Filmi Geek

Lal pathar (1964)

লাল পাত্থার

Dir. Sushil Majumdar

Not long ago I reviewed the 1971 Hindi version of this movie, starring Raaj Kumar, Hema Malini, and Rakhee, which I enjoyed very much.   The comments on that post included a very interesting comparison of that movie with the original, Bengali version of the film.

This one has Uttam Kumar instead of Raaj Kumar (Bahadur), Supriya Devi instead of Hema Malini (Madhuri), and in the role that later went to Rakhee, Srabani Basu (Sumita).  It is somewhat different in style from the Hindi version; for lack of a better way to put it, the latter is just more filmi somehow.  And since both stories are equally ridiculous, for me the Hindi version works better, seeming to own its ridiculousness.  Both are melodramatic, but the Hindi version seems more comfortable in that skin.  The garish visual design, Hema Malini's scene-chewing, Raaj Kumar's intense stare-acting - all just add up to a more entertaining, if not objectively better, movie.  That said, I do think Supriya Devi's Madhuri is a more engaging character than Hema Malini's version; with an air of greater maturity, less shrillness and more sympathy on her side.  (Plus, how gorgeous is Supriya Devi? Guh.)  However, Rakhee also a much more interesting Sumita than the bland, retreating version that Srabani Basu renders in the Bengali version of the film. 

At any rate, who is better company for watching Bengali films than Beth?  No one, that's who, and so it was with Beth that I sat down to watch Lal pathar.  During, we tried to make sense of the story, compared Bengali melodramatic style with Hindi, and discussed the obligatory name-drops of Rabindranath Tagore (this film contains two of those, plus Rabindrosangeet, leading me to speculate that Bengali films must achieve a certain Tagore density for certification, much the way films produced in Canada must have a minimum number of Canadian actors in them.  Beth dubbed this idea "TagCon.")  Afterward, she and I had a roundup chat about the film, and the remainder of this post comprises that discussion, with a few light edits.

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Beth:  Here's a question for you: based on having seen the Hindi remake, did you have expectations of the Bengali original, and if so did it meet them?

Carla:  I might have had expectations, although I am not sure I could have articulated them in advance. Silverambrosia's comments on my review of the Hindi version  gave me the sense that that the Bengali film would be more solemn, more cinematic - less filmi.  And, it was. I don't think I was expecting it to be less fun, which it also was.

What about you, given your knowledge of Bengali films of the period and Uttam Kumar's films - what were your expectations?

Beth:  You had showed me the excellent wiggery in the Hindi version, so I hoped for that - and got it right away. But as for actual Bengali cinema-based things, it was slightly more melodramatic than I would have expected, almost all owing to him being such an ass. The other movie I've seen Uttam be an ass in, he was the villain, quite clearly, so it wasn't a surprise. The way Lal Pathar depicted that was fun but also kind of silly at times: great use of shadows and all, but maybe the almost literal mustache twirling was a bit much, like when he's off hunting and is cackling and smoking while waving his gun.

Carla:  In particular about Bahadur being a jerk: in the Hindi movie, the Raaj Kumar version of Bahadur is just as much of a jerkwad as the Uttam Kumar version. Both Bahadurs are awful, and both are loony. But I find Raaj Kumar's version a more sympathetic character. He remains pitiable, while Uttam Kumar is mostly just mean.

Beth:  Agree - he is mean. And there's no explanation or context for it beyond "I am a rich male oh and by the way there is madness/alcoholism in my family."

Carla:  I don't think it's explained more in the Hindi version.

Beth:  He's also a hypocrite, since he flips out with jealousy over Sumita's past love while HIS LOVER IS IN THEIR HOUSE.

Carla:  I think it is something about the performance that makes Uttam Kumar seem meaner than Raaj Kumar.

Beth:  Uttam Kumar does smug pretty well, I'd say. One of his strengths is nonchalance and I think here he twists it into uncaring.

Carla:  Raaj Kumar seems tortured throughout.  And RK's Bahadur really loses his shit when he realizes ten years have gone by.

Beth: Uttam does not seem tortured at all, I'd say? 

