Chehraa Review

Chehraa is a slap in the face of all those filmmakers who make a movie without some suspense being revealed in the end. Just when you are expecting the film to end, it throws up a thrilling surprise explanation for something that you never knew happened in the film in the first place. Now there are few things more discouraging than not realizing that there was some suspense in a suspense film, and you are about to do one of them - read this review.

Megha (Bipasha Basu) is a woman with a harrowing past - she overate for a whole year, and as a result has a much larger waist than any Bollywood heroine in recent memory. When co-Psychology student Akash (Dino Morea) breaks the ice, she reveals it all to him - not her waist, you pervert, her past. She tells him how her dad used to beat up her mum when she was a kid. The "kid" in the previous sentence refers to Megha, not her mum. And no, that is not the suspense in the movie.

Megha's mum runs away with Megha, but the memories of the beatings persist, and she slowly goes mad. Megha's mum, not Megha. Megha just overeats and develops a huge waist. Now Akash isn't a man who makes a decision on a woman based on the size of her waist, but since there is nothing else to base a decision on in case of Megha, he makes his decision based on the size of her waist. He decides it's good enough for him, and proposes. Megha accepts.

Unfortunately, the villian returns. No, not the official caterer for this film, but Megha's dad. He starts beating up her mum again, and unable to bear it, Megha kills him and runs away with her mum. Now this is where they should have normally ended the film - the running would've done its bit for Megha's waist, the film would've been over in half the cost considering it's anyway going to flop, and everyone would've lived happily ever after.

Unfortunately, it doesn't. And so when the next scene says "five years later", it actually feels like it. Megha and Akash have been separated by a brutal misunderstanding engineered by Akash's dad, Akash marries Renu (Preeti Jhanghiani), and Megha marries a rich industrialist, Chandra (Irrfan Khan).

Megha becomes a patient of Akash's when she complains of a persecution complex that people are trying to kill her. He tries to tell her that such a feeling is common when you have a lot of flab around the waist since everyone wants you to jog, but she asks him to investigate further, and he finds that her husband is actually trying to kill her. And he is only person who can save her now.

For a thriller, the film does manage to keep you involved for some time, but is let down by a poor background score. Bipasha isn't an actress who can carry off a role revolving around her. In case you missed the point, she's put on weight. Dino Morea puts in a fine performance, and Irrfan is good, too. But the film has too many loose ends, and the ending is an explanation for a whodunnit that isn't built up like a whodunnit in the first place, with the result that the explanation comes almost like an extension of the film.

If you really want to find out the ending, just walk into the theater in the end!