Highway and Rang Rasiya are very well-done mainstream Hindi films, and each were, and are, very successful. But the elephants in the room concerning world cinema are the hundreds of romantic musicals, or masalas, cranked out from Bollywood from the sixties through the eighties, and progressively, nay relentlessly, from the mid-nineties to our present day.
One of the most popular Bollywood films in history, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Big-Hearted Will Take the Bride) (India, 1995) had a 1,274-week run at Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir theatre before being temporarily closed for Covid-19 protocols. But the film will re-open soon there, as it’s celebrating its 25th anniversary.
Baldev Singh (veteran character actor Amrish Puri) is an NRI, a Non-Resident Indian who has been living in London for over twenty years. He owns a small but busy convenience store there, and has a lovely family – his wife Lajjo (Farida Jalal) and two daughters, Chutki (Pooja Ruparel) and the older daughter Simran (Kajol).
Dharamvir Malhotra (Anupam Kher) is also a transplanted Hindustani in London who has become very successful in business. His rascal son, Raj (Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan) is a charming but incorrigible party animal and all-around horndog who has just failed his graduation. Raj’s father, rather than being unhappy with him, congratulates him for carrying on the family tradition of early failure leading to later success, and gifts his son a month’s Eurail tour of Europe in order to enjoy his youth in a way he was never able.
Simran, on the other hand, is asked to travel back to Punjab soon to consummate a longtime arranged marriage with the son of Baldev Singh’s childhood friend Ajit, who is very rich, securing Simran’s future and lending prestige to both families. Three of Simran’s friends are taking advantage of the same Eurail tour deal, and Simran asks her father if she can join them for the month’s tour before she fulfills her family wedding responsibilities. He reluctantly but ardently gives her his permission.
Raj and Simran meet cute on the train, jumping aboard together just seconds before departure. But Raj, clearly ensorcelled, works too hard to impress her, and Simran hates that he lays on the supposed charm way too thick. At a formal supper club in Paris, Raj teases Simran and her friends, seems to have embarrassed himself, then takes over the club with a giant music-and-dance number with all the taste and subtlety of Busby Berkeley. The next day, Raj and Simran miss their train, which leads to more good-natured passive-aggressive romantic combat and musical-dance adventures until they catch up with their friends in Munich. Finally ending the trip back in London, Simran offers to invite Raj to her wedding, but Raj tells her he won’t be accepting the invitation.
That night, Simran quietly confesses to Mom that she has met The One, The Guy. But not quietly enough – Baldev overhears their chat as well, accuses Simran of betrayal and declares they’re all going to India tomorrow. Meanwhile, Raj, admittedly smitten and spurred on by his father, goes to Simran’s home and finds the family gone. But Simran left, on the door jamb, a souvenir cowbell she’d bought with him in Switzerland. She knew he’d come for her, and left a sign to encourage him. Raj will be attending that wedding after all.
This is the film’s intermission, but it has already made some uncharacteristically bold strides. DDLJ was one of the first filmed narratives focusing on Non-Resident Indians living in Europe. Most Indian films told Indian stories, and Europe was seen as a pervasively corrupt land of no interest to Indian (predominantly Hindu) natives, especially after India gained full independence from colonial Great Britain in 1947. But director Aditya Chopra (son of veteran filmmaker Yash Chopra, making his feature film debut here) took splendid advantage of the huge variety of locations, and started a trend that other filmmakers jumped on quickly, budgets be damned. Musical romances waxed and waned from the sixties to the eighties, sharing cinema space with realist social dramas and hard-boiled crime films, but in the late eighties and nineties there was a big upsurge in masalas, and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge joined Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (From Doomsday Till Doomsday) (1988), the Salman Khan-starring Hum Aapke Hain Koun (Who Am I To You?) (1994) and Dil To Pagal Hai (The Heart Is Crazy) (1997) as history-making box-office blockbusters, not to mention another Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol vehicle, 1998’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something Something Happens). Culturally, these big-budget high-entertainment masalas were pointedly family-centered as well as presenting swooning youthful l’amour fou, coinciding with India’s economic liberalization policies in the early nineties – big reductions in tariffs, targeted tax cuts and aggressive deregulation. How liberalizing these policies actually are, especially under Narendra Modi, is surely debatable, but Bollywood has been thriving and contemporary India overall has been relatively stable, joining the US and China among the dominant economies of the world.
Remember that wedding that Veera Tripathi had been kidnapped away from in Highway? There’ll be no detours here for Simran Singh, now in Punjab preparing for her wedding despite her hopes for a miraculous intervention. In fact, there’s a heart-rending, surprising five-minute discussion where Mom itemizes her frustrations and disappointments as a woman in conservative Indian culture, and earnestly beseeches Simran to give up her idealized notions of love and submit to her father’s, her babuji’s, wishes for her own sanity and self-preservation. Kuljeet (Parmeet Sethi), to whom she’s been promised, is just another arrogant jock rich kid that even Chutki dislikes. But, in yet another belief-suspending show-stopper musical ballad extravaganza, Raj magically appears and swears that Simran’s father will give him her hand in marriage – he’ll settle for nothing less, and it’s the only right way to make it work. Throwing around promises of factory-building and massive investments, Raj ingratiates himself with Kuljeet and his father, Ajit, gets himself invited to stay at the Singh’s palatial home, and becomes a fixture during all four days of the wedding festivities – just as long as babuji doesn’t recognize him as that smart-assed kid from London. If you don’t think there’s eventually a happy ending, then you’re probably not this film’s intended audience, but Shah Rukh Khan as Raj will wear down your skepticism with his tireless and inventive machinations as he wears down members of both families until, at last, he must convince the seemingly immovable object, Simran’s father, of his trustworthy devotion to Simran. Have a handkerchief on hand. Trust me.
