RAEES Update #4 [25/01/17] - Page 21

Kaabil is gearing up to take Raees on at the box office, but whether Hrithik Roshan's differently-abled protagonist can match up to Shahrukh Khan's slick gangster remains to be seen. Director Sanjay Gupta tries really hard to pull at your heart strings with Hrithik and Yami Gautam's romance, but something about this movie's poorly crafted trailers and promos just can't win many of its target audience over. The film's tagline run along the theme of, "Their world was always dark. Their love deserved the light," implying that these characters, amid great suffering, find consolation in each other's love and there lies the problem.

There's nothing dark about these two characters' lives. They have perfectly coiffed hair, awesome fashion sense, perfect skin and live in more luxury than the sighted people who will pay money to watch their story. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having differently-abled protagonists in a film - Naseeruddin Shah's Iqbal was proof of this. But aside from the fact that Yami and Hrithik's characters are visually impaired, they are exactly like regular people - if not in better circumstances. This is fine, they might deserve it, but Gupta's angle to make us feel sorry for this duo which can ace the tango just does not work.

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You felt the titular Iqbal's sense of suffocation every second of the film because he could not speak. You felt Aamir Khan's desperation in Ghajini as he tried to remember his life because he lost his memory every 15 minutes. What you can't feel is the drawback of Yami and Hrithik's life as visually impaired people. Rather than everyone stopping their own dance practice to help the leading pair tango in Mon Amor, it would have helped if they'd been treated with some amount of apathy - harsh, but perhaps it would have helped to effectively play the sympathy angle.