorphosis from a Delhi-based unknown, lacking a film-dynasty pedigree, to King Khan, the dominant male star of Bombay since 1995.

Then, too, the film’s insider parody of the Hindi film industry, densely intertextual and deliciously smart, stands in stark contrast to the cheap-shot satire of a film like Deepa Mehta’s HOLLYWOOD-BOLLYWOOD (2002), which panders to every Western journalistic cliché about the alleged “mindless dream factories” of Bombay—the same sort of condescension exemplified by the odious chapter on the industry in Pico Iyer’s pop-travelogue Video Night in Kathmandu (1989). Instead, OSO affectionately celebrates the energy and heartbeat of the cinema that billions love, and its principals manage to combine a kind of desi innocence with a plucky pride. Everything about the film exudes confidence: Farah Khan’s in her director’s role (ironically exemplified by her ongoing gags about the irrelevance of directors in star-driven Bombay, even as she crafts what is, from start to finish, quintessentially a director’s film, with every frame carefully filled with remarkable details), and the industry’s confidence in itself as purveyor of glossy and globally-consumed entertainment that occasionally, as here, rises to greatness. It is no secret that most people in the Bombay film business despise the media label “Bollywood,” with its suggestion of a derivative phenomenon, and SRK has publicly stated this (in an interview in Nasreen Munni Kabir’s documentary, The Inner World of Shah Rukh Khan). Yet the term has now acquired too much global brand recognition to be altogether avoided. And so it is a particularly nice moment in OSO when the slimy Mukesh Mehra, power-lunching with Om Kapoor in a restaurant looking out at the Bombay skyline, responds to the star’s calling him “Mukesh” by saying, “Call me Mike. Everyone in Hollywood does.” Then, when “Mike” directs a remark to “Om,” the latter ripostes, “Call me ‘O.K.’ Everyone in …Bollywood… does”—with a slight pause that seems to both savor and distance this label—which is here strategically deployed in a verbal duel with a traitor who has abandoned both Shanti and the Motherland. Vah! How else to end than with: Jai Hind! and Jai Farah Khan!

 SRK did awsome in this movie like always

the rebirth of SRK after him being murdered and the 70's shanti dieing and sandy coming back in her place in 2007 was ver good

I think it was way better thannnn Sawariya

I went to movie with slightly lower expectation after my experience with earlier Farah Khan movie "Main Hu Na", but I was completely amazed watching this movie. Shahrukh steals the show with his acting and comic timing, Deepika looks fresh and glamourous. Other actors have done decent job to cop up with Shahrukh. Last but not least, a huge applaud for Farah Khan, she has really improved significantly after her first movie.

The movie starts 30 years back (1970s), and roams around a Bollywood junior artist Om Prakash Makhija dreaming of making it big sometime.  Love of her life is a super star Shanti Priya, who is already married to Mukesh Mehra, an opportunistic and selfish movie producer.  Mukesh has to get rid of Shanti as she is an obstacle for his Hollywood ambitions. Om dies trying to save Shanti, and reborn as a son of another superstar Rajesh Kapoor. The second part is more or less borrowed from Karz, but with few twists. 

Although the story is not new, there are enough surprises and amazing dialogues that you will not have chance to find any flaw in the story.  Go and watch this very well packaged movie with superb acting, well timed comedy, rocking music, glamour, masala and of course Shahrukh khan.

Hi,

Please read my OSO review at www.bollywoodreviews.net

Please post comments there.

--- prashen

Indian public choice and taste is deteriorating speedily ! I think the time has finally come for Lord Shri Krishna to come down and fulfill his prophecy – ‘whenever there is a downfall or decline of culture – I take birth’!!

The title of the movie is taken from a yesteryear movie on reincarnation – Karz. Before the media and film critiques could point it out, the film Director and actors pointed it out themselves – ie. they are trying to tell the media and the public that whatever foolishness or repetition or cut-copy-paste happens – its all in their knowledge and they do it purposely – for they know the taste of the Indian mass a bit too well – after all they are the ones who actually have been molding minds of the youths since last 50 plus years! Thus they know exactly how much damage they have done to the meager brained Indian individuals.

Very poorly fabricated. Transition from one scene to another is atrocious and abrupt – no smoothness in the film. Following things can be seen in the movie :

Arjum Rampal will look cute even at ripe old age !

Arjun was born in a rich family. He became a Producer in his prime youth. Got the golden opportunity to ‘do the needful’ will available young and taut daughters of greedy / dumb/pauper parents – one of them was Shanti !! After accidentally making her pregnant (those days condoms etc. were I guess rare commodity) – he kills her and gets rid of her and even burns down the Rs.40 lakh film set. Why all this? So that he could marry an even dumber daughter of some multi millionaire – who had no hassles to marry a character less debauch  !!He then shifts to Hollywood and gets the chance to ‘hump’ more beautiful and fair skinned females. After the age of 60 he comes down to India to make a hindi film…but the bhoot of shanti takes revenge and he dies. Well good for him – after having enjoyed his prime youth and old age he left his physical body which was anyways becoming worthless day by day as ‘doing it’ with the help of Viagra etc is really painful for such men who have had an active sex life since adolescence !! basically Shanti gave him Mukti (salvation) !!

Shah Rukh proved that your body can get into shape even after 40…something that Rekha proved some 20 years ago.

Deepika will remain a model for good. Blowing a bubble gum all the time does not make a lady look like an 8 years old innocent girl….

Rishi Kapooor is surely a bindass human being! – in spite of the fact that his son’s movie will be released with OSO – he still participated in OSO in good taste!!

Akshaya and Abhishek showed what actually goes on in the minds of losers – so very true !!

The Junior Artist – Shah rukh’s friend in previous life remains in the dilapidated slum area – led a miserable life of some extra  lying in a corner. Shah’s mother – another aspirant to make it big in the film world (in her youth) too leads the most deplorable life in some slum area…..somehow making both ends meet and living hand to mouth…but still daily we hear people going from villages to reach stardom.

In the last scene when the chandelier hits Producer Rampal’s head and he lay unconscious  – suddenly everyone vanish from the scene leaving Shah Rukh to be alone with the Producer – Why?! Had he done some small time course in First Aid or medicine that a hall full of people in party mood – many of them had come to enjoy free drinks and snacks - all left within a fraction of a millisecond!! That was too silly !!

Bhoots really exists – see how Dreamy Girl’s soul hovered over that dilapidated burnt down sets for 30 long years – just to take revenge !!So girls do not run after money and sleep around with rich money minded blokes – they just make use of your body to earn some money – they know the minds of men – so they make you wear …unwear garments to seduce ‘sex starved’ blokes so that they part with their money and make them richer !

And then we see people looking heavenwards seeking to get a glimpse of God in order to ask him why he gives money and power to the shameless, corrupt, debauch pigs who have no respect for the women lore !!Amazing!! God does not buy the tickets to a show to watch semi nude females becoming completely nude !! its you people who spend your hard earned money to watch such ‘item girls’ and when after the show you know and are sure that you would never be able to even touch such a fair skinned sexy lass – you get drunk and create ruckus and even rape some passerby to take out your frustration. And after all this people say its all fate and destiny !! Such escapists people are really !

A junior artist who had access to watch a beautiful heroine so closely actually thought that she will be his !! But for the first time they showed in the film that ‘heroine material’ are not all that dumb and are pretty clever – for she had already ‘pataoed’ the rich and good looking Producer Arjun Rampal and had even gotten herself pregnant by him so that he does not kick her butt on the arrival of another sexy lass ! But alas she miscalculated and had to meet an untimely death.