Kal Ho Naa Ho Review

Nikkhil Advani's debut, written and produced by Karan Johar, is the film Dharma Productions had been circling since Kuch Kuch Hota Hai: a triangle in which the man everyone loves has already decided he cannot stay. Shah Rukh Khan plays Aman with the volume all the way up, singing on Brooklyn stoops and steamrolling a Punjabi family's grief, and the performance works because the film lets you see the effort.

Every grin is a man spending something he cannot get back. Saif Ali Khan, as the friend being set up to win, is the funniest he has ever been, and the gay-misunderstanding routine with Sulabha Arya's Kantaben became a running joke for the decade. Preity Zinta carries the first hour on a scowl and the second on tears, and Jaya Bachchan does the quiet grief that keeps the whole thing honest.

It is unashamedly a melodrama. The diagnosis is a switch the script flips at the interval, the hospital act asks for tears it has mostly earned, and the final wedding stacks every trick the genre has. What makes it hold is that the comedy is as good as the crying: Kantaben, the Pretty Woman number, the diary. Anil Mehta shoots New York in autumn light as a place people actually live rather than a tourist reel, and Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy's title track, sung by Sonu Nigam, does the film's argument in four minutes. Twenty years on it is the reference point for the NRI romance, the film later ones are measured against and mostly lose to.