Ghajini (2008 film)

Plot

Sunita, a medical student, is investigating the anterograde amnesia case of Sanjay Singhania, the chairman of Air Voice, an infamous telecommunications company. Sunita does her investigation against her professor Dr. Debkumar Mitra's wishes as Sanjay is under criminal investigation. Sanjay, who loses his memory every 15 minutes, uses a system of photographs, notes, and tattoos on his body to recover his memory and remember his mission of avenging the murder of his fiancée Kalpana Shetty, who was killed by Ghajini Dharmatma, a kingpin and a notable socialite in Mumbai.

Meanwhile, Inspector Arjun Yadav of Mumbai Police investigates a recent murder committed by Sanjay of one of Ghajini's men at his house. He tracks Sanjay to his apartment and sneaks inside, knocking him unconscious and tying him to the chair he was sitting on. While searching his apartment, he finds a diary in his drawer and begins to read it. Arjun learns that Sanjay, a successful entrepreneur and second generation businessman, met Kalpana, a struggling model after planning to install an advertising billboard for his company above her apartment. When his agents approach Kalpana about it, her boss misinterprets it as a romantic advance and encourages her to accept it. It is later revealed that the company already found out that not only the apartment was on rent but she also didn't pay the rent for two months. However, Kalpana decides to pose as Sanjay's girlfriend, after seeing that the false story elevates her influence at work. After learning about the false rumor from local tabloids, Sanjay angrily plans to confront Kalpana. On the drive to her workplace, his convoy of cars is stuck in traffic. In that moment, Sanjay witnesses a young woman help a bunch of disabled school girls cross a ditch to enter a museum they had come to visit. He is deeply moved by her kindness. When he finally arrives at the ad company, he discovers that this kind-hearted woman is, in fact, Kalpana. Her cheerful personality, humor, and altruism capture his attention, and he decides to keep his identity a secret. Posing as a struggling model named Sachin Chauhan, he spends time with Kalpana as an ordinary man, and the two fall deeply in love. The diary ends with Sanjay proposing to Kalpana on New Year's Eve. With him deciding to reveal his true identity if she accepts, but to walk away as Sachin if she doesn't.

In the present, Arjun tries to interrogate an unconscious Sanjay about the events after the first diary to no avail. After searching his drawers again, he finds a second diary. As soon as he starts reading it, Sanjay suddenly regains consciousness, breaks free of his holds in a fit of rage and viciously attacks Arjun, tying him up and locking him in a cupboard. He later tracks down Ghajini to Sunita's college function where Ghajini is the guest of honor as the CEO of GD Pharmaceuticals, a major donor of the college. Sanjay, who is present in the audience, takes pictures of Ghajini as part of his plan to kill him. However, Sanjay mistakenly attacks and kills one of Ghajini's goons in the parking lot as Ghajini asked him to attend the phone call he received from Sanjay. Sanjay realizes his mistake and flees the scene as Ghajini and his men approach the parking lot. Ghajini is perplexed and fails to recollect the incident after trying to get information from the dying man. He decides to find and kill his enemies from two years ago one by one, but Sanjay is not among them.

Meanwhile, Sunita goes to meet Sanjay at his apartment after initially meeting him at her college. After realizing that the door is unlocked and there is no one in the apartment, she begins searching through Sanjay's belongings and finds photographs of the people he had murdered along with a photograph of Ghajini he took at the college function as well as the two diaries that Arjun found earlier. While further investigating, she accidentally opens the door of a cupboard and finds Arjun tied up, beaten and bound, and learns of Sanjay's murder plot. Arjun warns her to get out of the apartment as quickly as possible as Sanjay is unstable and can potentially hurt them. As they are discussing this, Sanjay suddenly arrives and questions who they are. Arjun quickly makes a run out of the apartment and Sanjay begins to follow him with Sunita following the two men. As the two men chase each other through crowded streets, Arjun is hit by a bus, and is killed instantly. Sunita makes her escape by distracting Sanjay into a fight with some local thugs in a mall.

