Jaanisaar: Visual treat without soul

Staring: Pernia Quereshi, Imran Abbas, Muzaffar Ali, Carl Wharton, Dilip Tahil & Beena Kak.
Rated: 4.5/10
 
First and foremost: This film should not have been compared with Umrao Jaan — at all! The comparison is thoroughly mismatched and it does Jaanisaar in more than anything else.Umrao Jaan was a classic, this one a greedy wannabe, affected, out of sync with our times and totally sedentary in portraying the Awadhi days of British Raaj. 
 
Umaro Jaan had the heartbeat of Rekha and the polish of Farooque Shaikh. Jaanisaar has a dead faced Pernia Quereshi who debuts under the wrap of dark lights and sepia shades more to hide her newness of acting than to enhance the ambience of this period drama. Imran Abbas is surely a beef cake but lacks the nazaakat and nafasat of the nawabi culture. Together, they speak the lyrical language of Urdu with an accent that gives away their modernness. 
 
Amid all this mismatch, there is a story of a minor battle of independence which is a neither here nor there account of those faceless freedom fighters who fight a perverted viceroy with a sex and kill kink and soon you have a wishy-washy romance buried in an inept freedom struggle.But away from all these loopholes, you will nevertheless be taken in by the visual treat that the Alis bring to you and the absolutely stunning costumes that they stitch up. At least this is what Pernia, the fashion entrepreneur gets it right. For the modern audience, the film is too retro to handle, especially with its half-baked script. For those in their 40s and above, the ghazals, the Urdu and the era recreation may give some reasons to sit through. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, August 9, 2015

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