Love tales of the extremist kind amid extreme controversies - the Bhatt style of telling stories. Fact meets fiction in a bold story that goes behind the scenes of the filthy world of the abrasive film industry.

Woh Lamhe falls in the same pile of bio/fiction films as Arth and Phir Teri Kahani Yaad Aayi, Bhatt’s previous attempts at depicting late Parveen Babi’s horrifying life and his popular love affair with her back in the day. While the other two films had only a few parts that recreated her life and their affair, director Mohit Suri digs deep to find answers to the heart-wrenching story of Parveen’s life in Woh Lamhe.

While Shiney plays Mahesh (Aditya Garewal), Kangana plays Parveen (Sana Azim) and Woh Lamhe captures the essence of an illness that gripped Parveen for most of her film career – schizophrenia and its effects on the ones close to her.

Paranoiac hallucinations and surreal belief in an imaginary world are the “pillars” of Sana Azim’s downfall in her personal and professional life. An ongoing pattern for over 10 years is discovered only once she reaches tall heights of fame and is left with nothing more than money, glamour and recognition; loneliness of an obvious kind leaves a void in her over-occupied life. She finds solace in Aditya, a struggling filmmaker, someone who refutes her recognition as a mere sellout tactic. She leaves home and her long-term abusive boyfriend, played by new comer Abbas. Aditya’s dream film finally materializes and...

Sana agrees to be the lead actress in his film. His film is a big hit and almost unknowingly Aditya finds himself in love with Sana, who he had imagined only to be a ladder to smell the flavour of sweet success.

Can love be escaped? Can you run away from loving someone who is mentally ill? Is it fair to abandon the one you love to live a comfortable life? Woh Lamhe isn’t about doing what is right, but in fact it shows how love is only about the heart and how your life gets strongly ruled by impulses and instincts when it is for real, after which, there is no escaping your responsibilities. When Aditya realizes that Sana’s “friend”, Rani is an imaginary person created only in her mind, he realizes just how grave her condition is becoming and a certain wave of responsibility washes over him. He “kidnaps” her from the hospital where she was due to get electric shocks, a treatment he stoutly disagreed with and instead flees her to Goa where she is treated at home with love and medicinal treatment, both. But eventually, Sana is turning to be a threat to Aditya’s life as her illness fluctuates between good and bad days; Sana decides to leave him and they last meet at the hospital on her death bed.

The hype that surrounded the film prior to its release may have caused the comparison to the actors to real life people (Mahesh and Parveen) but...

the movie is at large is a cheap imitation of what may have been one of the most grueling segments of Parveen’s life. Parts of the movie are fictitious, in order to weave a good story. Her hallucinations of imaginary people and the constant paranoia and fear of someone wanting to kill her were eating her up alive, but its spooky and haunting representation by the Bhatt camp was obviously a turn off.

Shiney holds the entire film or his wonderfully built broad shoulders, and his emotions and the intensity of love, passion, ambivalence all come forth great on his beautiful visage. You begin to empathize with him for the kind of condition he is caught between and you cringe at the sight of him choosing his love over his freshly taken off career, but you are proud at his courage to take on something most would have shunned. Mohit Suri has adapted a rather easy pattern to portray an extremist character, and Kangana, like in Gangster, is again shown like a reclusive waif roaming the streets at night (in skimpy attire) without much direction in mind. He should have adopted a different strategy in terms of sketching the characters, in order to lessen the comparison between his previous release and his new bio/fiction pic. Training Kangana for better dialogue delivery, which wanes the impact of a good script to a lousy effort, is a sheer must.

At the end of the day, the controversy is what gets the theatres...

buzzing; otherwise Woh Lamhe’s release would be regarded as just another Bhatt film. At the same time, you can’t clearly distinguish between fact and fiction and that can leave the audience a bit irritated.

Would Parveen have liked the idea of a film being made on something she considered so intimate and private? Would she have liked for the world to watch her “be” in a condition others could have only imagined? Did Mohit’s and Bhatt’s transliteration of her character do justice to who she really was? The film had a lot of potential but its multi-layered nuances were not exploited fully; it was clearly a half-evolved effort.