Denver’s an odd place for a Bollywood goddess, but that’s where Madhuri Dixit, India’s biggest female star of the 1990s, has been leading a Clark Kent-type life, married and raising children. Ms. Dixit has been gone from the screen for five years, long enough for a new crop of stars to emerge and for “Aaja Nachle,” her modest new film, to be a comeback vehicle.
For Ms. Dixit, 40, really to come back, however, Hindi cinema will have to figure out what kind of heroine a middle-aged woman can be. “Aaja,” directed by Anil Mehta, tries but doesn’t quite know what to do with Ms. Dixit, a wonderful dancer, who plays Dia, a choreographer living in New York. She returns to her hometown in India and tries to save a theater that developers want to replace with a mall by putting on a show.
The questions in Dia’s life are interesting (and echo those in Ms. Dixit’s) — Where does she fit in Indian society? What kind of artist will she be? — but Jaideep Sahni’s screenplay doesn’t fully address or dramatize them. Worse, the film denies Dia, who is divorced with a daughter, a love life. All her passion goes into the show she’s staging and into playing cheerleader to a budding romance between its leads.
Of course the filmmakers can’t erase Ms. Dixit’s considerable sex appeal. To do that they would have to keep her from dancing, and this is Bollywood, so dance she does. In doing so, Ms. Dixit reminds us that whatever “it” is, she’s still got it. Now stories will have to be found that can show it off.
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