Audient Bollywood: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge

This is the final installment of Audient Bollywood, a 2022 monthly series watching Bollywood films.

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) was the very first film I added to my Bollywood watchlist on Letterboxd. But that's not the reason I chose it as the final entry in this series.

I created the watchlist back in January, if I remember correctly, in order to give me a list of films to work from throughout the year, later adding some notes that included whether I could get the movie on one of my streaming services, whether it was a top ten dance scene, and perhaps most importantly, the running time -- knowing I'd have to factor in a movie's length in some months. I compiled it from several resources, though I believe I started with an IMDB list. Dilwale Dulhania La Jayenge must have been the first film on one of that list, because it was the first on my list, a list that grew to 64 titles, only ten of which I ended up watching.

But given that it was 189 minutes long, I thought there was a good chance I wouldn't watch it. I was really focusing in on movies that were closer to two hours than three, if I could help it, or movies that had been singled out for their great dance numbers, or movies that I had already known about through other means (such as RRR or Lagaan). 

Though I now think there's a certain poetry to watching the first film on the list last, that was just a coincidence. The reason I watched it was because of a TV show that I didn't even finish watching.

Back in July, my family and I watched the first two episodes of Ms. Marvel on Disney+. My wife and I were keen to continue; my kids, not so much. They thought it was boring. And apparently my wife and I didn't like it enough to promote it into our normal viewing slot after they go to bed. Increasingly, we haven't even watched one of our own shows in that time slot -- Better Call Saul, The Boys, Stranger Things, The Crown, etc. -- so we hardly had time to keep watching Ms. Marvel. It's just been a busy end of the year.

But in probably the last episode we did watch, the lead, played by Iman Vellani, meets a fellow boy of Indian heritage -- one of the "cool kids," I think. They're having a quick exchange in a car about Bollywood -- observed jealously by the title character's best friend who's crushing on her, played by Matt Lintz -- and they bond over the fact that they both know that "DDLJ," as they called it, is the best Bollywood movie. (I guess the majority of people prefer a different title. I don't remember what that title was.)

I immediately googled it, and there was the first title on my Bollywood watchlist.

This mightn't have been reason enough to watch the movie, and choosing my final movie based on this would have carried more weight had I actually finished Ms. Marvel. But what I liked about it was that it was a bit of an inside reference by a screenwriter of Indian heritage, something meant to congratulate others who got the reference and shared the refined tastes of a person who knows what's what. It was the best insider recommendation I thought I might get in the whole series.

And, unfortunately, it was a bit of a disappointment.

In a second instance of finishing up where I began, in a certain respect, DDLJ stars Shah Rukh Khan, who was also the star of the very first film I watched, Dil Se, back in January. That film came out three years later, and is famous for that great dance number on board the moving train. That dance number went a long way toward why I ultimately gave the film 3.5 stars on Letterboxd, because with so much of the tone of that film controlled by Khan, it would never have gotten there otherwise.

See, Shah Rukh Khan is a bit of a buffoon. A clown. An ass. I don't know if he's like that as a person, but that's the character he plays on screen -- which I now feel I can confirm after seeing him in two films. In both of these films, he comes on way too strong when he meets a beautiful girl, romancing her like the worst pickup artist you've ever seen strike out at a bar. On his best days he rises to the level of insincere used car salesman. There's a lot of making eyes and a lot of cheeky smiles and a lot of pranking and goofing. A little of him goes a long way.

And yet in both of these films, he wins the heart of what seems to be a quite reasonable and otherwise independent-thinking woman -- after the requisite period during which she despises him, of course. She's right to despise him, and in both cases, the narrative does not support her change in feelings toward him. 

I'm not sure if you can get it from just a quick picture of him, but at least you will see his annoyingly large stack of hair:

Maybe the hair was just the 1990s. But it's just so ... big.

Anyway, I suppose some basic plot synopsis would be in order.

Simran Singh (Kajol) is a Londoner of Indian descent, who has been promised to a young man back in India whom she's never met, but is the son of one her father's oldest and dearest friends. That's kind of the essence of an arranged marriage. Her father (Amrish Puri, who was Mola Ram in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) is a pretty traditional sort, but he does melt when his daughter expresses the earnestness of her desire to get a Eurorail pass to "live a lifetime in one month" before returning to do her duty. She reminds him that she's always obeyed him, and he lets her go.

Of course, it's on this trip with her girlfriends that she meets the doofus you see above, a rich kid whose father (Anupam Kher, who you would also recognize from some western movies) is actually proud of him for failing out of university because it confirms their family legacy of failing. Why should he see failing as a good sign? Because he's become a multi-millionaire without even getting as far as his son Raj did, so he assumes Raj will do the same. Raj also lives in London and he also board the Eurorail with a few of his frivolous friends. 

Their continuous meeting cute might be fine if it weren't for the fact that he's just so obnoxious. I knew from seeing Dil Se that eventually Khan would find this soulful, smoldering state of being that would make him better resemble a traditional romantic hero, but it just takes too long here -- and as I said, when Simran does fall for him, it's with insufficient reason. It's like one day they are bickering and she genuinely hates him -- with good reason -- and then the next day they are proclaiming their undying love for each other. I mean, this is a guy who went to apologize her in what seemed like a really sweet gesture, with an offer of a flower -- only to have the flower contain a squirt gun that squirts her in the face when she leans into smell it. That's the kind of doofus this is.

The second half of the film of course involves his going to India to try to prevent her from marrying a real douchebag, Kuljit (Parmeet Sethi), where other complications ensue. There are a few clever things in this section of the film. But the film had to do a lot of work to pull me back to a three-star rating, which it just barely did.

I can't really say why Aditya Chopra's film is considered the movie that Indians "in the know," like Ms. Marvel writer Bisha K. Ali, would favor over whatever it's main rival was supposed to be -- unless that main rival is also not very good. Which would then not explain why these two are held up on such pedestals. Maybe I've just been spoiled by too much good Bollywood this year to see this as an all-timer.

I've got to say that one of the problems was its length. Three hours and nine minutes is a long time to be watching something you aren't really into. (Some people will be saying that after coming out of Avatar: The Way of Water.) I tried to do what I did for Sholay in November, which was to watch up to the intermission during the later afternoon and finish at night, even though there was no intermission embedded into the film of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. The first part went fine, as I watched about an hour and three minutes on my balcony on a nice summer afternoon, leaving just over two hours to finish after dinner. For various reasons, though -- one being cumulative exhaustion, one being the consumption of alcohol during the afternoon at two different holiday events -- I barely got through 45 more minutes that night before falling asleep on the couch and waking up at 1. I couldn't power through another 80 minutes starting at 1.

So I finally finished it between about 4 and 6 yesterday afternoon in my garage, again pausing for short naps. 

I might have been carried through fine, even not really liking the protagonist, if the movie had had better dance numbers. It didn't really have anything with big production values, as the few times where a dozen dancers at once were on screen, they were over before they had even begun. And I don't watch Bollywood movies to see two people sing to each other and swing each other around in a field. There are plenty of American movies I can watch if I want that sort of thing, and most of them will at least be a bit more self-conscious about how cheesy they're being.

Even though I ended with probably my second least favorite movie of the whole series, this was, overall, a highly successful experiment. I call it an "experiment" because I went into it with a little bit of trepidation. Bollywood did end up welcoming me in with open arms, but it was definitely outside my comfort zone in some respects, and before I started, the length felt prohibitively long. I probably could have watched 15 or 16 movies in most other series in the time it took to watch 12 in this one.

But you can't argue with the results. Here's a recap of how these movies did:

January - Dil Se (1998) - 3.5 stars
February - Pyaasa (1957) - 4.5 stars
March - Dhoom (2004) - 3.5 stars
April - Bajirao Mastani (2015) - 4 stars
May - RRR (2022) - 4 stars
June - Anand (1971) - 3.5 stars
July - Baar Baar Dekho (2016) - 2.5 stars
August - Eeb Allay Ooo! (2019) - 3.5 stars
September - Lagaan: Once Upton a Time in India (2001) - 4.5 stars
October - 3 Idiots (2009) - 4.5 stars
November - Sholay (1975) - 4 stars
December - Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) - 3 stars

So only two films in the whole series received under 3.5 stars, and while some of that is probably my own excessive generosity and skewed rating system, I don't behave generously toward a film unless it gives me reason to. I had a hell of a good time watching most of these movies.

The interesting thing in looking back is that even though I gave a quarter of these movies 4.5 stars, it was two movies that I gave "only" 4 stars -- Bajirao Mastani and RRR -- that may have lingered with me the most. The dancing and production designs are out of this world in Bajirao Mastani, and RRR showcases some of the most inventive action filmmaking I have ever seen, continuing to hold its spot on my 2022 list as I realize certain films I had originally ranked higher simply are not better.