Sunita visits Ghajini while he is contemplating about the mysterious killer, provides him with the photos of the men Sanjay had murdered along with his identity and informs him that Sanjay is coming after him. Back in her hostel, Sunita realizes that Sanjay has a photo of her which she had him take during their first meeting so he remembered who she was. When Sunita calls Ghajini to recover the photo, she inadvertently speaks to Sanjay who had broken into Ghajini's house. Sanjay asks for her address, arrives at her dormitory and attacks her. Sunita traps him in the lift of the hostel by cutting off the power supply and alerts the hostel staff who call the police. The police arrests Sanjay and sedates him to keep him under control. As the police try to figure out about the identity of the man they have arrested, they decide to call the phone numbers tattooed on his body. One of the number is of Ghajini, who is informed by the police about Sanjay and his belongings. He visits the police station and poses as Sanjay's friend learning about the circumstances of his capture. He informs the police of Sanjay's identity and his medical condition. Shortly after, Sanjay's employees and doctor arrive at the police station and take him home. After they leave, Ghajini breaks into Sanjay's apartment with his men and decides to take advantage of his condition, destroying his pictures, notes and equipment and cover his tattoos so he doesn't remember anything about the past, instead of killing him as it would complicate matters with the police.

Back at her dormitory, a shaken Sunita remembers the diaries she took from Sanjay's apartment. She reads both diaries and learns about Sanjay's background and about Kalpana. In the second diary, Kalpana accepts the proposal on the condition that she purchase three Ambassador cars before she gets married; her father owned his own travel company as well as three Ambassador cars, before he got scammed by his brother-in-law. At work the following day, Sanjay is asked by his manager Pankaj Shroff whether he had revealed his true identity to Kalpana to which he responds that he prefers meeting Kalpana in his ordinary guy facade and delays telling the truth to Kalpana because of her conditions for marriage. He feared that if he told her his true identity, then she would be determined to become even richer than him and the marriage won't happen. He also hands the keys of a brand new flat to Shroff which he had bought as a gift for Kalpana, assigning the responsibility of somehow handing over the flat to her. Shortly after in a meeting with Kalpana, Sanjay learns that she had bought one Ambassador car after selling some jewelry she had saved for her marriage.

Air Voice is granted a license that gives the company exclusive rights to route calls from India to the UK. A feat that comes with a prerequisite trip to the UK for ten days. As Sanjay is celebrating this good news, Kalpana calls him to tell him the good news that she had won a brand new flat in a lucky draw organized by Air Voice (in reality, it was Shroff's idea to hand over the flat to her). Kalpana asks Sanjay to meet her at her new apartment. When he arrives, Kalpana brings a cement pad and has them imprint their foot impressions on it to store it as a memoir of their first step in her new apartment. Still keeping up his facade, Sanjay lies to Kalpana that he has to urgently go to his village to see his ailing mother, and sell a piece of inherited land on his name in the village for her medical treatment. Kalpana is saddened by this sudden revelation and asks him to come back earlier if possible as she did not have a good feeling about it. Moments before he departs for the UK, Kalpana calls him late at night, and gives him 135,000 Rupees for his mother's treatment after selling the car she wanted so much in order to prevent him from losing his family land. This grand, unexpected display of thoughtfulness and considerate altruism leaves Sanjay shocked and sober, cementing his love, conviction and commitment to Kalpana. That is the point where the second diary ended. Perplexed, Sunita sets out with her friend to find the remaining pieces of Sanjay and Kalpana's story.

After some research, Sunita eventually learns that Kalpana travelled to Goa by train for an ad shoot. In the train, she stumbled across and freed a group of girls from a sex and organ trafficking ring organized by a ruthless thug known as Ghajini Dharmatma. The story of the rescue of the girls makes the news and triggers a nationwide hunt by the police who start to dismantle the operations. On the train ride back to Mumbai with the girls, Sanjay calls her to check up on her and she tells him about the experience. Relieved that she is fine, he admits that he admires her kind heartedness and true altruism. He lightly alludes to his secret without giving anything away but promises to reveal more when he comes back.

