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.
No comments:
Post a Comment