I was still floored by Pyaasa, Lagaan and 3 Idiots, though, with Lagaan likely taking top honors for the whole series.

Pyaasa may be the best metaphor for the series on the whole, though. There was a great barrier to entry in this movie at first, and it took me maybe 30 minutes to decide I even liked the movie. By the end, I gave it only a half-star shy of a perfect score. 

It makes for imperfect metaphor for the series in another way, though, given that the opening minutes of my very first movie, Dil Se, smashed through whatever barrier to entry there was for me about Bollywood in general, giving me about two dozen Bollywood dancers on the back of a training traveling through tunnels and mountains as A.R. Rahman's "Chaiyya Chaiyya" rocked the soundrack.

I never looked back.

I'll let you know what I'm watching in 2023 in early January.

Audient Bollywood: Sholay

This is my 11th and penultimate film in my 2022 series Audient Bollywood, in which I'm familiarizing myself with the cinema of India.

Eleven months into this series, I'm finally figuring out the perfect hack for how to watch Bollywood movies while still keeping a normal schedule.

Namely, watch the first half on a weekend afternoon during what we refer to in our house as "quiet time" -- a period from about 4:30 to about 7 when the kids are allowed to be on their devices -- and then the second half that night after you and your wife go your separate ways for the evening.

Conveniently, Sholay (1975) even had an intermission to provide a line of demarcation between the two.

Yes, my 11th installment of Audient Bollywood was what I was referencing last weekend when I wrote this post about intermissions. I meant to hop on the regular monthly Audient Bollywood post in the day or two that followed, so as not to forget too much of what I wanted to say about Sholay, but this led to that and I'm only just getting to it now. I think I remember most of the salient takeaways of my viewing.

While researching the post about intermissions, I discovered they are still common in Indian cinema today -- and in Indian cinemas, referring to the locations rather than the industry, where they will insert intermissions into many longer western films that obviously don't have the when we see them. Interestingly, though, this is the first film I watched for Audient Bollywood that featured an actual intermission that was considered to be part and parcel to the film, part of the print that endured and that we watch today. And it's not like Sholay is the longest film I've watched for this series, though at 204 minutes, I suppose it's second longest only to Lagaan, which is a full 20 minutes longer.

No, I think the intermission we'd see if we were watching something in an Indian cinema nowadays is inserted after the fact and can be excised when the movie is distributed internationally. In 1975, that was not the case, and the break in Sholay came along just as I need to start making dinner for my kids. 

One other funny, non-story observation to make about this film before I get into its plot. I can't tell at what point over the years this was added in, but every time a character started to smoke a cigarette -- which was not a huge number of times, maybe a half dozen over the course of the film -- a message came on screen reading "Cigarette smoking is injurious to health." It would stay on screen for the duration of the cigarette being smoked, and then it would disappear. Too funny.

I chose Sholay because a) I wanted one more older film, as in pre-1990s film (I'll be finishing with a film from the 1990s in December), and b) it was on the list of top ten Bollywood dance numbers from Time Out, which I have been consulting all year. Since my December movie is not on that list, I'll finish this series having watched exactly half of those ten movies: Sholay, Baar Baar Dekho, Lagaan, Bajirao Mastani and Dil Se. That means that Devdas, Dabangg, Khalnayak, Mr. India and Mughal-e-Azam will all have to wait for future viewings intended purely for pleasure. 

(And since this is the last time I will mention this list, I should probably answer the question as to why I considered this one random list to be definitive. The answer is, I didn't and don't, especially given some of the disappointing dance numbers the list singled out. But I had to go with something, and I didn't want to overcomplicate things.)

But once I started watching Sholay I realized there was a reason to watch it beyond its supposedly superior dance number, a reason specific to me but one that should apply to any cinephile: It's kind of a loose adaptation of Kurosawa's classic Seven Samurai.

There are only two "samurai" here -- thieves Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) and Veeru (Dharmendra) -- but they fulfill a similar function to the titular samurai in Kurosawa's film. They are brought to a remote village to defend it from a band of marauders led by the wicked Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan), having proven their mettle as criminals and their abilities as sharpshooters. The jovial pair were identified by a retired police officer named Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar) when he was hunting them as part of his job. Thakur is kind of the paterfamilias of the entire village, and when the threat from Singh and his cohorts seems impossible to resolve, Thakur can think of only this pair to help quell it. 

Of course, Seven Samurai engendered proper westerns, most obviously The Magnificent Seven, but likely others as well. Sholay, then, feels like a western as well, as it involves guns and horses and all the other traditional western ingredients. As such it is my first western, of sorts, in this series. And its debt not only to Kurosawa, but also to Sergio Leone, is clear. (If memory serves, there is sort of a whistling score from time to time, and at least one scene that relies on no dialogue and mostly sounds and close-ups of action, like the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West.) As if director Ramesh Sippy wanted to make every one of his allusions completely clear, the actor who plays Thakur, Sanjeev Kumar, even has a bit of a Japanese appearance to him. You look at this guy and tell me if he wouldn't look completely normal turning up in a samurai film:

Even though some of Sholay verges on theft, it ended up being yet another film in this series to exceed four stars on Letterboxd. Actually in this case I ultimately went with exactly four stars, but I was considering 4.5 for a while. It has a satisfying epic arc, and explores the central relationship between the two thieves with a nice sense of humor that offsets the moments of violence and sadism by Gabbar Singh.

A discussion of Sholay would not be complete without mentioning Veeru's love interest, a frivolous carriage driver named Basanti, played by Hema Malini. She's a self-proclaimed chatterbox and she brings a great additional energy to the movie, supporting the humor that serves as an undercurrent between the two leads. In a scene involving her that is not played for humor, Singh requires her to keep dancing in the hot sun or a sniper will put a bullet in the captured Veeru. Singh's men break glass at her feet, and she has to keep dancing even while the shards are cutting the soles of her feet.

I had hoped this was the dance number that had been singled out by Time Out, but actually, it involves an older Bollywood icon who went by the single stage name of Helen, who had become famous as a Bollywood "vamp." In a one-off scene, she also dances for Singh's men. This scene did not particularly speak to me, and I imagine the writer included it primarily to honor this Bollywood legend. It's another case where the list may have had the right movie, but had the wrong dance scene in that movie. 

Jai also has a love interest, played by Jaya Bhaduri, but she doesn't sing and dance, so she doesn't get a paragraph to herself. Or at least, not a very long one. 

One final note about Sholay: Every time I see the title I can't help singing "sho-lay, sho-LAY, SHO-lay, SHO-LAY!" to the tune of Dolly Parton's "Jolene."

Okay I will wrap up Audient Bollywood in December with a movie that had a minor cultural moment in 2022. 

Audient Bollywood: 3 Idiots

This is the 10th in my 2022 series Audient Bollywood, in which I better familiarize myself with Bollywood filmmaking.

When I first came across the title 3 Idiots (2009) a couple years back, I had two immediate thoughts:

1) "Huh, I guess the Indians make lowbrow comedies, just like we do."

2) "But they still make them nearly three hours long."

I was right about one of those two things.

Although 3 Idiots does indeed contain some puerile humor -- a guy gets an electrical jolt when he pisses on a conductor, for example, and there's a lot of pants dropping and spanking of the exposed rears that result -- my first tipoff that it wasn't most appropriately defined as a "lowbrow comedy" was that "comedy" isn't even one of its genre assignments on Netflix. 

I'd figure whoever was assigning genres on Netflix would have just thrown "comedy" in there based on this poster, but instead, the genres are "social issue dramas," "movies based on books" and "Indian." Then there's the section that says "This movie is," and for 3 Idiots the moods are considered to be "sentimental, irreverent, emotional."

It was almost enough to make me balk at my choice when I fired it up on Saturday afternoon. In realizing I only have three movies remaining in this series, I've wanted to utilize those slots for specific purposes, one of which was to watch a straight comedy -- something that maybe the Indian version of the Farrelly brothers would make. If 3 Idiots wasn't going to be that, should I just pass it up for something else that I otherwise won't fit in, like an LGBTQI+ movie?

But I trusted the implied tone of that poster and went forward with the choice, and boy am I glad I did. 3 Idiots gets in all those tones, and the comedy too.

The three idiots of the title are engineering students at a top university devoted to that pursuit, and one of them is played by Aamir Khan, who is the star of last month's Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India. (He's the one in the center, with the orange shirt.) The movie is told from the perspective of ten years on, when a rival (not pictured) tries to hold Rancho (Khan) to an agreement he made to return to this rooftop meeting spot in a decade's time to see who was more successful. See, the rival (Chatur) believed that constant studying, and periodic backstabbing, was the path to success, while Rancho favored questioning the system that places so much pressure on its students, and outside the box thinking. But Rancho has not been seen since graduation.

