Saawan - The Love Season Review

It is ironical that the director who's given us several strong films based on high drama like Souten and Saajan Bin Suhagan has come up with his weakest film to date, and that too when it contains a part of his own name in the title.

Saawan Kumar's Saawan - The Love Season won't last till the onsent of saawan, the monsoons in India, even though it stars superstar Salman Khan, because it's a good concept gone sour.

For one, its screenplay has no sense of balance, it doesn't even make an apology of an attempt to follow three balanced Acts of screenplay writing, and comes up with a lopsided story that has you wondering what's the point of the film all the way till slightly before the interval.

But first things first. Saawan tells the story of a man who can see tomorrow, who can foretell the future, especially unpleasant events that will occur in  the future, with day, date and time to boot, much like tune-in promo on television.

There's this highly platonic young couple Raj [Kapil Jhaveri] and Kajal [Saloni Aswani], who bump into each other in Cape Town, and Raj falls head over heels in love with Kajal, and they ultimately get engaged after their fathers intervene and in celebration of the realization that they were childhood friends themselves, the two fathers (Ranjeet and Prem Chopra respectively) decide to get their children engaged.

But on the happy day of her engagement, Kajal learns from a soothsaying stranger (Salman Khan) that her father will die that night. He even tells her when: 9 pm. And when the deadly prediction does come true, Kajal is on the edge. The unfortunate incident is a trigger for Kajal, who has every reason to believe that the soothsayer can indeed predict death and doom.

And when, soon after, the soothsayer predicts that Kajal herself is going to die two days later, on the coming Friday, she is aghast. But alas, the plot, already extremely late in taking off, takes yet another detour from logic, and Kajal decides that now that she has only two days, why not sing a couple of songs and generally live it up? Finally, ultimately, when there isn't much more footage left for the screenplay to keep meandering on and off the rather thin track, our soothsaying hero (Salman) gives up his own life so that death is warded off the stricken heroine, and so that the platonic love birds can live to sing many more songs! Ho hum!

So, even Salman's presence in a not too hot performance anyways plus Rajendra Rao's good cinematography cannot rescue the wafer-thin semblance of an excuse for a  plot that actually stars to get focused only around the interval, the unfunny comic sequences from Johnny Lever and Bobby Darling, and the unmemorable performances by Saloni and Kapil.

Saawan - The Love Season is poor stuff indeed from Saawan Kumar. One wonders why Salman did the film in the first place. Not an extraordinary appearance at all, as the credits say, but an extraordinarily brave choice of role.

Rating: *