Carla:  I agree. Nonchalance was a good word to apply to it.

Beth:  There's no one and nothing with any...influence, is that the right word? over him. He's just a blasé self-centered bastard with no one to keep him in check.

Carla:  As for the women, I'd say the reverse is true—Supriya's Madhuri is much more likable and sympathetic than Hema's Madhuri in the Hindi version.

Beth:  Do you think that's dialogue or the actress or....?

Carla:  A little of both. Among the few scenes I noticed in the Hindi version that were missing in the Bengali version were Madhuri being shrill and cruel to the servants.

Beth:  Oh right. I wish we had known more about her before Bahadur finds her, you know? We have no idea what her pre-trauma personality was like, really.

Carla:  That's another aspect that's in the Hindi but missing in the Bengali: her family abusing her. After he first saves her from the dakus and returns her to her family—I gather from her widow's garb that they are in fact her in-laws, and they are horrid to her—and so it is quite distasteful when she turns around and treats Bahadur's household like crap.

Beth:  Oh yeah, then that's extra bad. Do you think THAT, coupled with his descent into jerkitude, indicates that the film is saying that one really is bound in by what one inherits or learns early in life?

Carla:  There is some interesting point being made there for sure.

Beth:  He's so adamant that he won't marry because his family is so awful, but then all of a sudden he does.

Carla:  He practically makes a choice to act like the criminally insane father's side of his family. He picks up the drinking right after he meets Madhuri; his servants are shocked by that. But yes, after the 10 years go by, and he goes off the deep end —when Madhuri asks him why he has suddenly decided to get married he walks her through the family history by way of answer.

Beth: Did that make sense? I don't remember.

Carla:  I am not sure it did, but that might be because I find it hard to keep track of the names, and who was on which side of his family.

Beth:  The walk through family history should be reasoning for why NOT to.

Carla:  You would think! His reasoning and changes of mind are somewhat puzzling to me. But it is clear that he is becoming progressively more insane.

Beth:  I wonder why he fixates on Sumita as his bride. I know someone says to him "who'd give you their daughter" but come on, he's loaded! Lots of people would give him their daughters.

Carla:  The dull Sumita (at least in the Bengali version). Yes, in the very beginning of the film, there is another royal family offering their daughter, and he declines.

One thing the movie does nicely, I think, is show how badly women get fucked over when cruel men make life-changing decisions for them. Sumita's father is as awful as Bahadur in this respect.

Beth:  Oh yes. A drunk and a gambler…who somehow got his daughter educated.

Carla:  True, but only for his own gain.

Beth:  Just as Bahadur tries to educate Madhuri so he has someone to talk about books with, I assume. Do you think he chooses Sumita simply because she was there and had a pretty voice? That's a trait his mistress lacked.

Carla:  The pretty voice, and perhaps (as you said) the education implied by the fact that she is musically skilled.

What do you think is up with Bahadur's insane jealousy, as you mentioned before?

Beth:  I have thought about that but not come up with much other than no one has ever been a threat to him in any way at all before? No one has even unintentionally been in the same arena with him.

Carla:  Yes!At first he seems legitimately interested in friendship with Ambarish, and it never occurs to him that there is romantic history between Ambarish and Sumita until Madhuri tells him so. That is consistent with what you are saying—it doesn't occur to him that Ambarish might be competition, because no one ever has been.

Beth:  I assume he also feels somewhat betrayed by the fact no one told him there had been a romance previously. Not just with a man he is friends with but also AT ALL. Men like him would assume their baby wives are virginal in any conceivable way, right?

Carla:  Yes, true. Plucked so young. And also free of anything like a sexual feeling of her own.

Beth: He's very accustomed to a woman being around for HIS sexual needs alone, since the previous woman has no life at all except what he's given her

Carla:  And how! good point.

Beth:  I also wonder if he's too much a solitary person at all to be married, irrespective of family trauma-drama-o-rama. He doesn't have any friends or siblings, does he?

Carla:  Not that are mentioned. Just that one manservant (the one with the child bride) that he chats with from time to time.