The film is a bait and switch in the best of ways. We are indeed set up for a broad comedy when Farhan (R. Madhavan, the idiot on the right) gets a call from Chatur (Omi Vaidya) just as his plane is taking off, stating that Chatur has found Rancho. Farhan fakes a medical emergency just so the plane will land and he can hurry off to meet Chatur. Similarly, Raju (Sharman Josi, left idiot) gets roused from bed by Chatur's phone call, and leaves the house without wearing shoes or pants. 

What follows, though, is a sometimes sobering consideration of how academic pressures, and the pressures to make one's parents proud, can lead these students down dark paths. There's one suicide within the flashback story we follow for most of the time, which runs through their four years at the university; there's another attempted suicide; and there's a third suicide referred to before the events of the story. The shrewd adjacency of the film's primary two tones is highlighted during one particular dance number -- I believe it was called "All Is Well," which is Rancho's mantra -- that is very cheery ad high energy, though it ends with a drone the students built rising up to the outside of a classmate's window, where we see him having hanged himself. It's a devastating choice by director Rajkumar Hirani, highlighting the fact that for these driven engineering students, indeed all is not well.

This classmate had asked the school's director, Dr. Viru Sahastrabudde (Boman Irani), for an extension on a key project, since his father had recently had a stroke. "I can give you sympathy but I cannot give you an extension," he barks. There's a reason the students have nicknamed this man "Virus."

3 Idiots has it all ways, and the extraordinary length of 2:43 -- extraordinary for a "comedy" if not for a Bollywood film -- allows us to really get to know these characters and understand their particular arcs. Farhan is trying to make good on the sacrifices his family made for him, giving him the house's only air conditioner so he could sleep well and study, and forgoing a car just to pay for his education. But he really wants to be a photographer. Raju actually does want to be an engineer, but he's having difficult with the pressure -- and he knows his family, including his very sickly father, is relying on his education to raise them out of poverty. Rancho is the mystery, the inspirational leader, the manic pixie dream boy, though we eventually learn why he disappeared after university and where he is now. The generous time spent with the characters almost comes to resemble what you would get over the course of a season of a streaming comedy, maybe something like Never Have I Ever -- though the fact that both are about the Indian experience is strictly coincidental in this comparison.

And of course it is a Bollywood film in all the ways I have come to expect and love over the course of this series. There are about a half dozen song and dance numbers, the most memorable of which takes place in the students' shower as they are covered in soap. And of course there is a love story between Rancho and Pia (Kareena Kapoor), who is the daughter of the director -- naturally.

The successful exploration of its social message about students under pressure, which never feels too heavy handed, is what really puts the cherry on top of a very entertaining film. It never gets weighed down by these considerations, nor does it make light of them or short change them. The end result was one of my favorite films in the series so far.

Only two installments left of Audient Bollywood. I'll miss it when it's gone -- which of course only means that I'll be more inclined to keep watching, just for pleasure. That's the goal of any series I do.

Audient Bollywood: Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India

This is the ninth in my 2022 series watching one Bollywood movie per month.

I had hoped to watch the 2001 film Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (often just referred to as Lagaan) on the flight back from the U.S. last month. Sadly, it wasn't among the available Bollywood options -- there were only about two dozen so that's not a huge surprise. Too bad. When else am I going to get 14 hours to myself to watch whatever I'd like?

Well, how about a garage movie marathon on Australian Father's Day?

(This is my last post about this marathon, by the way.)

I had scouted out possibly watching it on YouTube, where a free copy is available. Strangely, I hadn't been able to find it on iTunes. However, that turned out not to be necessary as it subsequently turned up on Netflix. In fact, I'm really glad I didn't go with the YouTube version, because as it turns out, it's "only" three hours and eight minutes long, meaning some unknown part of it is missing.

"Only," Vance? How long is the approved version of this movie?

Oh it's a mere three hours and 43 minutes.

Yes, Lagaan is now officially one of the longest movies I have ever seen. The only one off the top of my head that I'm sure is longer is Gettysburg, the 1993 civil war movie that had a special advanced screening on the campus of my alma mater, Bowdoin College, whose sixth president, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, is one of the characters in the movie. (Played by Jeff Daniels.) However, running times are notably difficult to pin down -- IMDB says Gettysburg was four hours and 31 minutes, when I think the version I saw was closer to four.

Anywayyyy ... this movie. Why this movie?

For one, it's one of the only Bollywood movies whose name I knew prior to starting this series. And I knew it courtesy of someone's rapturous words in my Flickchart Facebook group, where the film was recommended in the highest possible terms. I knew it was about cricket and I knew it was really, really long, and also really great.

All of these things are true.

In fact, for the lion's share of the running time of Lagaan -- which may have taken me closer to five hours to complete, with a nap near the beginning and other interruptions -- I was sure that it was going to be the first five-star movie of Audient Bollywood. I've gotten to 4.5 stars on a couple occasions but five still eludes me. In fact, as an indication of just how elusive five stars is, I haven't given a five-star rating to any film in 2022, last bestowing the honor on Key Largo a few weeks before Christmas.

In order to get five stars, a movie has to be pretty much perfect -- like Key Largo. And as Lagaan crept into the latter half of its fourth hour, it was clear to me that what I had thought was a tight script with no wasted story -- really! -- had ultimately proven itself a bit too flabby in the end. That, and the fact that I found the ending -- the very ending, not the climax of the narrative -- a little disappointing, removed it from that rarefied air. 

But my, what a good movie this is.

Given its incredible girth, I thought it might be a sort of the history of cricket in India, one that spanned the decades. Its 1893 starting point was only the beginning of the story, surely. But no, this whole movie takes place within a span of about four months in 1893, and is all the better for it. (I thought it might be based in historical fact, but as it turns out, it's just a really good yarn.)

The drought-stricken village of Champaner is the setting. It's under the thumb of an outpost of British officers, who extract a tax from the villagers via the local kings. See, the villagers pay tax to the king, but the king turns around and gives it to the British -- a fact known by everyone involved. This year, a particularly arrogant captain named Russell (Paul Blackthorne) demands twice the tax from the village, even though they have not been able to produce their usual crop due to the lack of rain. A lover of cricket and a rather sadistic fellow, Russell agrees to waive the double tax, as well as the tax for next year and the year after, if villagers from Champaner can beat his British soldiers in a game of cricket. If they lose, they'll owe triple the tax -- which will well and truly decimate the villagers, who were already expecting to be mostly decimated by the double tax.

Russell picks out one villager who stands up to him -- Bhuvan (Aamir Khan) -- to make this decision on behalf of not only this village, but all other villages in the region, who must agree to the same terms. That is, terms that Bhuvan will commit them to with his decision, which must be made there on the spot. The only problem is, they've never played cricket. They have a similar game that they play as children, but they'll need to learn the rules of the Brits' game, and also beat them at it, in only three months' time. Most people wouldn't have agreed to the deal, but Bhuvan isn't most people.

What follows is a rousing sports underdog story -- with musical numbers, naturally -- about the formation of their team and their preparations for the big match. Bhuvan has a local love interest in Gauri (Gracy Singh) and a potential love interest among the British, Elizabeth Russell, the captain's sister, who secretly helps the villagers learn the game, feeling like they've been handed a raw deal by her brother. She's played by Rachel Shelley.

Director Ashutosh Guwariker is so good at assembling all this, at establishing these characters and the stakes, at setting up this world and populating it with rousing dance numbers, that you feel like you'll watch happily for however long such a story lasts. And really, although it is long and deliberately paced, never does it get distracted on purely tangential material. It's as tight as a 223-minute movie can possibly be. (I said earlier there was flab, but now I feel like backtracking on that statement.)

What's more, I learned a lot about cricket! Which has a real benefit for me as a person living in a country in which a lot of people know a lot about cricket already. I still don't think I could speak intelligently about it with anyone, but I do know more than I've ever known about how it's played. I'm actually sort of eager to sit down and watch a real match.

I knew I had planned to watch Lagaan in this series, but after the fact I realized that it might have come up for me even if I didn't know it, by virtue of appearing on that list of Time Out's top ten Bollywood dance numbers, which I've made reference to several times throughout the series. As I was watching, I considered its possible appearance on this list, but disregarded it because none of the dance numbers, while certainly entertaining, seemed to rise to that level. Seeing which song made the cut after the fact -- a sequence called "Radha Kaise Na Jale" -- I'm not even sure I remember which one it was, since none of the numbers particularly made an impression as a superior example of Bollywood choreography. (Look at me, the expert on the topic now.) But I'm happy for the writer to have included it because this is, indeed, a superlative example of Bollywood filmmaking on every level, and why not dancing as well.

