Aashayein

Director: Nagesh Kukunoor

Actors: John Abraham, Prateeksha Lonkar, Shreyas Talpade, Anaitha Nair

"'Aashayein' is the story of a gambler, who wins a lot of money and is ready to live his life, pursue his dreams and do all the good stuff until he finds out the same day that he has only 90 days to live," Kukunoor told IANS.

"It is then the journey that he undertakes begins and the characters that he meets and how he learns to live life all over again," added the director, who is also making a comeback to acting with a cameo in the movie.

Produced by Percept Pictures Company and distributed by Big Pictures, the movie is an emotional uplifting drama. It also stars Sonal Sehgal, Prateeksha Lonkar, Girish Karnad, Farida Jalal, Ashwin Chitale and Anaitha Nair.

At a party to celebrate his big win at gambling, Rahul (John) proposes his girlfriend Nafisa (Sonal). Within minutes of announcing his engagement to her, he collapses on the floor.

After a medical diagnosis, Rahul discovers that he has only a few months left to live. How he makes the most of this time and how it changes him is what "Aashayein" is all about.

The movie is the tale of an individual's journey from darkness to light and "the way people perceive their phase with the imminent end of life," says Nagesh. The medium-budget movie has been shot entirely in Puducherry.

Noteworthy is that both Kukunoor and John didn’t charge a penny for "Aashayein".

"In order to show accountability for the project, we make all sorts of concessions and that is what we did in this case," said Kukunoor.

The movie has also been waiting in the cans for close to two years for differences between the producer and the distributor.

"It took them about a year to resolve their differences. Around January this year, when everything was clean and settled, we decided that August 27 will be the date of release," Kukunoor said.

"This was a technical glitch which was extremely frustrating but it was not something one could control, so we sort of waited on the sidelines for it to resolve," added Kukunoor.

But that was not it for him.

"The film has taken a while. I had written the script long ago and it took almost four years to find Percept as producers to come on board and then finally I got John."

"The amount of effort I’ve put in to get 'Aashayein' released, it seems like I’ve made a fresh feature film altogether. It has been an extremely long run process but at the end of it, it is all behind us and now fingers are crossed," he added.

This is a film about coping with dying. But that's not what makes it such a special experience. It's the writer-director's profound understanding of human nature that furnishes the simple story with a lucidity and coherence even when the protagonist's mind is so numbed by physical pain he can barely think straight.

"Aashayein" is structured as a journey from a bright delusory light into a place where the radiance comes from a consciousness of why mortality is not to be feared.

In John Abraham's eyes are mapped the entire history of the human heart, its follies and foibles as it struggles to make coherent the indecipherable logistics that define our journey across that bridge which everyone crosses from this world to the next.

As that very fine actress Prateeksha Lonkar (a Kukunoor favourite) says, "The only difference between the healthy and the ill is that the former don't know when they are dying and the latter do."

Between that state of blissful oblivion where we all think life is forever (and a day) and that one moment when our delusions come crashing down, there resides some very fine cinema. Hrishikesh Mukherjee's "Anand" where Rajesh Khanna smiled his way through that wobbly bridge taking us to the next world, is an interesting reference point in "Aashayein".

I also thought of the actress Supriya Choudhary shouting into the dispassionate mists in the mountains, "I want to live". The echoes reverberate all the way to Kukunoor's heartwarming, funny and elegiac exposition on the truth that lies on the other side of that illusory mountain we call life. Kukunoor pays a homage to life per se, and life as we know in the movies about death.

Even in the most poignant places in the art Kukunoor ferrets out some humour. When John's lovely girlfriend (Sonal Sehgal) hunts him down in his exilic place of the dying, John quips, "So you are not going to behave like one of those heroines in films who dumps the dying hero?"

The fantasy element creeps into the hospice (yes, that's the spotless space that the story inhabits unostentatiously) with the least amount of fuss. There's a little boy (the bright and expressive Ashwin Chitale) who weaves mystical tales borrowed from the comic books for the desperate and the dying. Here Kukunoor brings in an element of rakish adventure borrowed from the edgy hijinks of Indiana Jones.

