Film Review: Chance Pe Dance

A chance taken in vain

Director: Ken Ghosh
Starring: Shahid Kapoor, Genelia D'Souza
Stars: **




Director Ken Ghosh is best known for some of the wacky music videos he made in the 90s - one of them being the quirky Roop Tera Mastana remix where you had a housewife dancing with a broom in hand. Ghosh has a sense of the ludicrous, which adds freshness to his subject. But beyond that, the story of Chance Pe Dance is so serviceable and basic; it makes the film look like an extended music video. You can well forget things like a plot and climax.

Clearly, this is a collaboration of convenience for Shahid Kapoor and Ghosh who've come together for Ishq-Vishq and Fida earlier. Ghosh probably got the idea after the talent-hunt show he judged on television a few years ago. Dance has been incorporated into the theme so that Shahid can exhibit his skills and wonderfully toned body. Both Shahid and Ghosh however, have nothing new to offer.

Shahid plays Sameer, a struggling actor who finds his hopes getting dashed constantly. He gets his chance when a big producer-director, Rajeev Sharma (a hammy Mohnish Behl) sees him dancing at a club and offers to launch him. But commercial interests prompt the director to change his mind and he decides to go for a nation-wide talent-hunt show instead. This leaves Sameer broke enough to use his car as make-shift home and teach dancing at a school. There's a heavy sense of déjà vu in this story in which our struggler, after a few more hiccups, easily wins the contest and walks down the red carpet to his premiere in style with his lady-love (Genelia).
The ending of this film is so abrupt and sudden that one wonders if producers UTV pulled the plug on the film, asking the maker to wrap up things. Even otherwise, there is scant novelty to this subject. The wonderful Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon, the largely overlooked Kunal Khemu starrer Superstar and last year's Luck By Chance all offered keen insights into the workings of the film industry and poignantly captured the journey of their protagonists. Chance Pe Dance comes too late in the day and offers a token glimpse into the field.

Where it perhaps succeeds is in portraying the daily grind of a man trying to make it big in the city. Sameer keeps his bread under the iron to toast it. The portions where he lives in his car and hurriedly uses the school washroom in the mornings everyday gives an authentic sense of a struggle. With a subject such as this however, with no plot or real conflicts, the film ultimately turns out way too regular and pointless.

The film could have still been redeemable if it had a good enough music score. But Adnam Sami's music for Chance Pe Dance is utterly insipid. The electronic-techno music does nothing for the film.
A word on the dance – the world knows that Shahid is a great dancer, but he focuses so enormously on getting his moves perfect that the dancing doesn't appear too much fun. Strangely, in spite of being superior dancers, somehow neither Shahid nor Hrithik Roshan appear half as exciting as Govinda or Mithun. Could it be because they are too consumed in looking at dance as a serious craft, while the others just let themselves go?

Chance Pe Dance has a few fun moments, but in totality, it is mostly just an excuse of a film.

-Sandhya Iyer