How similar are the two movies? Read on to find out....

Bollywood has had a long & “noble” tradition of ripping off foreign films & our filmmakers have never shied away in taking credit for what is never rightfully theirs. We don’t mean to pass any kind of judgment by taking a moral stance whether copying without permission is right or not but we find it amusing to compare how our “Desi” remakes stack up against the original. Hence the ‘Copycat’ section is our little endeavor to inform the audience about how original is the product they are watching….

This time we pit Mansoor Khan’s 1995 drama ‘Akele Hum Akele Tum’ against Robert Benton’s 1979 family drama ‘Kramer Vs Kramer’ & see how really similar & dissimilar are they.

*Caution, Spoilers Ahead*

Plots:

Kramer Vs Kramer:

Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep) walks out on her husband Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) & child Billy (Justin Henry) since she feels stifled in her marriage & wants to pursue her dreams. Ted is ill-equipped to be a full time single parent & still hold his job but through a lot of dedication & trial & error he manages to take care of Billy. After sometime has passed Joanna returns asking for Billy’s custody & the matter goes to court resulting in a bitter custody battle between the two parents.

Akele Hum Akele Tum:

Kiran (Manisha Koirala) & Rohit Kumar (Aamir Khan) are two aspiring singers madly in love with each other looking to make it big time in the world of Bollywood. Much against the wishes of her parents they decide to get married & start a family. After marriage with Rohit trying to catch his big break, Kiran has to put her own ambitions on the backburner since she decides to take care of the house. She feels stifled by her life as a housewife & one fine day walks out on Rohit & their young son Sunil (Adil). Rohit handicapped with his newfound responsibility of taking care of his son fails to fulfill his dreams of becoming a big musician, while Kiran free of any constraints hits it big time as an actress. After sometime Kiran comes around demanding Sunil’s custody & a bitter court battle ensues.

 

Now that you have a clearer idea of the larger picture & similarities in both the films we shall look at smaller instances which are nearly identical in the two.     

Scene to Scene:

We’ll look at scenes which have been recreated in ‘Akele Hum Akele Tum’ almost shot for shot, dialogue for dialogue from the original. Plus as they say a picture is worth a thousand words, you'll find pictures throughout comparing the two movies & giving you an idea how similar the two are.

In both the movies when the female protagonist walks out of the marriage she’s waiting for the husband to return from work so she can break the news to him & when he does she hands him stuff like a set of keys, some domestic bills & other things. In both the movies, the husband tries to stop her with an almost same reaction from the wife. After the wife leaves, the next door neighbor who’s been the wife’s confidant for sometime now drops in to check what’s happening & the husband blames her for the entire problem.    

The next day the husband is woken by the child inquiring as to the whereabouts of the mother. The father & child try to make breakfast with disastrous results & all the while the boy keeps on telling the father how the mother made breakfast.

Another scene has the father doing some paper work & the kid spills some soda each time with almost the same reactions from both the characters. The very next scene has the two buying household items & the kid instructing the father what to buy because it was what the mother used to purchase. The scene right after involves the father reading out a letter to the child addressed to him by his mother. The funny part is that both movies have all three scenes in the very same order. Mansoor Khan could have easily broken all three scenes into individual parts & put them apart in the movie.

A few scenes later the child has an accident at the playground & gets a nasty cut above the left eye in both cases. All this happens while the father is engrossed in a conversation with the same next door neighbor from before. Both result in the father running to the hospital carrying the son in his arms & holding the boy while he receives stitches on his forehead.

Both movies have a scene where the child refuses to eat his dinner & despite being repeatedly warned by his father eats ice-cream instead. The father loses his cool & yells at the kid only to apologize later during the night.

A letter addressed to the child from the mother is read out to him by the father, where she explains to the kid why she’s left home & that she won’t be coming back for sometime. Though a nearly identical scene is there in both movies the placement of the scene in the chronology of the film is different.

The wife asks the husband to meet her at a restaurant where she asks for her right to her son & when the husband disagrees she informs him of her intention to take the matter to court. Again the scene is more or less same in both the movies.

The husband’s meeting with his lawyer again is pretty much alike in both films.

The custody battle in court has three nearly identical segments. The questioning of the husband, wife & the next door neighbor in ‘Akele Hum Akele Tum’ is nearly copy-cut-paste from ‘Kramer Vs Kramer’.

The climax too in both films is almost the same.

Differences:

Being a Bollywood adaptation, there are obvious things such as songs & additional characters as comic relief which don’t really count much as differences. We’d compare the meat of the plot & see what changes were made in our Hindi adaption.

The professions in both the movies of the male protagonist are different. Aamir Khan’s a singer in ‘Akele Hum Akele Tum’ & Dustin Hoffman’s an architect in ‘Kramer Vs Kramer’.

‘Akele Hum Akele Tum’ devotes its first half hour to setting up the couple’s back story. ‘Kramer Vs Kramer’ has no such bonding period shown.

The backdrop of the Bollywood music industry is developed in some detail with caricatures of popular music directors of the day are present (Nadeem-Shravan, Gulshan Kumar) & Aamir Khan’s character’s struggles to gain a foothold in the industry are given a fair bit of screen time. Dustin Hoffman’s character‘s challenges at work never really go beyond him trying to balance things on the personal & professional front.

The meteoric rise of Manisha Koirala’s character after she walks out on her marriage is shown with in ‘Akele Hum Akele Tum’ while what happens to Meryl Streep’s life is only mentioned in passing in ‘Kramer Vs Kramer’.

Final Verdict:

I would say ‘Akele Hum Akele Tum’ had a few sub-plots which fleshed out the original story, so it did add something to Kramer Vs Kramer but at the same time, it rips off scene to scene from what the original had to offer without the makers have bought the rights to remake the movie officially. I should ideally also discuss Anu Malik’s songs also but that’s better left for another time (soon).

In its own right Akele Hum Akele Tum is a fine movie but unfortunately the bitter truth is that it’s a Copycat!!!