Reception
The film premiered on 12 October 2007 in Mumbai and was released on the same day in North America. The film opened well as it was highly anticipated. However due to negative reviews as well as the competition it faced from the more successful Bhool Bhulaiya it became a box office dud in India. It was however more successful overseas.
In India, the film critically received a generally negative response, with reviewers criticising the repetitious and obsolete story line. Raja Sen of Rediff.com said the movie "takes us back to a kind of cinema we thought we were done with. Indian cinema threw off the dupatta just a little while ago; let's not shackle it back down". Taran Adarsh from indiaFM said it "stands on a shaky script and has all chances of slipping". Martin D'Souza of Glamsham.com noted, "this is a big letdown" from the director of the well-received Parineeta. The Hindustan Times wrote that, "This one comes out smelling of mothballs, like a wedding dress stored for decades in an attic trunk. Not surprising, since the plot is vintage 1977 from Aaina, and the 1995 award winning Marathi film Doghi" (made by Sumitra Bhave with Uttara Baokar, Sadashiv Amrapurkar, Sonali Kulkarni and Renuka Daftardar). Anupama Chopra found the film "a cauldron of wonderful cinematic talent, undone by half-baked writing".
Critical response in the United States to the film was more mixed. Frank Lovece of Film Journal International said that the film put "glossy Bollywood confection" in a historical context, calling it a "good old-fashioned, Douglas Sirk-style women's weepie ... so universal you could substitute Joan Crawford for Rani Mukerji and New York City for Mumbai". Maitland McDonagh of TV Guide found the film "breaks no new ground but is solidly entertaining" while David Chute of L.A. Weekly said, "The movie works so hard to transform its shocking subject into acceptable material for middlebrow melodrama that it never deals with it". Rachel Saltz of the New York Times termed the film, "A fascinating blend of musical, melodrama and feminist fairy tale".
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