Chance pe Dance is the third collaboration between actor Shahid Kapoor and director Ken Ghosh. And much like Ishq Vishq and Fida before this, Kapoor is almost the only good thing in the movie. Almost. The fresh faced Genelia D’Souza thankfully replaced Jiah Khan and is the only reason I enjoyed Chance Pe Dance more than Ghosh’s earlier two films.
The story is one you’ve heard before, most recently in the 2009 release Luck by Chance. Kapoor plays a struggling actor who travels from Delhi to Bombay to become a hero, because, well, everyone since his birth thought he should be. Not the film industry though. Much like the thousands who come here every year, Sameer Behl (Kapoor) goes from audition to audition, most often getting passed over by a less talented but better connected pretender. Eventually though, the contender gets his due (obviously), and we spend two predictable hours finding out how. Sonia Sharma (D’Souza) is a budding choreographer who crosses paths with him over and over, becoming his life coach and girlfriend in this milieu.
To his credit, Ghosh keeps the story light, with no unnecessary emotional drama. Sameer has a good relationship with his father despite his career choice, he never faces too bad a scrap, and even when the going gets really bad, he doesn’t forget to wear his designer glasses or his smile. The humor, scattered generously through the film, isn’t particularly intelligent, but then, neither are the characters, and the sheer likability of the two leads helps you wade through it, relatively dry.
Another positive in this film is the way Ghosh has chosen to shoot his non-dance songs, two in particular. In the track "Rishta Hai Mera," he shows the aspirations and ambitions of the characters by making them larger than life, using digital imagery to make them sit on bridges and walk taller than buildings. Whether this device has been used before I cannot say, but in this track I felt it worked really well. Also, in the romantic number "Pal Mein Hi," he uses a warm yellow filter which I feel added a certain ambience without being overbearing as in Ram Gopal Verma's “blue” films.
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