Filmi Geek

Hum dil de chuke sanam (1999)

हम दिल दे चुके सनम

This is grand-scale Bollywood romance, starring Aishwarya Rai and goofball cutie Salman Khan, is recommended for a rainy afternoon’s lush fantasy.  It addresses the conflict between duty and desire, a theme that is often explored to very moving effect in Hindi cinema.  The plot is on the thin and predictable side, but Hum dil de chuke sanam ("My dear, I have already given my heart away") makes up for it amply with three hours of the kind of generous helping of color and chime that only Bollywood can deliver. 

Nandini (Aishwarya), the beloved daughter of a famous musician, has led a sequestered and sheltered life in her father's palatial desert mansion, but she is a big dreamer with a romantic streak.  When Sameer (Salman Khan) arrives from Italy to study with the master, his fresh, handsome charm shakes up the entire household - but it's Nandini who catches his eye.  Their romance takes off quickly, if secretly, but Nandini's father arranges her marriage to Vanraj (Ajay Devgan) and, upon learning of her dalliance with Sameer, exiles him from the house. Sameer returns to Europe; Nandini goes through with the marriage, but she is such a miserable mess that Vanraj takes her to Europe to help her reuinte with her love.  Ultimately Nandini will have to choose - the sizzle of romance or the steady hand of family-approved marriage?

Hum dil de chuke sanam's look at the nature of love, and its comparison of youthful infatuation against the enduring partnership of marriage, is not groundbreaking, and yet its appeal in a culture where many marriages are arranged is fully understandable.  Vanraj is more patient with Nandini's moping and pining than most mere human men could ever be; she is fortunate that her choice comes down to the adorable passionate Sameer with whom sparks fly on the one hand, and a gentle, even-keeled saint of a husband on the other.  That Vanraj is presented as so miraculously tender makes the film's message unmistakably clear; how bad can respecting one's duty really be, if the prize for listening to your parents is a husband like Vanraj?

Story aside, the bulk of the film's entertainment value - and it has quite a bit - resides in the charm of its characters, the beautiful sun-drenched scenery, and, of course, the naach-gaana.  Hum dil de chuke sanam features some of the most delightful song and dance I’ve seen in a Bollywood film – sometimes even as good as the song in dance in the otherwise weak Devdas, which (not coincidentally) had the same director and composer (Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Ismail Darbar, respectively).  Here’s a YouTube link to one of Hum dil de chuke sanam's delightful songs, "Dholi taro dhol baje".  Another popular number from this film, "Nimbooda," is a little on the manic side, but it's still enjoyable, and it showcases Aishwarya's impressive technical skill as a dancer (though I hate her makeup).

Despite the opulence of the sets and costumes, the production of Hum dil de chuke sanam cuts costs in some classic Bollywood ways – the second half of the film, which is supposed to take place in Italy, was filmed in Budapest, and there’s nothing remotely Italian about the setting or the extras who wander about speaking Hungarian.  But none of that matters - Hum dil de chuke sanam is a fine package in which to enjoy the all the outrageously good-looking actors, melodramatic romance, and decadent set pieces that modern Bollywood has to offer.

15 Park Avenue (2005)

In 15 Park Avenue, veteran art film writer-director Aparna Sen takes on an exploration of schizophrenia and its reverberations through several lives.

Konkona Sen Sharma (Aparna’s daughter) gives a distressingly compelling performance as Mithi, stricken with schizophrenia as a young woman and now suffering elaborate, chilling delusions. Mithi is cared for, sometimes with more patience and other times with less, by her older sister Anju (GOAT's favorite, Shabana Azmi).   Anju is a driven and accomplished physics professor, but she can’t seem to manage a personal relationship. Among Mithi's delusions, she believes that she is married to Jojo Roy, a man she was engaged to prior to her final psychotic break. When the real Jojo (Rahul Bose) reappears, all three of their lives are shaken.

I expected a lot from this film – Aparna Sen has a stellar track record and the cast is fantastic – but 15 Park Avenue did not quite match my expectations. The early portions of the film were the strongest. Aparna did a brilliant job of handling the schizophrenia sensitively while still making me squirm with discomfort watching some of the more difficult scenes. In one scene, she allows the viewer to hear one side of a telephone conversation but not the other, contrary to the usual movie convention of viewer omniscience.  The result is a disquieting sense that one is eavesdropping, intruding on the characters' private space.  And Aparna Sen's script and direction extracted a stellar performance out of her talented daughter - Konkona chillingly captured the earnestness and confusion of Mithi's distressing, delusional shadow world.

