Neal ‘N’ Nikki, at last count, didn’t have 21 kisses. But the one big kiss that has gone unnoticed recently is in last Friday’s release, Apoorva Lakhia’s, Ek Ajnabee.
If you have watched the film, think back to the climax — the scene after Suryaveer (Amitabh Bachchan) hands over kidnapped child, Anamika (Rucha Vaidya), to her mother Nikasha (Parizaad Zorabian).
The next few scenes focus on the cigar-chomping Wang (Raj Zutshi) and a Thai actor called Yuth — his brother in the film. Within minutes, Wang plants a kiss on Yuth’s lips, before shooting him dead, and mouths the lines “A coward born is a coward dead. Kamzor log nahin pasand!�
Hollywood, tweaked
Raj Zutshi’s character, Wang, homes in on victim Yuth, as Suryaveer (Amitabh Bachchan looks on)
Ek Ajnabee is the desi version of Denzel Washington-Dakota Fanning-starrer Man on Fire. But Lakhia claims the kissing scene wasn’t there in the original. “This scene and the climax of the film is entirely mine; that’s original,� he claims.
This macho liplock, as Lakhia describes it, has been done in true Mafiosi tradition. “It was my idea to incorporate the man-to-man smooch. I wanted an old Italian way to say adieu, before killing someone,� says the director.
Adds Lakhia, “The killer would plant a kiss on the victim; this is the kiss of death.�
Script call
Did Zutshi have any reservations enacting the scene? “Not at all,� says the director. When asked how it felt kissing on screen, he laughed out loud.
“Emraan Hashmi is one lucky guy; he gets to kiss in each film of his.� But Zutshi had to kiss a man…. Zutshi chuckles even louder. “When Apoorva told me about the kissing scene, my first reaction was to laugh aloud. The idea just came spontaneously, and I jumped at it. It was the need of the script.�
The actor says the kissing shot took as many retakes as it would for any scene to satisfy a director. And how many times did he have to do it during the rehearsals? “Rehearsals happen when a man has to smooch a woman on screen. Certainly not for a man-to-man kiss. It was all done during the shot.�
I did good!
Amitabh and Zutshi in Ek Ajnabee
Zutshi further adds. “After the kiss, the Thai actor gave me a slip of paper, with his phone number! Jokes apart, I did not think too much about the scene.�
Nor has any family member or friend come up to him and told him anything about his liplock yet. But Zutshi thinks he got it just right, including the tilt of the head.
Is this Zutshi’s first on-screen kiss? “Certainly the first in recorded history,� he quips. Would he do it again? “You think anyone would give me a role which required me to kiss? Why not!� The actor will next be seen in John Matthew Mathan’s Shikhar, Abbas-Mustan’s 36 China Town and Sanjay Gupta’s Zinda.
source:mid-day
