It's no secret that I love Juhi Chawla. That's why I decided to watch Andaz (1994.) Yes, it was directed by David Dhawan, who is known for incredibly broad and sometimes tasteless comedies and directs with all the subtlety and grace of a brick to the head, but it's a Juhi Chawla movie! How bad could it be?
Ajay Saxena (Anil Kapoor) is a new teacher at the S. T. School, his alma mater, run by a kind, dedicated, and apparently nameless Principal (Kader Khan). I think he teaches history, but it's hard to tell, because he spends most of the time dealing with the antics of his unruly students. There are a lot of them, but only two are really important: Jaya (Karisma Kapoor) and Shagun (Shakti Kapoor). Jaya is brilliant, talented, and an incorrigible prankster, while Shagun is the absolute worst. He actually attended school with Ajay but kept getting held back far past the point of plausibility, and now he is a lazy, surly, deeply annoying adult who expects special treatment from his old classmate and is angry when he doesn't get it.
During a school picnic, Ajay manages to win over his students the old-fashioned way, by beating up a terrorist in front of them. (There's a whole terrorist subplot, but it's not that interesting and doesn't really become important until the climax.) However, Shagun was not on the picnic, since Ajay had suspended him for being the worst, so he is not won over. Shagun takes his revenge by planting fake love notes which are supposedly from Jaya, and when Ajay "returns" them to her, she thinks they are love notes from the teacher. Before the confusion can be cleared up, rumors are flying all around the school, and even some of the other teachers join in mocking and harassing the unfortunate pair.
Despite being the worst, Shagun eventually confesses, and Ajay and Jaya apologize to one another. She suggests that, since their reputations are already ruined, they should go ahead and get married. Ajay is rightly horrified by the idea (and so am I. What the hell, movie!) but Jaya is persistent. She leaves the hostel and takes a room next door to his house, and becomes such a nuisance that Ajay leaves home.
He comes back with his new wife, Saraswati (Juhi Chawla, finally!), a local orphan. He married Saraswati in a hurry, not realizing that she can't speak English, can't sing, can't cook, and can barely read; at the orphanage they taught her to just smile and say yes when her husband asks her something she doesn't understand, and Ajay is apparently bad at asking follow up questions. Fortunately for her, Jaya is there to teach her everything she needs to know, and the two women quickly become very close.
(As an aside, while she's poorly educated, Saraswati does seem to have a natural talent for the marital arts, since she and Ajay spend an awful lot of time canoodling. Like a lot of Bollywood movies of the time, the film cuts to a song whenever the characters are about to get frisky, but in Andaz the lyrics are unusually filthy; nothing actually explicit, but there are many references to trains and overheating engines and banging on the door.)
The plot makes it sound like Andaz is a psychological thriller about a man whose life is torn apart by a deranged stalker, but no. This is a romantic comedy. Jaya is presented as a wonderful, loving person who's determined to land her man, and as the perfect romantic partner for Ajay, if it weren't for that pesky "under-aged student" thing. Karisma Kapoor was twenty when this movie came out, but she's very clearly playing younger here, with glasses, pigtails, a breathy little girl voice, and some very short skirts. It's creepy.
But even setting aside the creep factor, the movie is a slog. The students are supposed to be charming scamps, but they come across as sadistic jerks. Every second that Shakti Kapoor is onscreen is excruciating. The terrorist subplot provides the occasional bit of dramatic relief, an escape from the oppressive comedy, but the action scenes are not that interesting and drag on too long.
And Juhi? She's fine. "Uneducated but spunky village belle" is a stock part that she plays really well, but I can see her play that part in better movies than this one.
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