But as delicate and spot-on as these aspects of the film were, many of the scenes without Konkona had a woodenness of dialogue that was distracting and disappointing. Shabana did a good job even with the weaker material she was given - her Anju was complex and subtle, part selfish, part protector. The fact that she was a scientist was, unfortunately, a token, a shorthand for her rationality and uber-competence. No delicate metaphors were built on this, though they could have been. (Still, as a former physicist, I got quite a charge out of listening to my beloved actress’s honey voice talking about quantum mechanics.)  But Rahul Bose, though I like him, was not quite up to the task of giving life to Aparna's less well-crafted dialogue.

The film's ending was ambiguous - some viewers may enjoy the open-ended conclusion, but I found it abrupt and unsatisfying, one of several ways in which 15 Park Avenue failed to live up to its rich potential.

Jaan-e-mann (2006)

जान-ए-मन

One girl, two guys who love her - sounds like a typical Bollywood love triangle.  But Jaan-e-mann ("Beloved") takes a very unusual look at that old story, with a surreal, self-referential, and theatrical style that uses the full range of freedom offered by the medium of the movies, rather than the constraints of the literal, to tell its tale. 

At the beginning of the film, Suhaan (superstar cutie Salman Khan) is a semi-employed and divorced actor trying to figure out how he is going to pay off his ex-wife Piya's alimony demands.  In steps Agastya (Akshay Kumar), a loveable nerd who had harbored a secret crush on Piya when they were schoolmates.  Suhaan and his uncle Boney (Anupam Kher) hatch a plan:  Get Piya (Preity Zinta) to marry Agastya - once remarried, she will no longer be entitled to alimony.  Piya lives in New York now, so Suhaan and Agastya head overseas to pursue their mission.  What follows is a tender romantic comedy along the lines of Cyrano de Bergerac - the bumbling Agastya is coached via earpiece by the smooth-talking Suhaan, who remains hidden by a series of ever-more-silly disguises.  As the mission approaches fruition, Suhaan must struggle against the love he still feels for Piya.  And the mission almost falls apart when Suhaan is thrown a curve ball that I will not give away here. 

So much for the plot.  From its opening scene - a peculiar sequence that takes place in a space station in orbit about the earth - Jaan-e-mann takes an extraordinary approach to the telling of a fairly ordinary story.  Throughout the film, moments of surrealism operate to weave the story elements together.  In the early scene in which Suhaan discusses his divorce with his uncle Boney (who, by the way, is a "dwarf" played by Anupam Kher on his knees, a harbinger of the weirdness to come), a giant screen suddenly appears in Boney's living room.  "What's this?" he asks.  "It's my flashback," Suhaan answers.  Later, when Suhaan is weeping to Boney via telephone from New York, the telephone booth is transported to Boney's room, glowing warmly in a beautiful and touching illustration of their connection across the seas.  In another example, after a flashback sequence ends with Agastya in tears, the scene fades back to Boney's house where Boney, Suhaan, and the "present" Agastya surround the weeping "flashback" Agastya in sympathetic silence.  The film is full of deft visual touches like these, some more subtle than others. 

One of the best things about this film is Akshay Kumar, who plays Agastya with a gentle sweetness that is a pleasure to watch. Both he and Salman bring a strong sense of comic timing to the film as well, and so the result is a story with equal parts silliness and poignancy. Preity Zinta is passable in her role, though she is the least challenged of the three, serving mainly as a surface that reflects the emotions of the two guys.  This is almost made explicit when the guys, who have rented an apartment across the street from hers, train a telescope on her window, hook it up to a projector, and watch her mundane daily activities in larger-than-life projection.  This device, which might seem creepy and stalker-ish in a more literal movie, works here as a symbolic expression of Priya's role.

The music serves the film well, but it is powered by the visuals and would not stand as well on its own. The best song by far is the manic, bizarro-world "Jaane ke jaane na," in which musicians, clowns, and midgets stream out of Boney's cupboards and parade around his living room with a cardboard cutout of Preity Zinta.   The film's first song, "Humko maloom hai," recounts Suhaan and Piya's marriage in a delightfully theatrical style, with explicit and implicit Broadway references. It is this kind of free theatrical touch that makes Jaan-e-mann a wonderfully fresh take on the standard Bollywood love triangle theme.

