THE CHOCOLATE BOY AND THE GIRL NEXT DOOR: CELEBRATING THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF QSQT

Okay, let's get some things straight. I am a big Aamir Khan fan, and when it comes to talking about his films, I conveniently see no flaws. I would happily jump through fire hoops and climb Mount Everest for him, although I don't think he would really put me up to those tasks, but I cannot say an unkind word about him or his films. I loved him as the incorrigible Sanjay in Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar, as the handle-bar mustachioed Mangal Pandey in Mangal Pandey, heck - I even love him in the new Godrej ads, where he is in drag.

In this blog, I discuss one of his earliest blockbusters  - Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, considered to be a landmark film in popular Hindi cinema. 23 April 2013 marked the 25th Anniversary of this film. QSQT was released on the very same date in the year 1988 and starred two freshly minted young stars - Juhi Chawla and Aamir Khan. The lead pair created history, as the film went on to become the biggest hits of that year.

                   

The poster of Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak

Juhi Chawla had recently been crowned Miss India and had also done some modelling, but her face was largely unknown. She brought the genuine innocence and optimism of a young girl just out into the world to the role, not to mention a lovable dorkiness - a quality that would mark many of her later roles as well. Contrary to popular belief, this wasn't the debut film of Aamir Khan. He had earlier worked in a film called Holi (Dir. Ketan Mehta,1984) as a teenager and also in the critically acclaimed Raakh (Dir. Aditya Bhattacharya, 1989) as Supriya Pathak's brother. In fact, he has also won a Special Jury Mention National Award for the latter. [ You can watch the film Holi on YouTube here and the promo of Raakh here] Though his roles in his first two films were quite edgy, in QSQT, Khan epitomized the new-age romantic hero. His character in the film was a welcome break from the angry young men that had ruled over the Hindi film industry in the 80s decade.

QSQT was the first and last of its kind in more than one way. It was one of the first films whose loo..oong and weighty title was compressed into a pithy, catchy acronym. This spawned a whole generation of similar bonsai titles like HAHK, DDLJ, KKHH, KANK, MNIK etc. Also, it was one of the last films where the much-in-love Raj and Rashmi rebel against parental authority, and elope to fulfill their love for and commitment to each other. Later films like Hum Aapke Hai Kaun and Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, on the other hand,  featured young lovers who were tame and boringly virtuous, and wouldn't even kiss each other without maa-baauji's aashirwaad.

                  

The lead pair of  Juhi and Aamir which stole everyone's hearts

The film, as everyone knows, is an Indianized reworking of Shakespeare's tragic play about two ill-fated teenage lovers - Romeo and Juliet. In QSQT, the youngsters negotiate personal desire and individual choice against a rigid and orthodox feudal family set-up. In this respect, the film does something rather brave. The family, especially the mother figure, in Hindi cinema has always been the site of protection and nurture, and most film plots drive towards the consolidation of this unit through the marriage of the hero and the heroine at the end of the film. In QSQT, there is no such consolidation, as the protagonists realise their desire of being together inspite of family opposition in death at the end of the film. Death, in this case, is not simply a tragic end but the final rebellion that the young people stage against the stifling value system of their respective families.

My favourite moment in the film is when Rashmi, instead of waiting around for the hero to bachao her izzat, rescues herself from a bunch of goons. Rashmi is accosted by a group of young boys looking for trouble, after she misses her bus and is lost on a jungle. (The leader of the pack is a very young and convincingly goony looking Makarand Deshpande and Aamir Khan's brother, Faisal, also does a cameo here.) As they chase her and finally capture here, she uses her presence of mind and some grit to knee the goon in his business and proceeds to hide in a pit covered with dry leaves.

The film, needless to say made history, and so did it's lead stars. The promises of eternal love may seem anachronistic in this age, when dating someone is as easy as "friending" them on Facebook. Yet the film will always remain a classic for its breezy music, its engaging melodrama and twists, its teen love story, and of course, some very good acting by its lead pair.

Happy 25th, QSQT!

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?