Back in Mumbai, Kalpana is informed by a female constable at the police hospital that two of the twenty five girls she has brought in for treatment went missing. Perplexed, Kalpana travels to the police hospital and confronts the guard about the two missing girls. As they are arguing, Ghajini arrives with his men and confronts Kalpana confessing to killing the missing girls and dumping their bodies in the river because they named him to the police. Kalpana is disgusted by this, accuses him to be part of the system which makes society unsafe for women and leaves. This enrages Ghajini and he plans to kill Kalpana. Later that night when Kalpana arrives back at her apartment, the same constable calls Kalpana and informs her that Ghajini has set out to kill her and his henchmen are hiding inside her apartment. She advises Kalpana not to go home but it's too late as she is already home. Ghajini's goons break inside her apartment and begin to look for her while she hid inside a cupboard. That same night, Sanjay arrives from London to meet his fiancée. He rings the door bell and knocks but leaves after getting no answer. A petrified Kalpana calls Sanjay but he has forgotten his phone in his car. When Sanjay gets in his car to leave, he discovers Kalpana's missed calls on his phone. He calls Kalpana and the ringtone of her cellphone points her location to Ghajini's goons as they are leaving the apartment after presuming that Kalpana escaped through an alternate exit. As Sanjay rushes back to her apartment after the call is suddenly disconnected, he finds Kalpana stabbed by the goons. As he is tending to her, Ghajini arrives from behind and hits Sanjay in the head with an iron rod before killing Kalpana with the same rod in front of him and knocks him out with another shot to the head with the rod, which results in a brain injury.

After learning of this shocking truth, Sunita locates Sanjay in a hospital and tells him about his past, reminding him of Kalpana's murder and giving him his diaries to read. He flies into a furious and heartbroken rage. He demands to speak to Ghajini and talks to him through Sunita's cellphone, telling him that he is coming for him. Sunita helps him track Ghajini to his company. But they find that he is already leaving the premises. They tail his car to a slum area and Sanjay, after identifying Ghajini with the help of Sunita immediately goes after him, killing his men who get in his way. Eventually, he finds Ghajini and begins to viciously attack him but he manages to escape. Sunita follows him through the area to make sure he was okay. Meanwhile after getting rid of more of Ghajini's men, Sanjay has a memory loss fit while searching for Ghajini, he locates him in a catacomb where he is hiding from him. But as soon as he realizes that he doesn't recognize him, he takes advantage of the situation and stabs Sanjay with an iron rod after Sunita who followed him there alerts Sanjay. After stabbing Sanjay, he knocks Sunita unconscious and taunts Sanjay with the grisly tale of how he murdered Kalpana. As Ghajini is about to make Sanjay relive the experience by preparing to kill Sunita in the same way with an iron rod, Sanjay recovers the memory of Kalpana and fights back, with an anger fueled strength. He kills Ghajini with an iron rod, in the same way that he killed Kalpana, thus avenging her murder.

Six months later, Sanjay returns to his office as chairman of Air Voice and is volunteering at an orphanage named after Kalpana. Sunita arrives at the orphanage and gifts him the cement pad with Sanjay and Kalpana's foot impressions when they first set foot in Kalpana's apartment after it was gifted to her. In the ending moments of the movie, Sanjay feels Kalpana beside him as the screen pans out to a fading sunset.

Cast

• Aamir Khan as Sanjay Singhania / Sachin Chauhan
• Asin as Kalpana Shetty
• Jiah Khan as Sunita Kalantri
• Pradeep Rawat as Ghajini Dharmatma
• Riyaz Khan as Inspector Arjun Yadav (voiceover by Rajesh Khattar)
• Khalid Siddiqui as Pankaj Shroff, Sanjay's private assistant and an Air Voice manager
• Tinnu Anand as Satveer Kohli, Kalpana's boss
• Sai Tamhankar as Amrita Kashyap, Sunita's friend
• Supreeth Reddy as Ghajini's henchman
• Mahendra Ghule as Ghajini's henchman
• Vibha Chibber as Havaldar Vaijayanti
• Sunil Grover as Sampat, a model who is being trained as the fake Sanjay Singhania
• Rajendran as Ghajini's henchman (uncredited)
• Firdausi Jussawalla as Dr. Peston Wadia
• Sonal Sehgal as ad model

