Revisiting Shah Rukh-Salman-Madhuri’s Love Triangle As It Clocks 23 Years

The love triangle about  a jealous husband(Shah Rukh Khan) , his devoted wife(Madhuri Dixit) and  a  supportive friend (Salman Khan) who’s  mistaken for the wife’s lover by her husband, seeks inspiration from a 1974  Rajesh Khanna-Mumtaz-Sanjeev Kumar starrer Aap Ki Kasam.       In Hum Tumhare Hain Sanam  the ornate packaging , topheavy starcast and  the  outmoded conventions of marital obligations and fidelity had the film trade very worried.  

Though Madhuri hadn’t had much  luck with Shah Rukh, she had a historic hit Hum Aapke Hain Koun with Salman Khan.

The film wasn’t only crucial for the  doddering fortunes of multi-starrers but also for producer K.C. Bokadia whose  career fell on hard times  in the1990s  after a couple of big hits Aaj Ka Arjun and Phool Baney Angaaray  in the1980s.  Because of  Bokadia’s financial crises  Hum  Tumhare Hain Sanam was delayed by almost six years.

It  marked the belated  directorial  debut of   the Tamil director   K.S. Adhiyaman who , incidentally, directed Hum Tumhare Hain Sanam without knowing a word of Hindi.     A lot of styles and trends changed  since Hum Tumhare… began shooting .

If nowhere else this long-delayed marital  triangle clickrf  in Bihar  where a jealous Shah Rukh Khan goes into a dream sequence   where he imagines his wife Madhuri  Dixit cooing “Gale mein laal tai” to Salman Khan.

Seven years in the making , Hum Tumhare  Hain Sanam makes us ‘grown’   in  exasperation.  All  the  actors have grown, some have even outgrown this marital drama. Only  Hindi debutant Adhiyaman has stuck on ,plodding through the over-stressed under- intellectualized story of an  over-possessive and jealous husband who nearly wrecks his marriage to a rather domesticated and dimwitted woman who can’t see how much her husband resents her  proximity to her childhood chum until it’s almost too late.

Shah Rukh Khan is the obsessive spouse  whose suspicions begin to tear into the innards of his marriage. In all  fairness the film ‘belongs’ to   Shah  Rukh , much in the same way that Sangam belonged  to Raj Kapoor. Adhiyaman pays more than a nodding homage to Raj Kapoor’s Sangam. Not only is the theme of  spousal suspicion caused by an old childhood  chum  borrowed from  RK’s immortal love triangle,  even the couple is named Gopal and Radha,a la  Sangam , with the unintentionally  intrusive friend’s name altered from Rajendra Kumar’s Sunder to   Salman Khan’s  more macho Suraj.

There are loads of other characters tucked into every nook and cranny of this over-stuffed masala dosa, more  sambhar than sombre. Even the music directors come in a bunch. The credit titles impatiently clubs them  together as “6 Top Music Directors”.  Creating an exceptionally atonal music score,we migh add.

In fact the same  applies to the film. Crammed with characters  and ideas it gives off an uneasily discordant tone. Borrowing bulky  batches  from Raj Kapoor’s  Sangam  and J.Om Prakash’s Aap Ki Kasam , Adhiyaman errs in  over-reaching.

The film tries to  be a  bit  of everything and ends up being nothing. While  the Gopal-Radha  marriage comes apart because of Suraj, it  also bears the brunt of a serious domestic friction  when Radha’s much-adored wastrel of a  brother Prashant(Atul Agnihotri) clashes with Gopal’s laadli sister Neeta(SumanRanganathan). With the narrative pulling  in two  different genres the film begins to resemble a waitingroom at a railway station where transit passengers  loose all their   inhibitions, and vanish into the night.

The peripheral characters such as  Shah Rukh Khan’s foster-father(Alok Nath),Madhuri’s mother(Aruna Irani), or Shah Rukh’s divorced colleague  and suggestively friendly secretary aren’t meshed sensibly into the plot.

Adhiyaman’s melodramatic motivations should have been allowed to  converge only on  the central triangle.He should’ve concentrated on making a marital drama instead of a family flick.With a bit of firm control the pati,patni and their woe theme would have acquired engrossing dimensions.  The three main players are competent enough  to add invisible shades into their characters. Shah Rukh is specially  in character–  tense, edgy, jittery , impatient and craving to get his wife’s undivided  attention.    He  handles both the  light-hearted exasperation(in the scene where  Salman calls in the night to  tell  Madhuri he’s got diarrhoea,  Shah Rukh’s spousal indignation is  brilliantly portrayed) and the grim and damning confrontation scenes(such as the one where, in one dam-burst he blurts out all his irate resentment against his wife’s   sunny friendship with her  childhood chum) in  equal measures .

Tragically the possessive husband’s character becomes a  casualty of  histrionic exhibitionism. After  playing the possessive husband’s character ,the  character progressively  begins to play  Shah Rukh Khan.  The improvisational sequence where Shah Rukh Khan  “speaks” to a clay horse is an item  rather  than a sequence in the film.

Salman is surprisingly subdued. He doesn’t bare his chest even in jest. And when he begins to do so in front of Madhuri Dixit , Shah Rukh berates his co-star for being a body builder and a showoff.Aishwarya Rai’s guest appearance as Salman’s blind  girlfriend who can “see” into his pure  intentions about Madhuri is well planned and comes at the right juncture.

The intentional humour in  some of  the dramatic moments  such as  the sequence in a  bar where Gopal   chastises an unfaithful wife  keep us looking at the proceedings with passing curiosity  rather than surpassing interest.

For a film where one of the heroes plays a  professional singer,  the music and  choreography are abysmally inadequate , if not downright ridiculous. The song –and- dance that Salman performs when he wins the Singer Of The Millennium award  is so pitiable the judges would surely be  tempted to take back the award.

The passage of time has also taken its toll on the narrative. Though fortunately  the actors don’t change their hairstyle in every sequence Madhuri Dixit’s  makep goes from  natural to chalky white.The print quality is also inconsistent and just for the sake of being an accommodating movie viewer,  one could say it reflects the mood of the  jealous husband.    Also, for a film that pitches its moral values and  marital thesis  primarily at a woman’s audience the humour  often gets coloured and suggestive.

There’s a sequence   where   Radha wants to “play football” with  Gopal in the middle of the night.  “Not  now, I’ve got a foot ache,” Shah Rukh adlibs.  Sure, and we get a  stomach ache instead of pain in the nether regions watching  three myopic people resolve a selfcreated messy triangle.