What do you think of Madhuri?

Beth:  I like her, though of course she's a bit of a pot-stirrer. I feel like she's excessively kind to him by the end. I think you brought up Stockholm syndrome? It's along those lines to me. He was horrible to her. But then again, we don't get the sense she's known anything better.

And that bystander guy gushes on about what an excellent woman she is to do that...so maybe she takes satisfaction in the virtue or something.

Carla:  Do you think she feels she owes him, because at least for those 10 years she got to be something like a queen, thanks to him?

Beth:  Maaaybe? Or is she just being wifely?

Carla:  Or as you suggested, she has nowhere else to go.

Beth:  And, as we discussed while watching, what else is she going to do, I guess?

Carla:  Jinx :)

Beth:  What do we think TRULY cemented the lunacy: murdering his wife and his friend OR the fact there was a baby? Or both? Or was he already gone?

Carla:  The whole plot that led to her death was pretty wacko to begin with.

Beth:  It wasn't clear to me how much meddling Madhuri did there. That scene where he overhears Sumita and Ambaraish and sees their silhouettes—that was authentic and NOT staged by Madhuri.

Carla:  Madhuri didn't come to Agra with them, did she?

Beth:  She did not. I'm not sure she actually set anything in motion, other than telling him about their past romance.

Carla:  Yes, she hinted about that, and then tried to seduce Ambarish a couple of times (it is unclear to me why).

Beth:  I wonder what Sumita made of Bahadur as a husband….or even just as a human being.

Carla:  Bengali Sumita is so bland, unburdened by personality.

Beth:  Heehee completely! I wonder if that would have suited him had he not gone krazzy4.

Carla:  The Hindi Sumita (Rakhee) is much better. She at least feels like potential, like a personality waiting to burst out, and that makes her death more of a tragedy—one has the feeling she could have been good for Bahadur, if he only stopped acting like a loon about her.

Beth:  My reaction to her death in the Bengali one was along the lines of "Oh Bahadur, you idiot, now you're a MURDERER too?" and much less "oh poor Sumita."

Carla:  Sumita is too much of a cypher to elicit much sympathy, perhaps.

Beth:  She wasn't a very specific loss. Not that there was any plot left to spend on that anyway.

The Lunchbox (2013)

डब्बा

Dir. Ritesh Batra

(A lot has been written about this film, which finally found its way into arthouse cinemas in the US after its successful run on the festival circuit and limited release in India last year. For that reason, I've allowed more spoilers than usual in what I've written below.  If you don't want to know how the film ends, don't read this review until after you've seen it.  For a most thoughtful and thorough discussion of the movie's themes and narrative metaphors that doesn't explicitly give away the ending, read what Beth had to say about it.)

A chance encounter can change a life.  I know someone who married a woman he met on an airplane, in the kismet of arbitrary travel plans and random seat assignments.  We are all of us ruled by stochastic interactions, the interplay of chance, the haphazard intersection of our paths through spacetime with the distinct paths of others.  

The Lunchbox (Dabba) is a tale of a one-in-a-million encounter and the people it alters:  The dabba delivery system of Bombay, so legendarily flawless, makes a mistake, delivers one dabba to one wrong recipient, and connects two lonely people.  There is magic in this, just as there seems to be magic in the meeting of one's life partner on a cross-country flight. It is magical that the error links an anxious, unappreciated homemaker, Ila (Nimrat Kaur) with a curmudgeonly, depressed widower, Saajan (Irrfan Khan).  If Ila's dabba had mistakenly gone to a clueless young professional just like her husband, or if Saajan had accidentally received a dabba from some other restaurant than the one he had always ordered from, there would be no story.  The hand of fate carefully guides Ila's dabba so that Saajan and Ila can find each other across space, and also for our benefit, so we have a movie to watch. That is kismet.

The Lunchbox acknowledges the magic in this setup, by hinting at other metaphysical connections between Saajan and Ila.  Twice during the film, when Ila is at home listening to film songs drifting down from her neighbor's apartment, Saajan, riding the Bombay local, hears boys singing the same songs.  At another point, Ila and Saajan are shown each batting a fly away at the precise same moment, on opposite sides of the city.  And so it the right choice, in the end, for The Lunchbox to remain ambiguous about where Ila and Saajan's connection takes them, because anything concrete would have pierced the veil of that magic. 