Don: The Chase Begins Again (2006)

Don: The Chase Begins Again is a slick, polished remake of the 1978 masala classic known simply as Don.  At the time I saw this film - in a theater on its first run - I had not yet seen the original, so I present my impressions of it here without comparison to the antecedent, without holding the modern script to its campy ancestor, without pitting its star Shah Rukh Khan head-to-head against the great Amitabh Bachchan, the original Don.   [Note: some comparison may be found in Filmi Geek's review of the original, written about a month after this review.] 

Still, it's difficult for me to review this film.  To explain my perspective, I can say that if this were not a Hindi film featuring some of the biggest names in contemporary Hindi cinema (though none of my personal favorites), I would not have seen it.  If it were a Hollywood film I might have been only barely aware of its existence.  It belongs to a genre - action thriller - to which I just don't pay any attention.  It's just not my thing.

If it is your thing - if you are capable of relaxing into the mode of the action thriller, of surrendering yourself to the particular kind of unreality that the genre presents, Don is a thoroughly fun ride.  Its twists and turns, while in some cases predictable, are nevertheless well-paced and well-executed.  Its sense of style is decadent and consistent.  I felt that some of the fight scenes went on too long, and I was irritated by some small weaknesses in the plot, but I think these stem more from the fact that I am not an action thriller fan than from any problem with this film in particular.  The film made excellent use of its exotic locale - Malaysia - with towering, vertiginous shots of the spectacular Petronas Towers and a climactic scene atop a forested mountain, perched upon a treetop network of scenic observation platforms and precarious bridges.

Shah Rukh Khan is used perfectly here in the title role.  He made his name as a romantic hero, and though he is a massive star he never really worked for me in that capacity.  In Don, though, his slick, creepy demeanor well suits the sadistic hedonism of the character.  The best performance in the film is that of Boman Irani, one of Bollywood's best and most versatile character actors, who is nuanced and intense as Don's nemesis, a ranking police official named DaSilva.  Priyanka Chopra is also quite good as a woman who, having lost her brother to Don's cruelty, infiltrates his organization in search of an opportunity to take revenge.

The soundtrack is a thumping techno score by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy.  I have observed with soundtracks by this team that I usually find there is one excellent song, maybe one or two that are fine but not particularly special, and the remainder range from mediocre to atrocious.  Don fits this pattern perfectly.  The triumphant track "Main hoon Don" is the excellent song, chilling and addicting. The anticipatory "Aaj ki raat" is also good, though I did not appreciate it until I saw the film, in which it sets a slick and smooth, yet kinetic, mood.  The other tracks are neither here nor there.  "Mourya re" is a colorful but forgettable festival song, the only track in which the techno beats have been laid aside.  Two remakes of songs from the original, "Yeh mera dil" and "Khaike paan banaraswala" fall completely flat for me.  In "Khaike paan" the techno beat just interferes with the bumpy energy of the tune, getting in the way and adding nothing.  "Yeh mera dil" is overproduced drivel, a pale shadow of the funky aesthetic of Asha Bhosle's orginal rendition. 

Still, even if the soundtrack is not one that I will listen to on its own, it suited the mood and tone of the movie and the picturizations were diverse and entertaining, and were among the most enjoyable aspects of the film as it was going on.  I haven't included Don in my "Good introductions" category, but I do think that if you are a fan of the action thriller genre, Don is an example of the best that the current golden age of Hindi film can offer.

Pyaasa (1957)

प्यासा

This 1957 film, which I selected on the recommendation of some of my friends at the BollyWHAT? discussion forums, has a very unusual hero – a starving, unrecognized poet Vijay (Guru Dutt).

Early in the film, Vijay is driven out of his mother’s home by his brothers, who think he’s a good-for-nothing layabout; they sell his life’s work, all of his poems, to a junk dealer as scrap paper.  Left with nothing, Vijay wanders the streets, encountering a prostitute, Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman, stunningly gorgeous and probably not more than 19 years old) and his old college flame Meena (Mala Sinha), now married to a big-time publisher. As (through a twisting series of events) Vijay’s poems become known to the world, he is disillusioned by the constant jockeying of everyone around him to benefit from the success of his work.

