Team FC
Like most kids my age, I was a hardcore Shah Rukh Khan fan. He was at the peak of his powers. I had seen him in almost every avatar by then – an average Joe, a psychotic villain, a nervy gangster and most recently, a charming romantic hero. But he was yet to do an out-and-out comedy.
I watched Duplicate at the local drive-in theater with my parents and friends. I could sense the energy around me nosedive. Nobody was impressed. Some of them looked at me quizzically, as if I had made the film. But it might have also been because I was the only one laughing – and reacting.
Over the course of my Bollywood-watching years, I started to figure out my adolescent fondness for Duplicate. I was never quite able to express that I was not laughing with the film. I was laughing at a film that wanted to be laughed at – which, in 1998, was a new kind of comic experience.
It was essentially a Farah Khan film directed by Mahesh Bhatt. When someone as fluent as Shah Rukh Khan acts in a comedy, he isn't performing comedy – he's spoofing melodrama.