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Of his own admission, Aamir Khan was more nervous than wife Kiran Rao before the first press conference to unveil the first look of Dhobi Ghat, her first directorial venture. Of course, it wasn’t his nervousness which kept him away from the media meet on 17th November at a suburban hotel in Bombay. Rather, as Kiran explained at the press conference, “All along, you have known me as Mrs. Aamir Khan. But I now wanted to introduce myself as the writer and director of ‘Dhobi Ghat’, that is why we decided that only I should be present at this conference. That’s the reason Aamir is not here. It’s a purely selfish reason.” Like Aamir, Kiran came across as an honest and confident person who hardly showed signs of nervousness when addressing the gathering and answering questions from members of the fourth estate. The fairly long teaser trailer of the film was unveiled before Kiran fielded questions from the press. The trailer, without a single dialogue, introduced Prateik Babbar (who plays dhobi Munna in the film), Monica Dogra (photographer Shai), Aamir Khan (painter Arun) and Kriti Malhotra (Yasmin) in that order.
Kiran Rao admitted that her debut film was more for the thinking audience and revealed that it had done the rounds of some film festivals. Revealing that the film had a mix of Hindi and English dialogues, she explained that translating the English dialogues into Hindi would’ve taken away from the film and its characters, which is why she chose to retain the English dialogues rather than writing them in Hindi simply to increase the film’s box-office appeal. Incidentally, the teaser trailer has absolutely no dialogues – neither in Hindi nor in English. The confident debutante also explained that she and Aamir were repeatedly talking about the English dialogues in the film and its (film’s) lack of universal appeal just so that the public shouldn’t expect the film to be yet another box-office blockbuster from Aamir Khan, especially because it starred Aamir and was produced by him. “Ideally,” explained Aamir later, “We would have liked to unveil the teaser trailer as three different trailers, probably with a gap of a month between two trailers. The first trailer would’ve introduced Prateik and Monica Dogra, the second would’ve focussed on me (Aamir) and Monica, and the third would’ve presented me and Kriti Malhotra. But the time we have is short as the film will release on 21st January next year. We’ve, therefore, included all the four principal characters in one teaser trailer.”
And the teaser trailer looks good and has a certain intriguing quality about it.
