Will Ash be Devgan's 'Raincoat'?
by: Lopamudra Ghatak
- timesofindia.com
After doing the balle balle Punjabi kudi act, garbed in sequined kurtas and Patiala suits in Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice, it is time for Aishwarya Rai to go east. Playing the role of a Bihari girl married and settled in Calcutta, Rai will sport minimalist make-up and Neeta Lulla-designed sarees in Bengali filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh's forthcoming Raincoat.
As Rai recovers from international critics' not-so-kicked response to B&P, she's keeping fingers crossed that Raincoat will help her smile at the Box Office.
And another person who will be hoping the same apart from director Ghosh, (who earlier directed her in Chokher Bali) is Rai's co-actor Ajay Devgan, who has not had great Company since 2002, where debutant Vivek Oberoi got the kudos for an impressive portrayal.
This year, Devgan's last outing was Mani Ratnma's Yuva, where again Abhishek Bachchan walked away with all the credit and left Kajol's better-half sulking. His other releases included adult comedy Masti, where the triumvirate Vivek Oberoi-Aftab Shivdasani-Ritesh Deshmukh stole the show and Devgan remained in the background.
With Raincoat, Devgan and Rai have been paired for the fourth time. The only time that their pairing worked was in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's magnum opus Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam in 1999. Pitted as the conscientious and too-much-in-love-with wife kind of a husband, Devgan did the martyr act convincingly.
Although his sensitive lawyer act, who takes his beautiful wife across seven seas to be reunited with her the real-life-cum-reel lover Salman Khan earned him applause, critics were not so kind.
Most credited the film's runaway success to Ash-Sallu onscreen chemistry, which was spilling over from their off-screen passion and good music and excellent cinematography.
Then happened Hum Kisise Kum Nahin in 2002, which was a box office dud, in spite of boasting of a star cast including Amitabh Bachchan, Sanjay Dutt and Rai.
A weak adaptation of Robert de Niro's Analyse This, it came as a cropper at the box office. Rai and Devgan's next pairing was in Rajkumar Santoshi's cop drama Khakee , where again Bachchan as an ageing cop and Akshay Kumar as a crooked cop outshone Devgan's cop-turned-baddie act.
Reasonably so. Although Devgan and Rai were supposed to be reel lovers, it was Akki who managed to romance Aishwarya and did a convincing job of trying to woo her endless, even falling for her deceptive act.
In the wake of such a chemical combination, Raincoat will test whether the duo can get lucky on screen.