I don't really have anything negative to say about the movie. The characters are great, the actors charismatic. The heroes are dreamy and inspirational, the villains wonderfully hissable. It all comes together magnificently, and I'm sure it wouldn't have taken me nearly so long to watch it except that I tend to be distractible in these marathons in the first place, just because there's so much sitting involved. I also needed to interface with my family a couple times, as when they presented me my Father's Day presents, which was a lovely distraction indeed. Don't take my five-plus hours of watching as any indication of my thoughts on the movie. 

The only even remotely negative thing I'll say is that it isn't a five-star movie. Not quite. For a person who tends to give out lots of 4.5 stars -- in fact, exactly 24 since the last time I gave out five -- I'm obviously really picky about the fives. I have to leave the movie with an absolute certainty of its near perfection, and with Lagaan, I just didn't quite get to that level. 

But my, what a good movie this is.

And it can't help but seem downhill from here. I've got three more picks in Audient Bollywood, and they will have a hard time living up to Lagaan. But I'd like to pick up one more pre-2000 film, one more top ten dance film, and then one final title that actually had a minor cultural moment this year -- which I will explain when the time comes. 

Audient Bollywood: Eeb Allay Ooo!

This is the eighth in my 2022 monthly series Audient Bollywood, in which I'm watching a Bollywood movie I haven't seen (which is most of them).

My logic behind watching a movie for Audient Bollywood on my plane ride back from America was twofold:

1) It would give me a discrete set of choices, however many were offered on the flight, which would allow me for once to have an artificial limit placed on my theoretically thousands of choices for this series;

2) It would give me 14 hours worth of flying time, and therefore, time enough to watch the longest movie Bollywood could possibly think of throwing at me.

But here's a funny little secret about the 14-hour flight between Melbourne and Los Angeles, which can fluctuate as high as 15 hours depending on winds and the like: It's actually not enough time.

How can you say that, Vance? you ask. Many people consider the biggest obstacle to visiting Australia not to be vacation time or the cost of the trip, but rather, the very length of the flight.

Once you've done this flight a bunch, though, you start to think of it less as a very long time to be trapped in an airplane, and more as a very short time to watch all the things you want to watch.

So when you factor in the fact that I ended up watching three other movies, as well as two episodes of the TV show The Flight Attendant -- and that I would involuntarily succumb to as much sleep as I could manage -- I ended up opting for the shortest movie I've watched so far in this whole series.

Eeb Allay Ooo! (2019) caught my attention for a couple reasons, only one of which was its skimpy 98-minute running time. Another was that it was supposed to be the feature debut from an acclaimed documentary director, which is the sort of perspective that has been absent so far in this series. However, now that I'm back on terra firma I'm wondering if I may have misremembered this as the movie from the acclaimed documentary director, given that director Prateek Vats has never before directed a film, full stop. It might have been one of the other dozen or so choices.

But this certainly feels like the sort of film made by a person accustomed to making documentaries. It is easily the most realistic and naturalistic film I've watched in this series, and in fact the first not to feature musical numbers or Bollywood dancing of any kind. Being realistic should not mean there's no absurdity to it. There's plenty of absurdity, though the comedy, such as it is, is very straight-faced.

I should start with the title. "Eeb allay ooo!" represents the noises made by professional monkey repellers in Delhi. That's right, there are people -- at least in this movie, though I suspect in real life as well -- who are paid to shoo monkeys from government buildings, so they are less of a hassle to innocent passersby. The most effective means of doing this is through these sounds, which, I suppose, approximate the cries made by these monkeys' natural predators -- larger monkeys and other alphas. However, the sounds must be made very precisely or they will be totally ineffectual.

That last is the experience of Anjani (Shardul Bharadwaj), a down-on-his-luck man who has come to the big city to beg for work. A benevolent relative has vouched for him and gotten him this monkey-repelling job, which he hates and is not good at. He's bullied by the other workers and by the monkeys themselves, who thumb their nose at him while his co-workers seem to do their jobs with a fairly high degree of success. While he's at first on the verge of flaming out, his sad circumstances of trying to shape up -- as every other person in this movie tells him he must do -- eventually force him to become more serious and in fact to become obsessed with trying to be good at this job, ultimately resorting to forbidden tactics like posting pictures of alpha monkeys and even dressing up as one. While this actually worsens his prospects at the job, it leads to meaningful self-discoveries and even a possible transformation that will help him find his place in this world.

And it's a world I felt like I could slightly relate to. From a trip to Bali in 2018, I know a little bit about the menacing quality of these monkeys, how they beg and jump around in public areas and pose a certain threat to passing innocents. We went to a monkey forest in Bali and one of these things jumped on my back for a couple moments before dismounting. The scratch he left on my arm while scaling my body led to jokes about the start of some new international pandemic. It was funny, but it also left me feeling like I'd been in a situation that could have ended badly. (When I watched Eeb Allay Ooo!, I had also just watched Nope a few days earlier, in which a much larger monkey proves capable of lethal force.)

So I sympathized with Anjani in his initial ineffectual attempts to repel the monkeys. Not only was it truly a Sisyphean task -- repel one monkey, five others come back -- but the fear involved in constantly interfacing with these wild animals seemed perfectly legitimate to me, even if it reduced him in the eyes of his mocking co-workers. Anjani is one of those characters that can do no right, not because he's actually incompetent or lazy or anything like that, but because his best intentions backfire and can never be seen clearly by anyone in his life. We've all felt like that from time to time.

But there's also a very dry humor to this whole situation. There's a certain absurdity to trying to shoo monkeys from public spaces, since the monkeys clearly will do whatever they want, and if you lack any real resources that might more permanently resolve the situation -- say, weapons -- then you are operating at a real deficit. In fact, in an odd way, it is meant that the very mastery of how you say "eeb allay ooo!" is the key to doing your job effectively -- though why this should be the case is anyone's guess.

I really liked this movie, though I have to admit that watching it feels like a bit of a dream. See, the second movie on this 14-hour flight -- which this was -- is usually the time when you start succumbing to involuntary sleep, the kind that comes in fits and starts, even when you lack the resources -- speaking of lacking resources -- to have the sort of couple-hour sustained sleep you really need. So the 98 minutes of Eeb Allay Ooo! probably took about five hours to watch, as if it were one of the Bollywood behemoths I've watched this year, or plan to still watch in the future. It's a shame I didn't choose a different time slot for it, since this was easily my favorite of the four movies I watched on the plane (Ambulance, Asking For It and Firestarter being the others -- none of which crossed the three-star threshold on Letterboxd).

I was really hoping that Qantas would have Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, the one movie I knew I planned to watch even before starting the series, which is three hours and 44 minutes long. Since it didn't, I may see if I can tackle that one in September. 

Audient Bollywood: Baar Baar Dekho

This is the seventh in my 2022 monthly series Audient Bollywood, in which I educate myself on Bollywood by watching notable examples of it.

As you may recall, I've been using a list of top ten Bollywood dance numbers (published in TimeOut) as guidance in making my dozen choices in this series. I won't get to all of the ten films -- length and availability are relevant factors -- but my July movie marks my third selection from that list so far.

It also marks the first time the list has steered me wrong, in terms of both the quality of the movie and the quality of the dance number. 

Or if this is one of the ten best Bollywood dance numbers of all time, I've got some disappointment ahead of me in the five remaining slots in this series.

The dance sequence selected on this list is the song "Kala Chashma" from the 2016 film Baar Baar Dekho, directed by Nitya Mehra. Oh, it's not a terrible number at all, but it's got a couple things going against it that I consider to be rather serious demerits:

1) It comes during the closing credits rather than being part of the narrative proper. That just seems like cheating. And because so many Hollywood romantic comedies have taken to having their characters dance over the closing credits, it felt hackneyed and obvious, even if Baar Baar Dekho might have slightly preceded that trend.

2) The primary "innovation" in its choreography seems to be people bobbing their heads from side to side. (Is it considered "bobbing" if the heads are going side to side? I wanted to say "wiggling" but that sounded even less right.)

Here, you can judge for yourself whether you think this is a great dance number:

Now, one thing I've discovered during Audient Bollywood is that a Bollywood dance number is a superfluous narrative flourish in the best of times. It almost always interrupts the action at sort of absurd moments, perhaps even to a greater degree than in the western musical because there's almost no attempt made to incorporate it into the narrative proper. It's much more like a stand-alone video than an offshoot of the action, and the lyrics rarely even seem to be elucidating anything in the story -- and I can tell this because I've been seeing them all translated in the subtitles. In fact there's one song in this movie that talks a lot about crispy potatoes. 