Pyaasa ("Thirst") is a beautiful film, shot with breathtaking cinematography, and the songs – whch are meant to be Vijay’s poems – are uniquely lovely.  (Unfortunately not all DVD editions subtitle the songs.)   Among my favorites is "Jaane kya tune kahin," which shows how breathtaking the young Waheeda was.  And "Ham aap ki aankhon mein" is one of the classic genre of ballroom fantasy sequences parodied in Dil chahta hai's "Woh ladki hai kahaan."

In one of its most interesting aspects, Pyaasa was sensitive to the plight of prostitutes and nautch-girls, while at the same treating society women (represented by Meena) much less kindly. The downtrodden women were shown just trying to make a living and care for their children, all the while demeaned and abused by the very men they serviced.   The society woman, in contrast, was exposed as a manipulative, selfish fraud. This is the kind of message I expect in a Deepa Mehta or Shyam Benegal film - but I was (perhaps naively) surprised and pleased to see it in a mainstream film from 1957.

Fanaa (2006)

फ़ना

Fanaa ("Destroyed in love") marked the return of the actress named Kajol to the screen after a several-year hiatus to raise a young child.  Before Fanaa I had only seen Kajol in one awful film (Ishq), though she starred opposite Shah Rukh Khan in some of the biggest hits of the 1990s.  Because her comeback was so eagerly anticipated among fans of Hindi film, and because Fanaa paired her with GOAT favorite Aamir Khan, I looked forward to this one. Add to that the fact that I got to see it on the big screen in its first run, and my expectations were high.

Unfortunately, Fanaa did not quite meet those expectations.

It has a few strengths, especially the steamy romance between Kajol and Aamir – they set the screen on fire.  Zooni (Kajol) is a sheltered blind girl from the Kashmiri mountains who ventures to Delhi with some of her schoolmates to dance on stage at a government event.  Rehan (Aamir) is the carefree, flirtatious tour guide hired to show the young women around the city.  Their attraction crackles from the moment they meet, and they are the delight of the film's first half, as they playfully improvise poetry to one another and tear around the streets of Delhi.  At the intermission, the film takes a sinister turn.  But the film's second half dissolves into a masala mess with plot holes that a jetliner could fly through, and as the wheels start to come off and the ride gets bumpier, the magnetism of Fanaa's two stars is not enough to carry it through. 

The film does have a fun soundtrack and some gorgeous picturizations - "Chand sifarish," for example, is a catchy toe-tapper, and "Mere haath mein" is pretty both to listen to and to watch.   But the story's weaknesses ultimately distracted from the searing beauty and heartbreak of the romance. When Kajol and Aamir were alone together on the screen, Fanaa sizzled. The rest of the time, it fell somewhere between flat and ridiculous.

Hum tumhare hain sanam (2002)

हम तुम्हारे हैं सनम

At times this film is merely an overwrought, love-triangular, Bollywood melodrama.  Even so, Hum tumhare hain sanam ("I am yours, dear") occasionally shines when it digs deep into the damage that failure to communicate can wreak on a relationship.

The relationship at risk here is that between straight-laced businessman Gopal (overacting superstar Shah Rukh Khan) and his sweet but clueless wife Radha (the gorgeous Madhuri Dixit, in a role that doesn’t come close to taking advantage of her abilities). All Gopal wants is some romantic, intimate time with his wife – lots of it, in fact – but Radha would rather hang around with her childhood friend Suraj (goofball cutie and GOAT favorite Salman Khan), a successful pop musician. Gopal doesn’t tell Radha that he’s feeling neglected; Radha doesn’t catch on that Gopal is jealous of her closeness to Suraj; their marriage comes dangerously close to the brink before Suraj realizes what is going on and steps in to help them out.

The script has a few very sensitive moments, exploring the work that goes into really making a relationship out of a marriage. But the film doesn’t quite fire on all cylinders; the pacing is clunky, the mood overwrought and contrived. And the songs – except for "Gale mein laal taai," a dream sequence number that I adore – range from unremarkable to awful.

Water (2005)

Water is the third and final film in Deepa Mehta's "Elements" series that began with my beloved Fire and continued with the breathtaking Earth.  In my opinion, Water is the weakest of the trilogy, but it is still lovely and moving.

Set in the holy city of Banaras in the 1930s, Water portrays the experiences of a child bride Chuyia (Sarala).  Widowed before she is even old enough to know she is married, Chuyia is exiled to an ashram ruled by a tyrannical old hypocrite Madhumati (Manorama).  Chuyia is looked after by two of the other widows in the ashram, the contemplative Shakuntala (Seema Biswas) and the lovely dreamer Kalyani (Lisa Ray), as well as a dashing Gandhist scholar (John Abraham) who meets Kalyani and Chuyia on one of their rare excursions outside the ashram. 