credit: hungama10.wordpress.com
It’s easy to take for granted that Bollywood films are consistently successful. Hindi films from Bollywood make up 43% of India’s overall film output, and routinely make 1/3 again more money than Hollywood films year-after-year. We’re used to the sweep and ambition of films from David Lean or Busby Berkeley or MGM producer Arthur Freed, but there are hundreds of competitively talented filmmakers – producers, writers, directors, actors, composers, choreographers, designers – cranking out Bollywood product every year. The screenwriters know they can routinely use over three hours of screentime to tell their stories, and they’ve nailed the structural challenges thereof. They don’t shy away from constructively stretching scenes out, but they still keep things efficient to set good boundaries for their actors. Say what you will about romantic musical comedies, but lousy performances here are very few and far between, as is boring music or sloppy choreography. Most mainstream Bollywood films are good, not great, but the great ones are genuinely jawdropping. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge is a well-oiled-machine landmark, and in the running for the best Bollywood musical film ever made…
…unless you’re one of hundreds of thousands who are inclined to give that sobriquet to Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om (India, 2007), another Shah Rukh Khan dazzler that dispenses with all of that sociology and travelogue and, instead, serves up a shamelessly self-referential show-biz singing-and-dancing extravaganza that’s as much parody as pageant, and as much ghost story as love story.
Om Prakash Makhija (Shah Rukh Khan) is a bit-player/extra under contract with a large Bollywood studio. He’s in the background of a bunch of star-studded hits, and aspires to become a famous film star himself. But, despite the loyalty and encouragement of his longtime buddy and sidekick Pappu (Shreyas Talpade), he’s losing his optimism. There are lots of beautiful actresses at the studio as well, but Om only has eyes for beautiful superstar Shantipriya (Deepika Padukone), who, of course, is securely unapproachable. But Om, working on an historical marauders-pillage-a-peaceful-rural-village scene, saves Shantipriya from a disastrous pyrotechnics accident, and wins her regard. They even go out on a date (which is, of course, a swooning musical/dance number), and everything’s looking impossibly rosy. But, a few days later, Om eavesdrops on a dressing-room conversation he’s not supposed to hear between Shantipriya and her imperious producer Mukesh Mehra (Arjun Rampal). What he learns about the two of them breaks his heart, but there’s worse to come, as Mukesh plots to murder Shantipriya. Locking her in a huge abandoned studio set, Mukesh sets the building on fire. Om fights frantically to bust in and rescue Shantipriya, but she goes up in the flames, and Om loses his life trying to save her.
The film now shifts to 30 years into the future, where we find that the deceased Om Prakash Makhija has been reincarnated into Om Kapoor, masala superstar, complete with fawning crowds of teenagers staked out at the studio every day hoping to catch a glimpse of their hero. Everything the earlier Om aspired to is what this new, present-day Om has achieved – with two notable differences. When the new Om shows up on set, and his hapless assistant explains the heart-rending scenario they’re shooting today, Om decides he doesn’t like any of it and, on the fly, substitutes a show-stopping music-and-dance dream sequence, Dard-E-Disco (“My heart is full of the Pain of Disco”) – an hilarious send-up of steamy, slithering, sensuous Bob Fosse-ish music videos complete with endless sprays and waves of water crashing across the impossibly buffed bodies of Om and his small army of dancing girls. I peg it as a brilliant parody modelled on the 1983 Travolta / Stallone Staying Alive (although I’m sure there are masala parallels aplenty as well), but for all the fun being had, it’s shockingly effective and entertaining. Nonetheless, we see Om Kapoor for the “be careful what you wish for” disappointment that Om Prakash Makhija never imagined – a shallow and spoiled sell-out surrounded by deferential sycophants. Later, as Om Kapoor collects yet another Filmfare acting award for what is pointedly presented as another soulless Show-Biz Product©, the post-award reception features another big-budget musical number featuring a seemingly endless parade of other Bollywood stars past and present. (Hey, Look, there’s Kajol!)
The second notable difference, and the one that shifts the whole tenor of this second act, is Om Kapoor’s pyrophobia. He’s terrified of fire, a remnant of his Om Prakash Makhija persona’s memory of Shantipriya’s, and his own, death in the giant inferno of Mukesh Mehra’s making. And, in a timely fashion, who should appear on Om Kapoor’s set one day but Mukesh Mehra himself, flush from thirty years of Hollywood success and ready to return to exploit the money-minting prospect of working with Om Kapoor. Mehra’s reappearance awakens the earlier Om within him, and, reuniting with his friend Pappu and his long-awaiting mother Bela (Kiron Kher), he plots an elaborate revenge against the murderer of his beloved. But the plan hinges on Om finding a suitable Shantipriya lookalike, and the one he discovers (the very last auditioner, of course) bears an uncanny resemblance to Shantipriya but needs a lot of work.
The comedic elements and the musical numbers are superb, of course, but the murder / ghost story trappings are effectively disturbing as well, in the same way Disney films scare the hell out of little kids (as well as their parents – c’mon, admit it…). The final revenge sequences get a little slippery – a “Phantom Of The Opera” homage is a bit much, but it’s a satisfying finale nonetheless. People love this movie, fanatically, and I suspect most who give either one of these two movies a shot will clearly understand why.
Periscope In The Bathtub 