Tera Jadoo Chal Gaya (2000) features some of Bollywood's finest supporting actors, including local favorites Johny Lever and Farida Jalal, but casts two fresh faces as the leads, Abhishek Bachchan and Kirti Reddy. Abhishek, son of Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan, went on to have a long and fairly successful career, and Kirti Reddy . . . . did not.
But that's a story for another time. In this movie, Reddy plays Pooja Sinha, an advertising executive with a dream. Right now, Pooja works for stern but avuncular Mr. Oberoi (Kader Khan, doing his best Perry White impression), but one day she hopes to be a successful director. She has the support of her saintly mother (Farida Jalal) and her flamboyant best pal Maggi (Johny Lever), and she's going to need it, because she's constantly late and on the verge of being fired. Despite that, though, she manages to catch Oberoi in a particularly avuncular mood and gets permission to take three days off to attend a friend's wedding in Agra.
Agra is famous for two things; one is the Taj Mahal, and the other is Kabir . . . at least that's what Kabir (Bachchan) says. Kabir is street smart, charming, and a talented musician, but so far he's not really successful. When we meet him, he's filming the wedding preparations at the behest of his best friend/adoptive father Gaffoor (Paresh Rawal.) At least, that's what he's supposed to be doing; Kabir spends most of his time filming the mysterious and beautiful lady from Mumbai. Gaffoor is annoyed and takes over the filming, which frees Kabir up to flirt with Pooja. She finds him interesting, but he is absolutely smitten. Still, he never manages to say anything to her, and his grand romantic gesture as she's leaving is to ride a horse through the train station and . . . hand over a nice collection of photos from her trip as a souvenir.
Pooja returns to the office after four days and is handed termination papers; it turns out Oberoi was really serious about the three day thing. Maggi saves the day by spinning a quick story about Pooja's engagement, showing the boss a picture of Kabir and Pooja as evidence. Oberoi buys it, Pooja's job is safe, and everything is great. And that's when Oberoi's son Raj (Sanjay Sure) enters the picture.
Raj is everything Pooja has been saving herself for. He's rich, he's handsome, he's . . . that's basically it. Rich and handsome. (Pooja is not a deep person.) She immediately falls head over heels for Raj, but as far as everyone at work knows, she's taken. Maggi has another great idea - just tell Oberoi that Kabir has done something terrible, and he'll insist that she calls off the engagement. It's foolproof, as long as Kabir doesn't show up in Mumbai, and what are the odds of that?
Meanwhile, Kabir has been brooding about Pooja, and decides to travel to Mumbai to tell her how he feels. He's accompanied by Gaffooor and Gaffoor's wife Shyama (Himani Shivpuri), and after settling in to their temporary residence, he goes looking for Pooja and winds up saving Oberoi from a band of well-armed muggers, suffering a nasty head wound in the process. Oberoi realizes immediately that this must be Pooja's Kabir, so he takes the lad to the hospital and then drags Pooja there to see her fiance before she can manage to lie to him.
Kabir is thrilled about the sudden engagement. He's less thrilled when Pooja takes him aside and explains her situation. She tells him that it's not enough for him to just break the false engagement and go away; she has to look like the innocent victim, so the only way to fix the mess she created and allow her to pursue the man she just met is for Kabir to publicly humiliate himself and play the villainous buffoon so that Oberoi will insist she end the engagement. At this point it's clear that Pooja is actually kind of an awful person, but Kabir is a Bollywood hero in love, so he immediately commits to maximum self-sacrifice, and vows not to return home until all of her dreams have been fulfilled.
The noble self sacrifice sounds a bit extreme, but it's actually pretty typical late Nineties Bollywood stuff, and it plays out in the usual way. Will Kabir fulfill his vow? Of course, even if he has to become a major celebrity overnight in order to do it. Will Pooja realize her mistake and realize that Kabir loves her, and that she truly loves him back? Eventually! The difference is that usually the person making the noble self sacrifice is doing it by choice, without telling the person for whom they're sacrificing themself. Pooja asks Kabir to humiliate himself because she is too embarrassed to tell the truth, which makes her look terrible.
Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with a woman choosing one man over another, and Kabir would be the first to tell you that his feelings, however powerful, do not oblige her to do anything. He never even tells her how he feels, and she doesn't find out until her mother explains things. That's fine, and if she had sent Kabir on his way or even asked him to publicly break off the engagement, there would be no problem. But that's not what she does. She asks a man she's known for four days to burn down his own reputation in order to make her look good in front of a man she's just met, in order to clean up the mess that she made. It's really hard to sympathize with her plight.
Apart from that, Tera Jadoo Chal Gaya is fine. There are plenty of songs. The supporting cast is great. the leads are suitably attractive; it's far from Bachchan's best performance, but he's suitably charming, and Reddy does her very best to bring some pathos to the character she's been asked to play. Two people find love and everybody learns a valuable lesson, but I think the real lesson is "If your unrequited love with asks you to do something you're not comfortable with, it's okay to say no."
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