The film’s real message is wrought in the juncture between the ashram's secluded cloister and a greater city in which the progressive ideas of Gandhi are beginning to take hold. The greatest strength of this film is Deepa Mehta’s visuals, which call on the titular element of water as a rich metaphor for so many things: a force for change and destruction and cleansing, but also, when stagnant, a haven for the breeding of disease.

As usual, Deepa Mehta extracts intense, cerebral performances from her actors, although Lisa Ray and John Abraham are not quite up to the standard set by the excellent work of Seema Biswas and especially little Sarala, who perfectly conveys the sadness and confusion of her story from the perspective of a little girl. 

Raja Hindustani (1996)

राजा हिन्दुस्तानी

Raja Hindustani is pure masala - it's fair to say that Raja Hindustani is the Platonic form of masala. 

The plot is Bollywood's classic time-tested poor-guy rich-girl romance.  GOAT favorite Aamir Khan is the titular character - his name also means "Indian king" - a proud taxi driver.  He meets Aarti (Karisma Kapoor) when she arrives in his town for an extended vacation and hires him and his cab to shepherd her around.  After a few obligatory misunderstandings, Raja and Aarti fall for each other.  Aarti's family schemes to drive them apart, however, and much weeping, hand-wringing, anger, and other masala elements - like a drunk Raja making a scene at a classy party - ensue.

Raja HIndustani, like many masala films, is better in the first half as the characters are introduced and their relationships established than it is in the second half, where the tensions rise in pitch and where Raja appears to go somewhat insane.  The climax is bizarre and over-the-top.  Still, it's not an awful film, and somehow works better than the sum of its parts would suggest.  It also includes a few really terrific songs, like "Pardesi pardesi jaana nahin" and "Aaye ho meri zindagi mein".  It was a tremendous hit in its day, though I'm not sure it holds up well. 

Main hoon na (2004)

मैं हूँ ना

I have to admit that when I first began watching this Shah Rukh Khan superstar vehicle, I didn't know anything about it, and for the first 45 minutes or so I thought it was intolerably stupid.  At some point, though, I realized that the whole thing was a spoof - it wasn't meant to be taken seriously at all - and after that epiphany I was able to sit back and quite enjoy this silly entertainer. 

Shah Rukh plays Ram, a 35-or-so-year-old military commando sent back to college with a dual undercover mission: protect a general's daughter (Amrita Rao) from terrorists, and find his own long-lost half-brother (Zayed Khan) to carry out his father's dying wish to reunite them.  In the process he falls in love with the school's chemistry teacher Chandni (Sushmita Sen), offs a bunch of bad guys, and saves the world to boot. 

Main hoon na ("I'm here, aren't I?") is rich with spoofing references to both classic Bollywood tropes and Hollywood films.  One memorable bit is a Matrix-style slow-mo sequence in which Shah Rukh dodges spittle instead of bullets.  Other recurring gags poke fun at the Bollywood musical romance tradition; each time Ram sees Chandni, a troupe of violin players suddenly surrounds him and he finds himself unable to resist bursting into song.

The fight scenes are tedious, and the portrayal of college life is inane, but Main hoon na makes up for these weaknesses with the sweet earnestness of the characters and a couple of very creative and fantastic song picturizations, like "Tumhe jo maine dekha", Ram's fantasy about romancing Chandni, and "Tumse milka dil ka hai," an exuberant ode to love in which all the main cast members participate. 

I am not really a fan of Shah Rukh Khan.  But Main hoon na is one of the few films I have seen in which Shah Rukh's studied, blow-dried performance style really worked for me.  His typically forced delivery suited Ram's awkwardness as a soldier undercover among students half his age.  And in his songs, since he was fancying himself a romantic hero, the over-the-top affect with which he usually plays came across, for once, as self-effacing and charming. 

I used to think this film would not be a great introduction to Hindi films because of its parody nature.  Also, the opening song ("Chale jaise hawaien") was, to my eye, a fairly nondescript college number that I thought (despite some impressive technical work - nearly all of it was shot in two very long takes) would leave Bollywood neophytes at best nonplussed.  But my friends at the BollyWHAT? discussion forums report wonderful reactions to this film even among the uninitiated, and so I include it in Filmi Geek's "good introductions" category.