How can anyone NOT like Salaam Venky?

The lovely Revathi’s Salaam Venky doesn’t give us a choice. We HAVE to like, if not love ,this big-hearted film about a dying son and his tirelessly devoted mother. Apparently based on a true story, the film clasps us in a tight embrace not allowing us to breathe. So overpowering is its commitment to wrenching tears out of us that the narrative frequently becomes melodramatic and maudlin, going as far as to making the mother sing a lullaby on her son’s death bed.

Seriously! What can we do except to surrender to director Revathi’s sentimental journey into the heart of a soap opera. played out with finesse, I might add.

No one can fault Salaam Venky for faltering in its commitment to communicating the mother’s grief. Kajol as the strong solidly nurturing Sujata curbs her tendency to shriek and shout. She has played that kind of a hyperventilating mother quite recently in Helicopter Eela. This time she is far more restrained and implosive, thanks to Revathi’s direction which impels the matriarch to bleed in places that cannot be seen.

I am not too gung-ho about Vishal Jethwa as the vibrant dying Venky. The standards for the dying-with-a-smile genre of cinema are very high indeed. I mean Rajesh Khanna in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anand just killed it. What comes thereafter can at the most be a homage to Anand. Jethwa is mostly stationery. He compensates for the lack of physical movement by over-using his facial muscles.

That having said, there is no dearth of moving, sometimes, very moving moments between mother and son, all over-punctuated by a background music which screams out the directions—now you must cry, okay smile a bit, uh-oh it’s time get to ready for the final curtain, etc—like a drunken traffic constable giving out directions at a busy crossroad.

Why must Hindi cinema continue to be so deep-focussed on illustrative background scores? I honestly didn’t need guidance to feel the emotions that the Kajol-Jethwa combination succeeds in generating between them.

And why are there so many peripheral characters ? A blind sweetheart for the dying hero is seriously manipulative. Anant Mahadevan comes quietly gives gyan about dying(to a dying man) and leaves quietly. Rajeev Khandelwal shows up as a resident doctor who drops in to see Venky whenever he feels like and leaves with all-essentials-are-normal brief to the head nurse(Mala Parvathy) who acts like Lalita Pawar in Anand without the scowl.

Then there is Aahana Kumra playing a stereotypical newshound (only the cigarette dangling from the crimson lip was missing). She has a change of heart the minute she meets the dying sunshine boy Venky. Aamir appears as a denim-clad trimmed and tucked Yamaraj for intermittent dialogues on death with Kajol. Director Revathi shows up for a sequence as the judge Prakash Raj’s wise wife.

My favourite supporting actor in this teartful treacly tale of mother, son and a gallery of hangers-on is Rahul Bose as the quietly efficient lawyer Parvez who shows up towards the end to fight for Venky’s right to die. So stretched-out is director Revathi and her co-writers Sameer Arora and Kausar Munir’s excursion into the theme of dying with dignity , that the intimate o mother-son drama is drowned in a progressive disengagement of the audience from the core emotions.

The clunky writing apart, Salaam Venky is not an unlikeable film. How can a film about a mother clinging to a dying son(“I am the only mother who wakes up her son in the middle of the night to check if he’s alive”) go wrong?

It doesn’t. But it could have remembered the immortal line from Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anand that Venky likes to quote: “Zindagi badi honi chahiye lambi nahin” while writing in so many character who just crowd the hospital room.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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