Who says money can't buy love? John uses bundles of cash to bring a smile to these doomed lives. When he doubles up with pain in womb-like postures of helplessness we feel his pain.

John in Harrison Ford's hat and whip cuts a starry figure. He has never been more fetchingly photographed. John's smile reaches his eyes, makes its way to his heart and then to ours. This film opens new doors in John's histrionic abilities. It's a performance that heals and nurtures.

John's finest moments are reserved for a hot-tempered sharp-tongued 17-year-old girl on a wheelchair, played with intuitive warmth by Anaitha Nayar. He guides the relationship between these two unlikely comrades of unwellness with brilliant restrain and candour. She wants him to make love. He does with his eyes using his unshed tears as lyrical lubricant.

Here is a performance that defines the character through immense measures of unspoken anguish. Rajesh Khanna in "Anand"? Nope. John pitches his performance at a more wry and cynical world where true feelings are often smothered in worldly sprints across a wounded civilization.

This is unarguably Kukunoor's most sensitive and moving work since "Iqbal". We often find little sobs pounding at the base of our stomachs. Not all the characters or situations are fully formed and fructified. But even the partly-realized truths in "Aashayein" convey more common sense and uncommon affection for life than the "entertainers" of today's cinema where laughter is generated through cracks in places very far removed from the heart.

"Hum log bhi zaadatar aam logon ke jaise hi dikhte hain (We mostly look like common people too)," explains a poor, old prostitute (Farida Jalal), almost looking into the camera. You heart's supposed to melt at that profound appeal from her community. Apparently.

This reasonably healthy woman, diagnosed with AIDS, is a social pariah even among the terminally ill. Fellows around switch chairs at her presence. A perfectly educated, "M.Com, MBA" (Girish Karnad) believes her touch could spread the deadly disease. Others with literally few days left to go themselves feel the same.

AashayeinThe hero of this film's checks himself into a super posh hospice, a home for intensive palliative care. The film takes us through an extended, guided tour of this house of death. Where waiting lists multiply, but the charity home restricts its patients to 50 only. Each day could offer a newly vacant spot but.

A warden here suggests, "The difference between us and the terminally ill is the latter can see death coming. We can't. Death is certain, either way." Live for the moment, I guess.

The camera pans then on to the pained eyes of a woman suffering for long on life-support. She pleads the nurse. The nurse pulls the plug. You're supposed to gasp. Well.

Scenes after another, whether long lessons on karma or carpe diem, make for a bunch of similarly banal misses between outcome and intent.

Given the picture's purpose itself leaves very little room for doubt. An audience's pre-knowledge that the characters before the screen will eventually degenerate into vegetables make for instant sympathy. Destiny is not even on the hero's side. Everyone smiles still. Your eyes must wet. Movie manipulation is complete. Alas.

While the filmmakers figured their supposedly perfect setting out, a story didn't follow. Or it did. A part of it is fair endorsement for the Make A Wish Foundation. The hero sets out fulfill one last wish on each inmate's bucket list. A rock show follows several vodka shots. You could do with some of the latter to figure if the rest of the movie is more macabre or moronic.

A millionaire hunk befriends a giggly 17-year-old who wants to bed him before she dies. That cinematic threat looms large right through the film. Both suffer from diseases with names "more complicated than lymphosucoma of the intestine."

John's the bachelor hunk. The film preaches 'no smoking'. He makes love to the cigarette while his lungs die. A miracle child next-door offers him outlet into his childhood dreams. He secretly auditions for Indiana Jones And Raiders Of The Lost Ark in his sleep! The minor girl waits around for the slurpy kiss still. No, please!

Most of us have little choice but to stoically make light of death. This death-wish turns instantly into a barrel of laughs; all of it unintended, of course. Eventually you may like to sing, 'Gimme hope John? Naah!'