But a pure Bollywood dance number -- like I've seen enough Bollywood to make such a judgment -- is indeed part of the movie proper, not just an end credits dance sequence that's essentially designed to show how much all the people in the cast like each other and how much fun they had making the movie. So says I.

Since even if you watched that clip, you probably have no idea what sort of story it's accompanying, I might as well get into the plot now. And on this front the film had significant promise.

It follows the story of Jai (Sidharth Malhotra) and Diya (Katrina Kaif), who have been in each others' lives forever -- we open on them both being born in different hospitals in 1986, and the credits are a montage of their childhood growing up together and becoming romantically inclined toward one another. By the time they are young adults, they're still gaga over each other, but he -- skittish male that he is -- starts to worry about the commitment of marriage she's hinting at. He spouts divorce figures and also secretly harbors an interest in moving to England to take a job at Cambridge University. He knows she'll never go for this because she's very close to her family.

So as their wedding approaches, he starts to flake -- and then he starts to lose time. This was the promising part, since you know I like movies about what I call "the uncontrollable slippage of time." I was at first reminded of the 2021 Australian film Long Story Short, in which a newly married man wakes up each morning one further year into his marriage than he was the day before. In fact, I looked it up to try to see if there was a connection between the two, because Jai first wakes up ten days into his honeymoon, not remembering how he got to that point, and then the next day, two years into his marriage after this wife's water breaks. And you can tell they haven't been two happy years because she's really pissed with him and they're living in Cambridge, those two things probably being related to one another.

I couldn't find a connection between this and Long Story Short, and if there had been, it would have obviously been the other way around, with Long Story Short taking its concept from this. In fact, the connection is with the Adam Sandler movie Click -- one of my classic "uncontrollable slippage of time" movies -- as Wikipedia states that Baar Baar Dekho was inspired by the Sandler flick.

If so, they probably should have just gone with an exact Bollywood remake, magical remote control and all, because the execution of the concept is pretty scattershot. There's only a rudimentary explanation given for how much time Jai is moving forward each day, and why -- he's a gifted mathematician with a Rain Man-like ability to do instantaneous calculations, and in one of those "standing at a white board" scenes he works out some sort of exponential increase in the jumps, though it's essentially waved off as unimportant. The thing about high concept films is that you sort of have to create rules and then obey them, or else it just feels all over the place -- like this film.

And then at one point he goes backward to an earlier point, but then forward again, and it really gives the impression that the screenwriters are just making it up as they go. Maybe they were. 

Which, as I suggested earlier, would probably be okay if it was propped up by some really great dance numbers. There is one dance number I did like, which I thought was going to be the one that made the top ten list. That would have at least been something.

I did enjoy the lead performers for the most part, her more than him. The movie flirts with poignancy from time to time, and I liked what it was trying to do, but it just didn't get there. 

But hey, at least it was only 135 minutes long -- which is puny by Bollywood standards.

In August I hope to catch a movie on the fly on my return trip from the U.S. I'll be flying back on August 20th and I have to assume Qantas has plenty of Bollywood content on it, perhaps even some older stuff that I have identified as a good fit for this series. And a 14-hour plane ride is the perfect opportunity to watch a Bollywood movie, the longest one I can possibly find. 

If they don't have anything, that'll still leave me 11 days after I return to watch my August movie. In fact, I might have tried to catch my July movie in this way, as we're flying over on July 26th, except that a) if they didn't have anything, I'd have only five days left in the month to watch something, a pretty big ask with all my other travel commitments, and b) I'd rather have most of my choices in this series be intentional ones, not just whatever the plane ride has to offer. 

Audient Bollywood: Anand

This is the sixth in my 2022 monthly series watching Bollywood movies. 

After watching Anand, I think I have witnessed the template for half the movies Robin Williams made in his career.

That's an exaggeration, of course. It also makes it sound like I didn't like Anand, which I did.

In June, I purposefully went back in time in Bollywood's history after a string of 21st century movies, which was also an intentional choice to see how much the things we today associate with Bollywood -- singing and dancing -- were present closer to its origins. Anand, a 1971 film about a man with a terminal illness, seemed to be a perfect test case for that.

At first it looked like I might have finally found a movie with no singing and dancing. But that proved to be only half right. There were no dance numbers and nothing that even really resembled syncopated physical movement during the songs, but eventually there were indeed songs, some of them quite catchy.

As you might be able to tell from the poster, the title character -- played by Rajesh Khanna -- is a man with an easy smile who doesn't let a terminal diagnosis get him down. He's got the very rare lymphosarcoma of the intestine, and it means he only has six months to live. Anand Sehgal's got a contagious personality type and is always trying to make everyone around him laugh, partly because that's his nature, and partly because he doesn't himself want to be the cause of their sadness. If he only has a short time to live, seeing everyone else around him in grief is certainly no way to spend it.

Can't you see how Robin Williams would have played this role in the American remake?

The other main character is his doctor, who can't do much for him, and who takes on a larger role as his friend. That's Dr. Bhaskar Banerjee (Amitabh Bachchan), a dour sort who gets irritated at being asked to cure the fantasy maladies of the rich, when he wants to save the poor but can do nothing for them. He's let his sense of hopelessness color his whole personality. His interactions with Anand transform him, so much so that he writes a book about them -- in fact, the events of this movie are essentially him recounting his experiences with Anand while accepting an award for his book in the film's opening minutes.

There are side characters -- a doctor friend who has taken a different path than Bhaskar, and love interests for both of them. That's right, Anand is still trying to find someone to fall in love with, an optimist to the end.

It's not an intricate movie plotwise, which makes it a real departure from most of the other Bollywood movies I've seen this year. But it has a pretty strong cumulative effect and works the sentimental angle pretty hard, though usually well. There are a few moments that prompt involuntary sniggers, as they are pitched a bit more dramatically than the scene may call for. But these are relatively few, and overall it's a really nice portrait of triumph over despair.

I wanted to take a moment to mention one of the funny little differences between these and Hollywood movies that I've been observing, few of which I've mentioned so far. One is that many of them have a legal document that appears on screen before the film, that I believe is the government's approval to screen the film. I've found that funny but gotten used to it, and I've been forgetting to bring it up. 

The one I noticed during Anand was related to the opening credits themselves. I've never liked the phrase "guest appearance by" -- how can you be a guest on a one-off project? -- but they do it a little differently in Bollywood, or at least back in the Bollywood of 1971. In this case the two actors singled out were listed as "friendly appearances." I thought that was cute. 

I feel like I should have more to say about Anand, but as you know, I've gotten a bit behind in my writing, and nothing else is really jumping out at me. It's a nice movie that has nice things to say about the human spirit. I'm glad I watched it.

Now that we're halfway done with this series, I have to start carving out time for a few movies I've singled out that I feel like are a must-watch. The problem is, some of them are more than three hours long. Will I have time for this in July? Doubtful, though stretching it out over two nights worked last month, so maybe that's the way to go. 

Audient Bollywood: RRR

This is the fifth in my 2022 monthly series introducing myself to Bollywood movies. 

I mentioned a few months back that I became aware of my March movie, Dhoom, by seeing a large billboard for its sequel hanging in downtown Melbourne. This city is very hospitable to Indian cinema in a way I can't imagine most major American cities being, or not very prominently anyway -- maybe only in heavily Indian areas. (Do any American cities have the Indian equivalent of a Chinatown? An Indiatown, maybe? Little Delhi?)

I tell you this because May seemed like a perfect time to catch a current release -- in the cinema.

The idea might not have occurred to me on my own, but it occurred to my wife. I had showed her a great dance number from Bajirao Mastani, my April film, and that was the occasion for her to show me a trailer for a new movie she had seen advertised called RRR, which she was dying to see.

I can see why. It's a historical epic with great visual effects and action scenes, and an insane sensibility that I would later compare to the films of Timur Bekmambetov. But I'm getting ahead of myself. 

We talked about making this happen, actually going to a Melbourne Hoyts (that's where Bollywood films mostly seem to play locally) to see RRR. But my wife and I might see one movie a year in the theater together, and I don't think we've seen any together since before the pandemic -- not just the two of us. (She's been along to movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Ghostbusters: Afterlife.) The 185-minute running time, had we been aware of it, likely would have further put the kibosh on the idea.

But I left it really late to watch my Audient Bollywood movie for May, and then a few days ago, I happened to see RRR -- on Netflix. It may be that's always where it was supposed to debut for us here in Australia, or it may be that with the Netflix debut pending, its local theatrical window was very short. In any case, a three-hour running time is far more digestible of an idea when you can watch it at home and spread it over two nights.

