Customer Reviews

Umrao Jaan

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Aishwarya Rai is exquisite as Umrao Jaan. This is a beautiful film,
similar in some ways to "Memoirs of a Geisha", telling the life story
of this famous courtesan and poet, and her journey of love, betrayal,
and forgiveness.
The music and dance sequences are the very best I have seen in Bollywood,
or anywhere for that matter---traditional dance, truly beautiful and
authentic music.
Gorgeous clothes, jewelry, people, locations, music, dance and story.
Abishek Bachchan is magnificent as Umrao Jaan's lover. The scenes where
their eyes first meet are electric! The scene where she first dances for
him is absolutely riveting and beautiful.
You will fall in love with this movie -- forever.

I was going to watch half this evening and catch the rest tomorrow, but it was the equivalent of a book you can't put down. Visually magnificent (my hearing is quite poor in my old age, so that's mostly what I could appreciate). I now understand why some consider Aishwarya Rai to be the most beautiful woman in the world (and considering how knock-you-down beautiful some Indian actresses are, that's saying something).
She (Amiran-Umrao) proves that though sometimes life is full of disappointments, that doesn't mean you have to be one of them yourself; sometimes life is cruel, but that doesn't mean you have to become evil. Maybe the only way you can win sometimes, is to not give in and let the worst things that happen to you determine what you become in your heart.
I don't know if it proves that great artists (singers and dancers in this case) have to suffer greatly to become great. Maybe it's like heroes: it takes tragedies to bring them out. The life depicted here is certainly tragic in the classical sense, but there is some kind of noble victory turning it to poetry of word, melody, and motion the way she does instead of "going postal." It's the antithesis of the more common revenge story.

This one is a thing of beauty in several big ways. I'll even forgive them for their very one-sided protrayal of British violence in the Sepoy Mutiny (the rebels were at least as guilty of atrocities, and set the mood from the beginning -- plenty of shame and blame all around), but at least that part was short and moved on soon.
Bottom line: It is one to mull over and remember.
By the way, if the name of the important historical city of "Lucknow" looks odd (as in too British), it's because a truer transliteration of the Hindi would be "Lakhnao."