LOVE SHOVE AND PAPERMAN PART II

Including a love story in the narrative of a film is no great achievement. I don't mean this derogatorily  but in a sense that even films which have the most experimental of plots and filming techniques very often feature love stories as a main or sub-plot. Take for example films like Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998) - extremely experimental in its story-telling, but it is essentially a love story. Even a film like the recent Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012) - a film whose main theme is violence and racial discrimination - is basically the love quest of Django to find Broomhilda, his lady love. And what of all those suspense-type 70s Hindi films in which  nail-biting climax is often interrupted by a love song with the hero and heroine running around in the Alps? Love, actually, is everywhere.

The genre of films to make the most cash out of this filmy trope is, of course, the romantic comedy. This is one of my favourite genres of films. There's nothing that can be a better mood-lifter than a romantic comedy and a tub of chocolate chip ice-cream. But the romantic comedy is not without its problems. The first of these problems is that it is unfortunately characterized as a "chick-flick" type genre, with the assumption that it could only be of interest to women. This means that lesser films of this type (such as 13 Going on 30, The Wedding Planner, The Proposal, Sweet Home Alabama etc.) will take this a bit too seriously and focus their attention only on the story of a girl looking for the right kind of love and the right kind of man. So there will be no witty banter (like in When Harry Met Sally or You've Got Mail), no crackling chemistry (like in Notting Hill or You've Got Mail again) and no laugh-out-loud sequences (like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones' Diary Part 1 & 2). 

The romantic comedy (especially in recent times) is comfortable with taking the all too familiar route and drawing attention only to the story part in the phrase "love story"; and not saying anything much about the love part. 

But then there are other films which make us think more deeply about this mysterious creature called love. They ask us complex questions like: What is love? Is it an isolated emotion or is it sometimes mixed with other feelings like jealousy, a desire to destroy, friendship, sacrifice and sorrow? How much is society part of our love story and does its attitude count?

 The French film Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012), which also won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, has a heartbreaking take on it. Love here becomes entwined with the idea of death and mercy. I don't want to give away any plot points, but this film tries to imagine what it's like for someone to watch a long-term partner suffer and slowly become a shadow of themselves. It poses a difficult question when it asks to what extent one could go in order to reduce a loved one's pain, and also one's own pain in watching them suffer and inch towards death. 

In another film, As Good As Gets (James L. Brooks, 1997), love is as eccentric and whimsical as it characters. But it is also about acceptance of this craziness and imperfection. Closer home, a film like Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 1999) tells us that the love that lasts is the one where you are willing to do things for your partner, for their happiness, even if sometimes this doesn't involve your own happiness and comfort. William Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet (and its various interpretations on film) complicates things for us when he suggests that love and death may be intricately linked, and somehow love is complete and fulfilling and ideal only in death. Love is unearthly - never to be attained in life, but only in death. Another complex form of love - obsession - can be seen in Darr (Yash Chopra, 1994). Love is not innocent, beautiful or magical here, but destructive and neurotic. In a film like Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) love is transgressive and reaches far beyond any societal conventions.

Granted that such films cannot be as charming and as easy to digest as romantic comedies, but then if love itself can sometimes be incomprehensible, difficult, amusing and vague, can't films about love be so too?

The Yash Chopra that We Forgot

There has been a common theme in all the Hindi film award functions this year - a tribute to Yash Chopra. Mostly, these tributes feature Shah Rukh Khan serananding Yash Chopra heroines from the yesteryears to the current times. So, in one award function that I saw, Katrina Kaif floated down to the stage in a white dress, while in another Rekha made an appearance on stage in her trademark shiny, gold saree. Now, in all this veneration of Yash Chopra as the "man who taught us how to love" or the "king of romance" the film folk have conveniently forgotten the earlier films of Yash Chopra which are far from romantic, and even further from conformist.

Case in point: Chopra's first film Dhool Ka Phool. This film, released in 1959, tells the story of a boy born out of wedlock, and the derision that he has to face from society as a result of this. Featuring the memorable song "Tu hindu banega na musalman banega, insaan ki aulad hai insaan banega", the film provides a unique humanistic perspective on this sensitive topic, without the usual moralizing and melodrama of plots involving naajaayaz aulads. The film does not implicate the mother only, as other films with similar storylines do (like Aradhana, 1969), but both the parents in refusing to take responsibility for the baby they unintentionally made. There is no romance in this story, no indulgence from Chopra's side in making his heroine (Mala Sinha) look unrealistically aesthetic - it a simple film that makes a strong social comment, about a hypocritical society that revels in sitting on a high horse, categorizing people and then demeaning them.

Chopra also directed one of the first multi-starers, Waqt (1965), which boasted of a casting coup of Sharmila Tagore, Shashi Kapoor, Sunil Dutt, Sadhana and Raaj Kumar. This trend was later used by film-makers like Nasir Hussain, Manmohan Desai, and more recently Karan Johar. But this film is significant for me not for its star cast, but the manner in which the characters and backgrounds are represented here. This variation in the background of the characters somehow disappeared from Chopra's other films like Silsila (1981), which only focused on the high society of Delhi without problematizing issues such as class and glaring differences between the haves and the have-nots. 

But the most ground-breaking of Chopra's film would have to be Ittefaaq (1969), a song-less thriller starring Nanda and a young and very dishy Rajesh Khanna. The film uses the hand-held camera technique to heighten the intrigue of the crisp, no-nonsense murder mystery. The Ram Gopal Verma style topsy-turvey camera angles seem a far cry from the soft focus sanitization of Chopra's later cinema.

Then, somewhere along the way, this perceptive and intelligent director changed into the "King of Romance". The love story element in his films has occupied our collective consciousness to such an extent that we miss the moments of the unexpected in his films. Sample the mother-son banter of Kabhi Kabhie (1976) between Rishi Kapoor and Rakhi. Or the deep frienship between Anupam Kher and Anil Kapoor in Lamhe (1991). Turning the ek ladka aur ladki kabhi dost nahi ho sakte myth around in Dil To Pagal Hai (1997)in the relationship of Karisma Kapoor and Shah Rukh Khan. And the most surprising of all - casting loverboy Shah Rukh Khan as a stalker and sociopath in the film Darr (1993).

If we look at Yash Chopra's films only as romances, then we unfortunately conformize him. But in a way he confomized himself as well in films like Chandni (1989), Silsila and his latest, Jab Tak Hai Jaan (2012). And sadly we remember him only for these films, which fit into our notion of an ideal escapist world, where women are pretty and chiffon-clad and men are rich and own fancy cars.