Which is exactly what we did on Saturday and Sunday.

And this movie is entertaining as fuck. Excuse my language. But it is. 

The two guys you see in the poster -- well, before I tell you who they are, let me explain to you what's going on in that scene, to give you some idea about the tone of this movie. The guy on the bottom has just broken the guy on the top out of prison, where he was scheduled to be hanged, and because the guy on top had his legs broken, he can't walk on his own. So instead of the bottom guy just cradling him or slinging him over one shoulder, they come up with this daunting blend, where the guy on the bottom can be the guy on the top's legs, while the guy on the top fires rifles and punches people out from a height of about ten feet in the air. And you can just imagine the stunts they do jointly, flipping gymnastically around various structures while knocking out various combatants, all the while never becoming disentangled.

The top guy, Rama Raju (Ram Charan), is the guy we meet first. He's a policeman serving his British rulers, and he's a badass. Not only does he believe absolutely in his duty and in fulfilling his role to the best of his abilities, but the best of his abilities involves insane, suicidal acts of bravery. The way we meet him is a perfect illustration of this. During a crowd scene where protestors are trying to knock over a fence as they protest the British ruling regime, a man in the crowd hurtles something over the fence and injures an important person. Determined to arrest this man, Raju runs at full sprint, up an incline, and into a teeming mass of people, all of whom want to do him harm. He literally fights hundreds of people who are closing in on him and crushing him, repeatedly emerging from impossible circumstances to continue pushing this crowd aside as he proves his quarry. And you better bet he gets it, bloodied and bashed though he may be at the end.

The bottom guy, Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao Jr.), is one of the people on the other side of the fence. Not literally, but he's part of a native group in opposition to the ruling class, who casually tread on the value of Indian life, and steal a young girl from his community because they like the way she sings -- and brutally kill her mother on the way out of the village. He's a protector of the village and vows to get this girl back -- who is either literally or figuratively his sister, I couldn't quite be sure. He's a badass too, again as exemplified in the scene where we first meet him. As part of a plan that we don't see materialize until later in the movie, he uses himself as human bait to try to catch vicious predator -- at first they think it's going to be a wolf, but the plans change and it's a tiger instead. (I won't spoil how they use the tiger in case you are inspired to go check out RRR on Netflix yourself.) His scene first escaping, then snaring in a trap that keeps on failing in unexpected ways, then finally subduing the tiger is one for the ages. 

It's clear that director S.S. Rajamouli knows what the hell he's doing when it comes to grand set pieces. He's directed 11 other features, though without looking into it more than I care to do right now, I have no idea if any of them are in this same vein. But let's just say that the more I see of especially recent Bollywood -- you may remember that Bajirao Mastani was from 2015 -- the more convinced I am that the scope, the scale and the visual effects are only a slight step down from the best of what Hollywood is capable, if they are a step down at all. I know that tiger was digital, just as I know that some of the humans themselves had to have digital enhancements to pull of these sorts of stunts. And there are a few times when, for example, a person being blown off their feet by an explosion, or an animal tumbling head over foot, maybe did not tumble or fall in the way that gravity would truly dictate. But it's crazy fun and entertaining, and both my wife and I let out whoops of surprise and joy on regular occasions.

Plot? I can't tell you how closely this sticks to any of the real events in India of the 1920s -- that's when this occurs, if I didn't mention it -- and there's a disclaimer about historical accuracy, or lack thereof, at the beginning of the movie. (Bajirao Mastani had this too.) But the two main characters were real people, famed Indian revolutionaries. All you really need to know is that the British characters are all awful fascists and major assholes (with the one exception of Bheem's British love interest), and that although Raju is initially on their side, it won't/can't last. A revolution is coming to India, and these guys are going to lead it, in spite of dozens of twists and turns and absurd set pieces along the way.

I'm dying to tell you what they do with the tiger(s). But I won't.

However I do want to communicate to you just how gloriously over-the-top this all is. There's an amazing sequence where the pair -- who are working together while the policeman is undercover -- save a child from burning oil slick in the water. It involves riding a horse and a motorcycle over alternate sides of a bridge, each holding a rope as they swing down to grasp the child while also swinging past each other and exchanging a flag, which the second guy will use to protect himself from the flames as he swings back through them. As with many of the set pieces in this movie, a description in words cannot do it justice. You just have to watch it.

And I think, I am concluding right now as I write this sentence, that I may actually watch this movie again. All three hours and five minutes of it. I know there are wonderfully brazen, totally outrageous scenes that I'm forgetting that I would love to watch again. There are parts involving a flaming motorcycle and a bunch of TNT that would be well worth the second watch.

The one thing RRR doesn't have a lot of? Bollywood dancing. There are about two numbers, and then a number that plays over the closing credits as well -- far shy of the ten to 12 numbers in the films I'd watched previously. The one I remember best, though, is the two leads involved in a dance with insanely hard moves. They cheated a little bit by speeding up the film, but I don't care -- the end result is what matters, and the end result of all of RRR is glorious.

One last thing: RRR stands for Rise Roar Revolt. 

Okay, each of my last three movies in this series have been from the 21st century, so it's time to delve back into the past again a bit. In June I am likely to watch Anand, a 1971 film with the merciful running time of only two hours and two minutes.

Audient Bollywood: Bajirao Mastani

This is the fourth in my 2022 monthly series increasing my familiarity with Bollywood.

To this point I have operated on the assumption that whatever Bollywood does well, which so far appears to be quite a lot, it probably would never exceed about 75% of what Hollywood could do with the same material -- at least in terms of the core technical components of cinema.

Bajirao Mastani proved that wrong.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali's 2015 historical epic, which was another of the films identified in Time Out's list of the ten best dance scenes in Hindi movie history, is just about as opulent and technically accomplished as any big Hollywood blockbuster. In fact, Lord of the Rings came to mind during some of the (relatively infrequent) battlefield shots, where a digital camera swooped over the soldiers like an eagle. I couldn't tell if most of the backdrops were real or digital, including impressive palaces and their grand interior chambers, and that's most assuredly a good thing. Likely many of them had to be digital, which means they work even better in a way.

I say it was "just about" as opulent and technically accomplished as a Hollywood film, because there were a few minor "glitches" here and there -- edits that seemed a little abrupt, a few moments of close combat that didn't have the advantage of Hollywood fight choreography, that sort of thing. Overall, though, wow -- what a feast for the eyes.

Of course, what Bajirao Mastani lacks in fight choreography, it more than makes up for in dance choreography.

Because the first dance number is a bit delayed here -- maybe not until about 30 minutes into the 158-minute movie -- for a moment I wondered if I might be getting my first Bollywood movie that did not have dance numbers. (Forgetting for a moment, I suppose, that I had identified this movie because it appeared on the Time Out list of memorable dance scenes.) But when those numbers came on, they came on strong -- and with each new number, I had to ask myself if this was the one the writer had been so impressed by, because each had a very strong candidacy.

First I'll tell you a little what the movie is about. It's an adaptation of the novel Rau, which I guess is already a pretty loose take on its subject -- the opening of the film greets us with a lengthy disclaimer about the attempts at historical accuracy, or lack thereof, of the movie we are about to watch. Rau considers the life of Baji Rao I (or Bajirao Ballal), the seventh "peshwa" (prime minister) of the Maratha empire, who was born in 1700, and his second wife, Mastani. Rao was a great conqueror who defeated Mughals at the Battle of Delhi and the Battle of Bhopal, among others, during a 20-year career as peshwa. And that's all the stuff I don't know about that I care to copy from Wikipedia at the moment.

The story touches on his military victories, and includes some really lovely digital artistic renderings of those battles in the opening credits and elsewhere -- the type you would see in similar Hollywood epics. But this is largely a movie about palace and political intrigue, as Rao's career and reputation were overshadowed by the fact that he took a second wife, a Muslim, despite ample evidence that his first wife (Kashi) was a pretty good catch and a pretty good person. The film makes it out to be that he was sort of duped into the arrangement, as he gave Mastani a dagger, possibly as thanks for saving him in battle. (This may be one of the things that didn't really happen.) In her culture, that was a sign of matrimonial intent on his part. As both a sign of his sense of duty and the fact that he's sort of smitten with her, he agrees to take her on as a second wife -- what the rest of the world sees, especially his traditional Hindu family, as a concubine. The story suggests that it's Mastani he really loves, which causes all sorts of problems for him.

