Trying hard to like Leena Yadav's debut film 'Shabd', you sit thru the entire feature in eager anticipation of a/the/any magic moment. But ...
Although the premise was novel, the buildup was not. One sex scene does not compensate for the lack of sexual chemistry between the leading pair. The Booker-prize winning author is trying so hard to come up with an authentic story for his next novel that he goes and casts his own wife as her rebellious alter-ego, easily falling for the 'forbidden fruit'. Shaukat Vashist requests, goads, almost forces his wife Antara to initiate an illicit relationship to help him craft a leading character in his next novel. When the 'truth' becomes stranger than his bookish 'fiction', and Antara meets and eventually falls for a dashing (yea, no less) young colleague, Mr Novelist is quite unable to handle it. But he saves the best, a one-page ending, for last.
We are not led to believe that the entire thing is the writer's fertile imagination gone awry. Evidently Yash's character is real (witness the college peon asking Shaukat if he had any message for Yash, etc) and so is the romance that ensues between Yash and the writer's wife Antra. In the end, it appears the writer of "Shabd" was herself so confused about the interactions between her characters (there were only 3!) that she couldn't figure out how to end the characters or the movie!! The performance by Sanjay Dutt was the saving grace of this film. Zayed Khan is miscast as the college professor and lacks acting skills. Aish tries hard but her dialogs are so mushy; could have used some zing.
The writer of this review believes that the writer of this movie should have worked harder on the writer in her movie.