Cameo appearance

• Anjum Rajabali as Dr. Debkumar Mitra, Sunita's professor

Production

Development

Post the massive success of Ghajini, Murugadoss expressed interest in remaking the film with Salman Khan, but Pradeep Rawat felt like Aamir Khan might gel with Murugadoss better. It was rumoured earlier that the film was titled Kajri. It is a remake of the Tamil film, Ghajini (2005). Aamir Khan, who had never before worked in a remake film in his career, was initially hesitant to do the film, but was convinced by Suriya, the original star of the Tamil Ghajini, who told him he was "the only one who could do justice to the character." Suriya was a fan of Khan, and had some involvement in the film's development, discussing minute details with Khan for two years during the film's development.

Casting

Priyanka Chopra was offered the role of Kalpana, but was later replaced by Asin, who reprised her role from the original Tamil film.

Khan was involved in the film's creative writing process, deciding what should remain from the original Tamil Ghajini and what changes should be made. Murugadoss revealed that the altered climax of the film was rewritten by Khan. According to Murugadoss:

Influences

Murdagoss's original 2005 Tamil version of Ghajini was inspired by the American film Memento (2000), which itself was adapted from the short story "Memento Mori". The film stars Guy Pearce as Leonard Shelby, a former insurance fraud investigator searching for the man he believes raped and killed his wife during a burglary. Leonard suffers from anterograde amnesia, which he contracted from severe head trauma during the attack on his wife. Certain concepts like writing notes behind instant Polaroid photographs and tattooing facts on his body are also similar. According to Khan, "Ghajini is not a remake or even slightly inspired by Memento, but rather a remake of the Tamil film, Ghajini". However, he acknowledged that Murgadoss's original Tamil film was at least partly inspired by Memento, stating, "Murgadoss had heard about a film called Memento and the concept had really fascinated him. Without having seen the film he went ahead and wrote his own version of the script and screenplay. Having finished his script, he then saw Memento, found it very different from what he had written, and went ahead and made Ghajini."

The CGI opening brain sequence was inspired by the 1999 film Fight Club by David Fincher. This sequence was also used in the Tamil version of the film.

The film's title is a reference to Mahmud of Ghazni, the tenth-century Sultan of the Ghaznavid Empire whose name is pronounced "Ghajini" in Tamil. Several comical scenes in the film are similar to Happy Go Lovely (1951).

Filming

Shooting started in Chennai in May 2007. Climax was shot in Old City, Hyderabad. Other filming locations included Bangalore, Cape Town in South Africa, the Deadpan Desert in Namibia and Mumbai. Aamir Khan had spent a year working out at the gym, training for his role. This film marked the Bollywood debut for Asin. The film's production budget was .

Release

Ghajini was released on 25 December 2008 with an estimated 1,500 prints worldwide, including 1,200 prints (digital and analogue versions) in the domestic market, making it the largest Bollywood release at that time. The domestic rights were sold to Geetha Arts for , while satellite, overseas and home media rights were sold at a total of , breaking the records of Shah Rukh Khan's film ''Om Shanti Om'''s .

The overseas distributors, Reliance Entertainment released the film with 300 prints in 22 countries, including 112 prints in the US and Canada, 65 prints in the UK and 36 prints in the UAE. Ghajini was also released in Norway, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. It had around 650 paid previews which fetched it around .

Home media

The two-disc collector's edition DVD was manufactured by Big Home Video and distributed by international distributor, Adlabs Films Ltd. (now Reliance MediaWorks) on 13 March 2009.

Video games

Main article: Ghajini – The Game

A PC video game based on the film was manufactured and produced by FXLabs Studios Pvt Ltd and Geetha Arts, and marketed and distributed by Eros Home Entertainment: Ghajini – The Game. It is a third-person action game consisting of five levels of play; here the player controlled the protagonist Sanjay to accomplish missions using martial arts, weapons, and artefacts. It was hailed as India's first true 3D PC game with an MSRP of US$14.99. Although never officially rated, the distributor recommends that 15+ year old players partake in the game.