I should stop here to point out a big discovery after the movie started: That first wife, Kashi, is played by Priyanka Chopra Jonas, then just Priyanka Chopra, who has subsequently starting appearing in Hollywood movies (and married Nick Jonas). Because I happen to have seen most of the Hollywood movies she's been in, I feel like I know her a bit, enough so that it seemed nice to see a bit of her origins -- even if those "origins" are only seven years ago. (Her actual cinematic origins go back nearly 20 years, so it would not be a surprise to stumble over her again in this series.) 

Anyway, she's really good here. Because she has graduated to sort of "media personality" status -- I believe I knew her that way before I had seen her in anything -- it felt safe for me to assume she probably wasn't that talented of a performer. Again, watch those assumptions. She can act and she certainly can dance, though it doesn't seem like she's doing her own singing. 

The other leads -- Ranveer Singh as Bajirao and Deepika Padukone as Mastani -- are also incredibly charismatic. When they're the center of their own dance numbers, you can't take your eyes off them.

Let's get to those dance numbers. And for the first time in this series, I'm going to do something that I probably should have done from the start, especially with opening film Dil Se -- include some clips for you to watch.

Without going back to consult the Time Out list during my viewing, I finally concluded that this must be the number that had made the writer's top ten list. It's led by the peshwa and is just overloaded with kinetic energy. The song is called "Malhari":

When I went to check the list, though, I found it was actually a song involving Bajirao's two women dressed in similar saris, called "Pinga." I suppose it's a less aggro/more feminine answer to this song, but is no less awesome:

I'd say the degree of difficulty is higher in "Malhari," but they are equally joyous.

And together they get at why I am enjoying this series so much. What's going on in the narrative is not necessarily joyous in both instances, but Bollywood dance numbers are able to step outside of what's going on in the story to give us something ecstatic on its own terms, without the need to be shackled to the narrative. "Malhari" is indeed celebrating a victory -- political rather than military in this instance, I believe -- but in "Pinga," Kashi is really not that excited about having to accept Mastani into her life through her husband. She does make a gesture by giving her this sari, but the song makes it look like they have truly mended fences, when they haven't really. That doesn't undercut the number's effectiveness in the slightest.

Bajirao Mastani was a big critical hit in India, winning all sorts of awards and becoming the fourth highest grossing movie of 2015. Though after watching it, I have to wonder which were the top three, and how they could top this in terms of production design, dance numbers, etc. 

I suppose as a dramatic narrative, maybe it is not always quite what it could be. I'm not sure I quite feel the tragic romance between the two main characters to the extent that Bhansali wants me to, perhaps because she's a bit stalkerish at certain points and he has a perfectly lovely wife already. But one trick the film does pull off, on a narrative level, is to have gotten me sort of interested in exploring Indian history -- about which I know almost nothing. I probably won't, but let's just say I started to go down a bit of a rabbit hole on it today before having to stop myself due to other commitments. 

On to May.

Audient Bollywood: Dhoom

This is the third in my 2022 monthly series catching up on prominent Bollywood films.

The first two entries in this series included a film that promised to have outstanding dance numbers (1998's Dil Se) and a genuine classic from the origins of Bollywood (1957's Pyaasa). Now in March we get to a film I had actually heard of before this series began.

It may not actually have been Dhoom (2004), per se, that I had heard of, but rather its sequels. I probably wouldn't have heard of Dhoom 2 (2006) either, as South Asian content was not very prominently advertised in Los Angeles, where I lived in both 2004 and 2006. Rather, it was 2013's Dhoom 3 that I remember seeing on a massive poster that took up a whole building wall here in Melbourne, that piqued my curiosity about this franchise nearly nine years ago. But I couldn't rightly start in on the third film of the series, so Dhoom was my choice for March -- and given the goals for this series, to expose myself to a multiplicity of examples of Bollywood, the sequels will likely have to wait until another year, as simply enjoyment-based rather than assignment-based viewing. Read on if you want to see whether my enjoyment rose to the level of seeking them out.

In watching Dhoom, I consciously wanted to see what a Bollywood franchise looked like, especially one I could tell from the poster was an action franchise. And I discovered that it looks ... pretty much like an American franchise.

In fact, Sanjay Gadhvi's film wears its influences on its sleeve. It is essentially a combination of The Fast and the Furious and Ocean's Eleven ... which also describes the Fast and Furious movies in and of themselves as that franchise moved onward. But in 2004 only two movies in each of those series had been released, and probably only one by the time they started making Dhoom. Of course, other Hollywood influences abound, as the central buddy partnership of a cop and a criminal recalls 48 Hrs. and countless other movies on which the genre of the buddy action comedy was based. 

Is resembling these movies a demerit for Dhoom? Hardly. The informal name of India's film industry is a loving homage to Hollywood, so it makes sense that many Bollywood films would be an attempt to bring the conventions of Hollywood to a South Asian audience. Not that those South Asians could not watch the originals, but everyone likes movies that star people who look like them, don't they?

And it's a credible version of Hollywood filmmaking. The action set pieces are good, the comic rapport between the stars is enjoyable, and there's even a use of split screen, which was popularized around that time in the films of Steven Soderbergh in particular. 

I'll give you a quick plot synopsis just so you know what we're talking about. Mumbai is being beset by robberies conducted by a gang who ride motorcycles -- I'd call it a biker gang, but then you might be thinking of Harley Davidsons rather than the bikes you see in the poster, which give the film its Fast and Furious flavor. (Hotrodders are hotrodders, whether their vehicle of choice is a bike or a muscle car.) The leader of the gang is Kabir (John Abraham), and in hot pursuit is detective Jai Dixit (Abhishek Bachchan). Kabir is always one step ahead, of course, so Dixit enlists a low-level hustler, Ali (Uday Chopra), using various blackmails to convince him to cooperate and try to infiltrate the gang. The gang increases the complexity of their heists while Kabir taunts Dixit, including one time bumping into him on the street, pretending to be a blind man -- his "proof" that Dixit couldn't catch him even if he were right under his nose.

That should all sound pretty familiar to anyone who was watching Hollywood action movies around 2004. What wouldn't be familiar is that this, too, has dance scenes. I wasn't 100% sure whether Dhoom would participate in the traditional Bollywood usage of song and dance -- some films made in Bollywood surely must not -- but after the cold open heist, a traditional Bollywood number is the first thing we get. It's between Dixit and his wife (Rimi Sen), and it's just the first of about four or five such numbers throughout the film.

Without fail, such numbers always boost the value of the movie for me. Without them, Dhoom is probably a three-star effort. The dance numbers kick it up to 3.5, and even though I'm trying to avoid giving movies that extra half star for no good reason, these dance numbers are a good enough reason. Their syncopation, their joyousness, and their total lack of necessity to the story always puts a goofy grin on my face.

And as mentioned earlier, the set pieces are pretty inventive. There's something about close-combat fighting in the movies I've seen that seems a bit off, but the stunts are pretty fun. For every bad absurd stunt you have -- like this one part where Dixit and Ali, on a motorcycle, simply jump over a group of approaching assailants, without there appearing to be any sort of incline that enabled the jump -- you have a good absurd stunt. The best of these entails jumping a speed boat over a road, across the path of an approaching truck, so someone on the boat could fire shots at someone in the truck. Fun stuff.

What's also fun is the charisma of these stars. Despite assuming central position in this poster, Bachchan is probably outdone in this regard by the smoldering Abraham and the funny Chopra. Then when one of these people appears in a challenging dance number, you think "Oh yeah, not only are they charming, but they can also dance and possibly sing." The film is, probably unsurprisingly, not great on gender equality, but the female member of the gang, the only woman who appears with any consistency, also has real star power. She's played by Esha Deol, and she has magnetism to spare. (Plus, er, sex appeal. That's all I will say.)

I might go into more detail about Dhoom, but I have to say, I chose some pretty unfavorable circumstances to watch it. It was the second movie I watched after the family and I watched Turning Red. It was nearly 10 on a Saturday night when I got started on it, after an insanely busy week that started in Sydney and also included our upstairs carpets being replaced, our car breaking down, a tour for a possible high school for my son, me conducting interviews for an open position at my job (a career first for me), and more Uber trips than I can count. So yeah, I was too tired to watch Dhoom, probably, but I couldn't resist the projector already being set up in our garage for Turning Red. I fell asleep a couple times, but I think they were all pretty short, and I don't think they affected my ability to follow what was happening or enjoy it. Dhoom isn't the type of movie that asks too much of you, and that was a thing I needed on Saturday night. Fortunately it was also short by Bollywood standards, only 129 minutes. 

On to April, where it may be time to get back to one of the movies that has been singled out for containing a top ten Bollywood dance sequence. Since I really enjoy even the ones with supposedly "mediocre" dance sequences, that could be a real treat. 

Audient Bollywood: Pyaasa

This is the second in a year full of getting acquainted with Bollywood, one movie per month.

