Pyaar Zindagi Hai

About the film

Pyaar Zindagi Hai (transl. Love is Life) is a 2001 Indian Hindi-language romantic thriller film directed by Vijay Sadanah. It is a remake of the Tamil film Aasai (1995). The film stars Ashima Bhalla, Vikas Kalantri and Mohnish Bahl and was produced by K.C. Bokadia under the banner of BMB Pictures.

Plot

After the marriage of his daughter, Geeta, with army Major Pratap Singh, widower Hridaynath lives a simple middle-class existence with his unmarried daughter, Priya, in Dehra Dun. Geeta, Pratap and their new-born son, Munna, pay them a visit and live with them for a few days. They find out that Hridaynath is under constant threat from a loan shark he had borrowed money from to get Geeta married. Shortly after that Geeta and Pratap leave back home for Ranikhet, and it then that Hridaynath finds out that his loan has been repaid and that they also have a telephone now - thanks to Pratap.

Quite unknown to Hridaynath, Pratap has set his eyes on Priya and wants her for himself, so much so that he is willing to kill Geeta and get remarried to Priya on the pretext that Munna needs looking after. So to get the ball rolling, he kills Geeta by drugging and then suffocating her with a polythene bag. He then informs her dad and sister that she has died of a heart attack, and convinces them to leave Dehra Dun and live with him in Ranikhet. This is where he plans to seduce Priya in order to marry her and vows no one can dare to come in his way.

Unfortunately for him, Priya has a fiancé Amit that she loves very much and she introduces him to Pratap. Frustrated, Pratap sets out to destroy Amit's character. First, he takes advantage of a careless Sikh man in their way and deliberately arranges for them to bump into him and steals Amit's wallet in the ensuing melee. Predictably when Amit notices his wallet missing, he confronts the Sikh man and makes a fool of himself, as it is Pratap who has the wallet. When he suspects and attempts to frisk Pratap, Hridaynath chastises him and Pratap escapes.

Release and reception

Pyaar Zindagi Hai opened in theatres on 7 September 2001. It grossed over ₹1,100,000 (US$16,929) worldwide. The film collected ₹1,098,500 in the opening week. Taran Adarsh wrote, "The only saving grace of the enterprise is the twist in its story [...] Otherwise, the story meanders on the beaten path, which doesn't excite the viewer one bit."

Key details