Mobile video games were also released by Indiagames based on the film including Ghajini The Game and Ghajini Ultimate Workout.

Controversy

Director A. R. Murugadoss was arrested shortly before the film's completion. According to Salem Chandrasekhar, the producer of the Tamil original, he had not bought the rights to remake the film in Hindi.

Anil Kapoor sarcastically mentioned that the director of the original film, Memento (2000) Christopher Nolan, from which Murugadoss based-off story, was very upset, he told Anil "I have heard that one of my films has been copied. I (Kapoor) said Ghajini. He was very upset about it. I told Aamir also. I told (Nolan) the film had just been released over there and is a big success. (He then said) Yeah, no money, no credit, no nothing.”

Reception

Critical response

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film received an approval rating of 54% based on 13 reviews, with an average rating of 5.90/10.

Rajeev Masand of CNN IBN wrote "Ghajini isn't a particularly good film, but entertainment it delivers by the bucketful." Martin D'Souza of Bollywood Trade News Network notes its flaws in the script, while praising the action sequences. Taran Adarsh of Bollywood Hungama remarked that the movie "is a winner all the way". Nikhat Kazmi of The Times of India praised the performance by Aamir Khan as its high point. Zee News described Aamir's performance as his best to date.

Sukanya Verma of Rediff describes the film as "a sleek album of dark memories, which are terrifying to relive and shattering to experience". Noyon Jyoti Parasara of AOL India said, "Most comparisons often point out that a remake is not as worthy.Ghajini however succeeds when it is compared to the Tamil version directed by the same director." Anupama Chopra of NDTV said "Ghajini isn't a great film or even a very good one but I recommend that you see it. It is, as we used to say in the old days, paisa vasool. Kaveree Bamzai of India Today said that "This is brutality, choreographed by a poet, and therefore that much more compelling."

Gaurav Malani of India Times criticises its length while praising the performance of the cast. Raja Sen of Rediff criticised the performance of Asin while concluding, "overwhelming feeling is one of regret". Shubhra Gupta of Express India concluded that Ghajini is too long, too violent, and criticised Jiah Khan's acting and dancing skills, but praised the performances of Aamir Khan and Asin. Hindustan Times wrote "You'd like to give Ghajini a long-term memory loss. Kya, kyon, kahan? Murugadoss.? Aamir? Asin? Who? Got to jog my memory... maybe after 15 minutes."

Box office

Ghajini released worldwide on 25 December 2008, on Christmas Day. The film became the first-ever Bollywood film to open in double digits, collecting ₹102 million ($1.27 million) on its opening day, followed by ₹118 million ($1.47 million), ₹102.5 million ($1.28 million) and ₹87.5 million ($1.09 million), taking its four-day opening weekend collection to ₹410 million ($5.13 million). The film went past ₹1 billion ($12.5 million) domestically in its fourth week, thus becoming the first ever Bollywood film to cross ₹100 crore net domestically. It was the first Bollywood film to enter the 100 crore club.

Ghajini became the highest-grossing Indian film ever at the time, and was declared an "All Time Blockbuster". Its record was surpassed a year later by another Aamir Khan film, 3 Idiots (2009).

Soundtrack

The film has six songs, including two remixes, composed by A. R. Rahman and with lyrics penned by Prasoon Joshi.

Reception

Bollywood Hungama wrote, "The music of Ghajini is all set to make waves way into 2009 after the Christmas release of the film. When 'best of the best' list would be compiled at the year end, it would be hard to ignore Ghajini." Rediff.com gave it the highest possible rating of five stars with the reviewer praising Rahman saying, "This could just be one of his finest albums ever. Not just are the tracks great, but each one segues into the next with perfect unpredictability." According to the Indian trade website Box Office India, the soundtrack album sold about 1.9million units, making it the year's best selling Bollywood music soundtrack album.

Awards and nominations

References

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