After the movie, a woman stopped me in the restroom and asked, "Do you think they went to Bhutan together?  I do."  Likely a significant fraction of the audience was rooting for that outcome.  But showing it would have required facing a lot of messy realities that would break The Lunchbox's gentle spell.  When Ila and Saajan finally meet, are they attracted to one another?  Is it the same kind of attraction on both sides?  Will Ila actually leave her husband on the spot?  What about their daughter?  And just how much older is Saajan than Ila, anyhow?  The Lunchbox is right not to address these questions, to remain in its magical space where accidents of fate can bind strangers together on their journey around the sun without regard to bare, troublesome practicalities. 

Instead of such muddying complications, The Lunchbox dwells beautifully on human connections.  The dour Saajan acquires not only the delicious meals and thoughtful letters of Ila, but also the friendship of his optimistic puppy-dog of an assistant, Shaikh (Nawazuddin Siddiqui, in a performance that bounces like a super-ball off Irrfan Khan's morose tension).  This friendship grows so touchingly and organically that it is a more satisfying relationship than the nominally central one between Saajan and Ila.  After all, it is more real; unlike an epistolary relationship, the literal, physical closeness of Shaikh and Saajan leaves no space for fantasy.  Shaikh's presence is real, irritating, inconvenient - he looks too closely over Saajan's shoulder, juts his head into Saajan's personal space, helps himself to Saajan's lunch - and their friendship grows out of this rocky soil anyhow.   The messy realities are dispatched before the two men become close.  When Saajan tells Shaikh he has a girlfriend named Ila, the feeling is sweet but also a bit pathetic; the question whether Ila thinks of him as her boyfriend hangs in the air between screen and audience.  If Saajan were to tell Ila of a best friend named Shaikh, however, there is no such pestering doubt.  And Saajan's first smile of the movie comes while talking to Shaikh, not while reading Ila's letters.

But Saajan is changed by both relationships.  For one, he is made to feel young, then old, then young again, until perhaps he comes to realize that he is neither, or both, or that it doesn't really matter, so long as he has not given up human connections entirely.  The Lunchbox provides sweet and delicate window into the ways people touch each other, without too much focus on the troublesome details, or how touch also sometimes means hurt.  It's a lovely fantasy world to spend a little time in, and you get to choose your own ending.

Gaddaar (1973)

गद्दार

Dir. Harmesh Malhotra

Some time ago, I started to write a discussion of this fascinating, intense, visually gorgeous, relatively underappreciated film, only to discover that Beth and Greta had already said just about everything I wanted to say about it. Gaddaar (“traitor”) is a film that lines up all the usual masala suspects – Pran, Madan Puri, Ranjeet – and places them in a taut, intriguing narrative that is anything but masala. Here, the villains are the protagonists – individuals of relative depth, with personalities beyond “megalomaniacal villain” and “thuggish henchman.”

 Where a masala film elevates a social ideal by embodying it in a hero and pitting him against a snarling, comic-book mastermind of pure evil, Gaddaar turns its lens on the workaday crook, releaving a narrative of the guys who commit crimes not out of grand, twisted principles but rather just to make a living. These are not larger-than-life cartoon mustache-twirlers who occupy the tricked-out techno-hedonism lairs of masala bad guys.

And yet Gaddaar still presents a high-70s, masala-esque aesthetic.  It offers that wild sense of style that makes films of this era such a visual treat - the villains sport everything from shearling coats to pink ruffled shirts to checked jackets to wide-collared pastel suits.  There are brilliantly gaudy interiors, and dancers glowing in colorful lighting.  And in one of the most masala touches, the villains get a terrific qawwali.

