ANKAHEE – NOTHING NOVEL BUT HANDLED WITH FLOURISH

Rating:- * *

Shekhar [Aftab Shivdasani] is married to Nandita [Amisha Patel]. Before long the couple is blessed with a daughter, and everything looks hunky dory with the small family until a Miss World and Bollywood star Kavya Krishna [Esha Deol] walks in.

Kavya is beautiful. Shekhar, a very much married man, falls in love with her. Kavya also responds. She feels he’s the only person in the world who can make her happy.

But where does Nandita go? The poor girl is stuck, in the middle. Shekhar, her husband is the only man she has ever loved. But giving a damn to her and daughter Sheena, he walks away. From her. From their home. From Sheena.

In some ways ANKAHEE bears a striking similarity to Mahesh Bhatt’s ARTH, with the difference that there is a child too in Ankahee. When the wife comes to know of her husband’s liaison with another woman, a beauty queen/actress, she pleads with the latter who turns a deaf ear. She may not have any right as such over the actress, but taking courage in both hands,she does teach a lesson to her errant hubby: by slamming the door on him when he comes back to her, a little too late. If Aftab emerges as the culprit, that’s natural, for, he broke the code of faith. Whether the film has autobiographical undertones, be that as it may. However, a few sequences have been handled quite sensitively. For instance, when the estranged parents visit the school principal and the child asks her father if it’s true that he’s having an affair with another woman, and when the wife pleads with the other woman would melt even the stone-hearted.

But there is hardly any novelty in the film, and its pace is also rather slow.

Writers Yash-Vinay and Vikram Bhatt have done a fairly good job by writing a cohesive and consistent screenplay. Even the dialogues [Girish Dhamija] complement the emotional graph of the story.

Pritam’s music is in sync with the mood of the film. ‘Tumse Yun Milenge’ is the pick of the lot. Cinematography [Praveen Bhatt] is up to the mark.

As for performances, Vikram has extracted good work from almost everyone, including Esha Deol.

On the whole, ANKAHEE is a sensitive tale handled with flourish, for which Vikram can claim legitimate credit.