Taal - Overlooked?

[Pic Courtesy Roger Ebert's Website]

Roger Ebert, arguably America's most well-known movie critic, conducts an annual Overlooked Film Festival that, in his own words, "showcases overlooked films, formats and genres". This year's edition of the festival includes Taal, Subash Ghai's film starring Aishwarya Rai, Anil Kapoor and Akshaye Khanna.

I found Taal to be a strictly by-the-numbers, predictable love triangle set against the backdrop of music. It employed well-worn cliches(the heroine's father being insulted by the hero's family, to name one) in its treatment of the poor girl-rich boy love story in the first half while the second half was marginally better as it showcased an eccentric music director's love for the heroine. Its ending, in keeping with the rest of the movie, was cinematic and predictable too. On the positive side were a gorgeous Aishwarya Rai, a blockbuster soundtrack by A.R.Rehman and an energetic performance by Anil Kapoor.

While Ebert's review of the movie is scathingly funny, his liking for the movie and his appreciation for Indian movies in general, comes through (after all, he gives it 3 1/2 stars). Taal has a story with an abundance of sentiments, an ending respecting 'Indian' values, a sanitized, Bollywood-style romance, a universally acknowledged beauty as heroine, extravagant song sequences and is mounted on a grand scale. For Ebert, these elements are representative of today's Indian films, and so these factors, rather than absolute quality, seem to have been behind his selection of Taal for his festival. But even with those same parameters, me thinks he could have come up with a better choice. IMO, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam would have been a much better replacement. It includes all those qualities that Ebert is looking for but puts them together in a much better package.