  

Gaddaar explores themes of trust and betrayal, honor among thieves, as these villains try to track down a compatriot who has made off with the loot from their big job. Confined to a hotel room in Bombay or a snowbound lodge in the Himalayas, they move through a complex dance of shifting alliances and betrayals. These are manipulated by an interloper to the gang, the outsider Raja (Vinod Khanna), who is here so young and relatively unknown that his emergence as a good guy is anything but guaranteed.

So take a look at Beth's comments and Greta's, prepare yourself for some fabulous visual style and a narrative as lean and intense as Deewaar, and watch this fabulous film.

Lal patthar (1971)

लाल पत्थर

Dir. Sushil Majumdar

Sometimes a movie about horrible people can nevertheless be a satisfying watch.  Two of Lal patthar's three principals are awful; Bahadur (Raaj Kumar) is vain, selfish, and sanctimonious, and Madhuri (Hema Malini) is mean, indolent, and manipulative.  This movie could have been unbearable, the kind of film where you yell at the screen in annoyance and unsympathy as awful people do awful things to one another.  Yet somehow it isn't.  It retains just enough of a shred of sympathy for each to keep the viewer engaged in their troubles. 

Raaj Kumar Bahadur, also known as Gyanshankar Rai, is a man of great wealth and royal birth, troubled by his family history (which, in the usual style, is set out in confusing exposition in the first 15 minutes of the film).  With a villanous father, a saintly mother, and a possibly insane grandfather, Bahadur perceives himself as a cursed duality, a mixture of two very different types of personality.  He vows celibacy (so as not to propagate the damaged family line), as well as temperance.  Then, while out on a tiger hunt,  he rescues a girl who had been kidnapped by dakus.  Bahadur returns the girl to her family, who abuses her terribly.  Learning of this, Bahadur essentially buys her from them.  Moved by her beauty and apparent fragility, he falls in love with her, christens her Madhuri, and makes her his queen in all but formality - he does not marry her.

Oh my goodness she is lovely.

Duality is a running theme in Lal patthar.  Bahadur has the blood of two very different families running in his veins, and his two names reflect that.  He also shifts from one persona to another when he meets Madhuri, turning abruptly from his celibate and teetotaling ways.  Madhuri starts her life as a village girl, Saudamini, but Bahadur wants to remake her according to his own model of the ideal woman:  refined, educated, literate in English and Hindi.  Indeed, you know things are not going to go well for Bahadur and Madhuri when he says this:

That trick never works!

Sure enough, Madhuri does not take all that well to playing Eliza Doolittle to Bahadur's Henry Higgins.  There is some interesting commentary on the relativity of cultural values lurking here:  Bahadur frets disgustedly at Madhuri's rural-accented Hindi, while Madhuri in turn giggles at her English tutor's English-accented Hindi.  And the English tutor makes no headway with Madhuri. "Please excuse me if I put it bluntly," she explains to Bahadur as she resigns her post. "Rani sahiba is rather dull-headed."  What Rani sahiba is, in fact, is bullheaded; Madhuri seems more uninterested than unable to learn what Bahadur wants her to master.  And while she may not acquire much refinement, she takes very readily to the role of mistress of the manor; in no time she is fluent at abusing the servants.

Though one has the sense that Bahadur's love for Madhuri fades as she fails to conform to his ideal imaginings, she remains mistress of his home.  The years pass, and the ever sharp-tongued Madhuri gleefully points this out to Bahadur, who seems to have spent a decade in a haze and is shocked to discover grey at his temples.   Annoyed at Madhuri, Bahadur trades up to a younger model - a poor, talented, lovely singer named Sumita (Rakhee). 

Her stage is adorned with a giant version of Vijantimala's puffball saree from Jewel Thief. How could he not fall in love?

This time, Bahadur marries, earning him a promotion from Rajkumar to Raja, and making Sumita his actual queen.  But Madhuri remains the de facto head of the household, mistress not just of the servants, but of Bahadur himself - when she beckons, he will drop anything, even Sumita, and go to her.   Despite this evident hold on him, Madhuri burns with envy.  She plants the seeds of jealousy in Bahadur's mind, questioning Sumita's relationship with her childhood sweetheart, Shekhar (Vinod Mehra), recently returned from abroad.

