Masand's verdict: Umrao Jaan

LIFELESS UMRAO: The film fails because it's a placidly told story without passion or pathos.

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Cast: Aishwarya Rai, Abhishek Bachchan, Shabana Azmi, Suneil Shetty

Direction: J P Dutta

Director JP Dutta has been insisting that his new film Umrao Jaan is not a remake of Muzaffar Ali's fabulous 1981 film starring Rekha. And truth is, he's more or less right. Dutta's film which opens at cinemas this week is a more faithful adaptation of Urdu author Mirza Hadi Ruswa's novel about a young girl who's kidnapped from her happy home in Faizabad and sold off to a brothel in Lucknow where she's groomed to become a courtesan.

In Dutta's film, Aishwarya Rai plays the doomed damsel who – apart from the fact that she's got a raw deal in life, finds out that she's unlucky in love too. She catches the fancy of dapper nawab Abhishek Bachchan, but alas their romance isn't meant to be. As she discovers in the end, once a lonely tawaif, always a lonely tawaif.

The thing that hurts the most about JP Dutta's Umrao Jaan is that it's far too synthetic and as a result, you really can't relate to Aishwarya's pain. Not when she's kidnappned and sold off as a little girl, not when her romance comes crashing down like a pack of cards, not when she's shunned by her own mother when she returns home and not at the end when she finally settles into a life of loneliness.

Now, the funny thing is that for her part Aishwarya sobs her eyes out from the very beginning, up until the very end. She simpers and whimpers and yet you’re just not moved.

In contrast, you're reminded of Rekha who in the earlier film suffers in silence all along, holding back her tears till the very end, thus building up to a big climatic moment when your heart goes out to her.

In the new film, Umrao's sad life story is narrated in flashback by Aishwarya herself who puts on her heavy voice and punctuates her story with sniffles.