Having started this series in January on really solid ground with 1998's Dil Se, I was ready in February to go back and do something that I kind of felt the instinct to start out with: see a really formative Bollywood film.

Unfortunately, iTunes was no help whatsoever.

The first five or so movies I checked from my Bollywood watchlist that were pre-1980, iTunes had none of them. Then I started checking some other titles I'd had earmarked as likely choices for this series for one reason or another, and it didn't have many of them either.

Just when I started to panic -- and was very close to renting something from the past five years that featured a gay relationship, which I thought would be interesting -- I found a goldmine of Bollywood on Amazon Prime. Including the first "formative" film I'd checked for on iTunes, 1957's Pyaasa. Amazon will be a likely source for most of the rest of the films I watch in this series, given its generous quantity of such films. (Netflix has a number as well, but you won't be surprised to learn they are more recent titles.)

Now, Pyaasa is pretty old -- 16 years older than I am, which makes it pretty old -- but it is not the oldest Indian language film I have ever seen. That honor goes to Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, which came out two years earlier but cannot rightly be considered a Bollywood film because it did not emerge from the studio system that comprises Bollywood. (I believe I'm correct in phrasing the basic parameters of Bollywood in that way; I'm just starting out, so you will have to forgive any minor inaccuracies as I discuss these movies.) I googled it to be sure, and Pather Panchali was produced by the government of West Bengal, which definitely sounds outside the commercial sphere of Bollywood.

And Pather Panchali made me a little concerned about Pyaasa. Because there are aspects of its production that are very rough -- much rougher than what a commercially funded film could produce just two years later -- Pather Panchali threw up a little bit of a barrier with me that I never got past. I should clarify that a movie looking rough is not, in itself, reason for me to reject it, but I'm just trying to convey the experience I had with this particular film. The roughness of the filmmaking (sorry Ray, I'm sure you are brilliant) kept me from full engaging at the start, and the story never really brought me in. I am surely wrong about Pather Panchali and someday I would like to revisit it, plus see the other movies in the Apu trilogy, to learn how wrong I really am. (There's a longer discussion of my thoughts on Pather Panchali here if you are interested.)

Despite some worrisome moments in the first ten minutes, Pyaasa is not Pather Panchali.

I should discuss the significance of those first ten minutes before we get on to the film proper. Like Pather Panchali before it, I couldn't get through Pyaasa on my first attempt. While in that case, sleep overtook me, here it was something entirely external to the experience of watching the movie. I first tried to watch Pyaasa on the night the Oscar nominations were announced -- I say "night" because here in Australia, those announcements occur at about 12:20 a.m. I had budgeted exactly the amount of time I'd need to watch the two hour and 20 minute movie, with a few short breaks, before tuning in live to see who'd be competing this year for best picture. But at about the ten-minute mark of Pyaasa, my wife came into the living room to talk to me about something -- don't remember what -- and that conversation took maybe 15 minutes. By that point, the window for Pyaasa had been lost, and I watched Andrew Bujalski's far shorter Funny Ha Ha instead.

I wasn't able to get back to Pyaasa for two weeks, frittering away most of February in the process. There were a couple times I considered putting it on, but it was too late or I was too tired. Simply put, Pyaasa was starting to assume the epic scale of a real chore in my head. It's short by Bollywood standards, but it's long by the standards of most films, and I was really worried about another Pather Panchali experience, plus maybe with singing. The first ten minutes of Pyaasa might have been more polished than Pather Panchali, but not significantly, and I didn't feel myself immediately engaged by the characters. (In case you didn't know, Pyaasa is also black and white, which again is something that factors into the way we prejudge a movie and its possible resources.)

The singing part was the part I was not sure about. As I try to come to a definition of what Bollywood is -- even though it is many things -- I've been asking myself whether singing and dancing is a quintessential part of it. Obviously Bollywood is a behemoth producing hundreds of movies a year, and they cannot all feature singing and dancing. But more to the point, are the movies on my Bollywood watchlist primarily going to have been "recommended" to me because they contain singing and dancing? Is a person making lists of essential Bollywood films going to consider that in the lists they make? Were singing and dancing there from the start, or did they only come later?

I soon learned that yes, singing and dancing were there from the start -- but only if you consider the musical era in Hollywood to be "the start." Bollywood has the same lengthy history that Hollywood has, with films dating back to the turn of the 20th century, so obviously, not much singing then.

I've been yammering at you for quite a while and I haven't really even gotten into the movie yet.

Pyaasa is considered a classic example of the form and is directed by Guru Dutt, who is also its star. As I was watching the film, I did some quick math and decided that Dutt could possibly still be alive today, so I looked it up. Nope, and nope by a lot. He died only seven years later at age 39, from what was either an accidental or intentional mixing of alcohol and sleeping pills. He had already tried to kill himself twice, so it was probably the latter. But he was a huge star before then and I'm thinking I might encounter him again, depending on how many older films I watch in this series.

Dutt plays a poet named Vijay, whose poetry cannot gain any traction with publishers because it deals with social issues rather than romance. His brothers hate him but he has the love of his loyal mother, who is not in great health. He quits his menial blue collar job after his foreman throws out his poetry, knowing what it was but not caring, and soon after there's an episode where the same poems (salvaged from the trash) are sold as scrap paper by his malicious brothers, which he must track down. I love the notion that in India of the late 1950s, scrap paper was something that was sold -- though not for very much money, which becomes a metaphor for how Vijay thinks the world sees him.

He must track down this scrap paper, which leads him to a street walker named Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman), who bought the scrap paper. (What a prostitute needs with scrap paper, I'm not sure.) Speaking of engaging with social issues ... I think I imagined that a Bollywood movie might try to steer clear of tackling issues like prostitution, but maybe Dutt had plenty in common with Vijay, refusing the lures of commercialism and trying to succeed with topics he really cares about. By all accounts that worked with Pyaasa.

His encounter with Gulabo confirmed the thing I hadn't been sure of, and couldn't be sure of despite some melancholy singing in the film's opening minutes -- the movie does indeed follow (create?) the template for future Bollywood films, which is to break from the story for (sometimes lengthy) songs. Now, to say there is dancing in the way there is in a film like Dil Se would not be correct. Given what we know of Dutt, he would likely shun the big commercial dance number, and indeed, what dance we see here is minimal and never involves more than two people. In the one case where there are two people dancing, they are waltzing, not performing Bollywood dance.

It was really useful to see this sort of origin of future Bollywood, because it suggests that there was something common in the DNA of these films, even when the subject matter was not frivolous. A movie with this story would never be a musical in Hollywood, but Dutt's usage of songs, sprinkled regularly throughout, suggests something deeper within the culture that expects this sort of expression on film. 

To be fair, the songs have a textual purpose as well. Vijay's poetry is something that is meant to be sung, in the style of classical Indian music, and it's possible that all the songs in the film are "realistic," in that they involve material really being sung by the characters to each other in that moment, not the metaphorical expression of their thoughts and feelings that comprise a Hollywood musical. Like, in a Hollywood musical a character would probably never say to another "Remember that song you sung to me earlier?", because the song would exist in this nebulous space between a thing that really happened and a thing that didn't really happen. I think all the songs in Pyaasa really happened, but they are spaced out the way they would be in a Hollywood musical, so the effect is similar on the overall thrust of the film.

I quite liked the songs, but as the movie went on, I really liked the story. It picks up incredibly in its second half, after drifting a little too much for my tastes in the first half. It gets really complicated and interesting, also following Vijay's previous love, Meena (Mala Sinha), who didn't marry him because he was poor, as well as the person she did marry, Ghosh (played by an actor who goes by the single moniker Rehman), who also happens to be a literary publisher. Ghosh rejects Vijay's initial attempt to publish, though there later comes a reason he wants to publish the poems, which allows for a really fascinating look at such topics as greed, betrayal and artistic integrity.

By the end, the story actually takes on some aspects of the story of Jesus Christ, which I found really interesting from a movie with these origins. It's possible it also resembles a story in Hinduism or Islam, so I might just be being narrow-minded in my interpretation, but as a western viewer I only have my own reference points.

Long story short -- it may be too late for that at this point -- by the end I was really overwhelmed with how much I liked the movie. In its second half it moved from somewhere around three stars, all the way up to 4.5. And whether my reaction was really more appropriately a four-star reaction, I felt happy to honor Pyaasa in this way -- maybe sort of a makeup call for the paltry 2.5 stars I had given Pather Panchali.

I don't have my movie picked out for March yet, but thanks to Amazon, I have plenty of choices. There are three or four movies on my watchlist that I had heard of prior to starting this series, so it may be time to take down one of those, so I can intersperse the others throughout the rest of the year.