And rather dashing he is.

The loyal Sumita is the innocent victim here of Bahadur and Madhuri's pathological relation.  Though she would, in fact, rather be married to Shekhar, Sumita shoulders her fate stoically as a good Indian girl should, and wants nothing more than to please Bahadur and win his attention.  It's hard not to feel sorry for her, thrown into this ridiculous household dominated by these two awful people. 

And yet part of what makes Lal patthar so much fun is that all of the characters are somehow sympathetic, even the wretched ones.  Bahadur is pathetic, despite his power and wealth; as misguided as his actions are, they are accessible.  He is a deeply confused and troubled fellow.  And as vicious as Madhuri gets, one never forgets the abuses she suffered at the hands of her family when Bahadur first rescued her from the dakus; there is an echo there of Sita's treatment after her encounter with Raavan, and the mythological allegory inclines one to leniency with her even when she is at her most loony.  Moreover, at the film's conclusion, Madhuri achieves a full redemption that is deeply satisfying.

The sum of all of this is a simply terrific movie that gets better the more I think about it.  It has some smashing songs and a fabulous visual aesthetic.  Both heroine and anti-heroine are stunning; Hema Malini in particular looks delicious, and the relish with which she chews up the scenery playing this complex character is more than a treat.  And then there is Raaj Kumar.  The man is a terrible, terrible actor, the godfather of the sort of "stare acting" later perfected by the likes of Ajay Devgan and Abhishek Bachchan. 

"ub - buh."

But God help me, I love him.  He's just so damned dashing, whether arrayed in traditional finery, a handsome slim-cut western suit, dressed for the hunt in stylish khaki and pith, or reclining while flanked by his hookah and his most prized trophy.  And then there are WIGS and DISGUISES.

Dear God, the wigs and disguises.

Truly, need I say more?

Well maybe just a little more.

Lal patthar is available to watch with subtitles on YouTube.  So is its Bengali original, by the way, starring Uttam Kumar and also directed by Sushil Majumdar.  I started watching the Bengali film with Beth and will finish it in the next couple of days.  Stay tuned.

Queen (2014)

Dir. Vikas Behl

About a third of the way through Queen, its titular character Rani (Kangana Ranaut) is assaulted in a Parisian alleyway by a would-be purse-snatcher.  Rani hangs on to her purse with ferocious tenacity, twisting its handles around her wrists, falling to the ground, kicking at her assailant to keep him at bay. The struggle lasts a long minute, before a voice from a neighboring building scares the mugger off, and Rani sits up, gasping, to process what has just happened to her.  This scene is a microcosm of Queen, which is Rani's wonderful bildungsroman.  With each challenge Rani faces, each new experience, she discovers an internal reserve of strength that she had no idea was there.  And watching her discover it is an absolute delight.

As Queen opens, Rani is a provincial and proper girl, about to marry.  Rani seems to view her marriage as a culmination, an event that provides definition to her life thus far.  Suddenly spurned by her fiance, Vijay (Rajkummar Rao), Rani takes her honeymoon anyway, without him, and in classical fashion has a journey of self-discovery in Paris and Amsterdam.  By the end of the film, Rani has a fully developed sense of self and of adventure, and the film executes this arc flawlessly.  There is no one moment or event at which Rani breaks free, no abrupt discontinuity between seedhi-saadhi ladki and broad-minded free spirit.  Challenge by challenge, friend by friend, experience by experience, Rani smoothly becomes more and more alive.  This transition is no mean feat for a film to manage; it is a subtle development of strength, and difficult to portray.  Queen, and Kangana Ranaut, achieve it perfectly.

There's a lot of talk - and not just with respect to Hindi films - about "strong" female characters.  I like strong female characters as much as anyone - they make for good stories.  But there are different kinds of strength.  Rani comes from a Delhi Punjabi family, complete with (as my friend Karan Bali so excellently observed) the chubby little brother and bindaas grandmother who are becoming standard issue for such filmi families.  But Rani is not loud and headstrong, like Parineeti Chopra in Ladies v. Ricky Bahl, or on a confidently planned path to independent success like Anushka Sharma in Band baaja baaraat.  She is much more like Sridevi in English Vinglish, an understated woman of powerful untapped potential who at first believes she can be content with her small world and her small role in it.   Queen is English Vinglish at a different time of life, and the difference matters:  Queen says you do not have to pay decades of dues on the straight and narrow before earning the right to find out who you really are.

At the heart of Rani's strength is a magnificent gameness, rendered by both the script and by Ranaut with a perfect balance of boldness and caution.  As Rani is confronted by new experiences - the permissiveness of French culture, the pounding beat of a night club, the prospect of three male roommates in an Amsterdam hostel - she greets each one first with fear and discomfort, and then relaxes into the flow, resolving at least to accept the new world order as it shifts and changes around her.  I love this about Rani.  She is not a wild child or a rebel - she is simply open to new ideas as they come to her.  Kangana Ranaut delivers this with perfect pitch, her wide open face registering shades of shock, trepidation, and finally a plucky sort of surrender to whatever strange new experience is thrown at her.  It is a treat to take these adventures with her.  And while the film flirts with a number of cliches - the sheltered Indian girl traveling abroad, the moral laxity of foreigners, the strangeness of foreign cultures and foreign food, the first taste of alcohol - with each of these elements Queen leads you down the garden path, so that just when you fear it is about to lose its magical touch and invoke some hackneyed trope, it veers sharply, comically, and delightfully around the obstacle.  It uses these elements well, to tell a piece of Rani's story, rather than leaning on them lamely, to make weak fun of foreigners.

One mark of Rani's awakening is that when she meets Vijay toward the end of her adventure, it is on her terms, at the place and time of her choosing.  At the beginning, when Vijay calls off the marriage, he claims that being abroad has changed him, while she has remained the same. And at that point, you might be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt - perhaps he genuinely believes the relationship would not work.  As the details of their courtship are doled out in flashback, though, it becomes clear that for all his talk, Vijay is small-minded and a bit of jerk, without much sense of (or interest in) any way that Rani's desires might be independent of his own.  (Rajkummar Rao is getting quite good at playing this kind of character, the boy who could be a good man if only he made one or two catastrophic choices a little differently. See Love, Sex aur Dhokha for a more gruesome example.) By the end of the film, it is obvious that Vijay has it exactly backward; Rani is the one who has changed and grown, while Vijay (who boasts that he understands foreigners as a class, but fails to perceive them as people) is the same provincial, egotistical boy he always was.  To Queen's credit, it does not bash us over the head with this contrast, but rather lets it hang in the empty air around Vijay when Rani ditches him to go to a concert with her international friends.

Some aspects of Rani's arc are rendered in delightful details.  In the moments after Vijay calls off the marriage, Rani steps out of the Cafe Coffee Day shop he has chosen for a breakup venue, and we see her, reacting with shock to what he has said, framed by the cafe's awning with its apt slogan, "A lot can happen over a cup of coffee."  In another superb moment, during a song set in Paris, Rani reacts with some shock to the sight of couples openly kissing all over the city. There is a break in a song, a silent beat, in which Rani's face registers a charming discomfort; then, at the very moment her face changes to a bemused sort of resignation, the song picks up again, in a new key.  In that instant, Queen encapsulates the irrevocable changes happening incrementally, moment by moment, in Rani's understanding of her life.  Later, toward the end of her film, her Amsterdam roommates find on YouTube a video of the song that opened the film: Rani dancing with her family during the celebrations of what was to be her wedding.  Rani watches with a mixture of puzzlement and horror.  One has the palpable sense that she is looking at herself in another lifetime. 

I do not feel my words, plentiful as they are, do justice to the pure pleasure of Queen, of Rani's journey and adventure and strength and beauty, the subtlety and craft with which this story is told, how truly remarkable and lovely this movie is from start to finish.  With all this, a marvelous and engaging performance by Kangana Ranaut (who transforms into Juhi Chawla when she smiles) and yet another brilliant soundtrack by Amit Trivedi, why are you even sitting here reading this?  Just go watch Queen.  You can thank me later.