(by Alex John)
(This write-up is not about the film)
Okay, let me kick this off with a question. How many movies do each of us want to celebrate the 10th anniversary of in 2020? How many films do we have in mind for their 15th anniversary? 20th any? Maybe a few. Now, dare ask me about the films I want to celebrate the 25th anniversary of, and I will throw a bunch of Bollywood and regional films at your face in no time. Yes, quite a few. We all know what this means. The show goes on like nothing happened, but the number of films we keep close to our hearts is hopelessly diminishing every year. Why am I, a non-Hindi speaker, still fondly remember a Bollywood film that came out 25 years ago? Don’t I watch Hindi films these days? Yes, I do. Some of them really strike a chord with me too. The last Hindi film I watched is Tumhari Sulu on Amazon prime, and boy, was that one hearty. I thoroughly enjoyed the flick, but I am sure I am not going to celebrate it after 25 years. Ask me why, and I would say the answer is pretty simple. The film did not give me anything to celebrate. Of course it’s funny, warm and thought-provoking, but nothing moved me to that scale of elation that would result in a long term relationship with it. Tumhari Sulu was like most of the notable films of this era-chirpy, cerebral and nuanced, but nowhere near to my heart like those X-gen films are.
Okay let me cut to the chase. What makes me treasure Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge even after 25 years of its release? The fact that it has everything that I inherently love in a commercial film as an Indian. The jollification, the songs, the dances, the mesmerizing presentation of the cinematic version of our ballet-inspired artistic culture, and the unapologetic use of all these things for unadulterated entertainment. The very things today’s filmmakers are almost ashamed to endorse. The things we lost in the course of trying to impress our ‘international’ audience. Indian cinema’s entertainment wing now finds itself located in a cultural no-man’s-land caught between the western tastes and desi style, with Bollywood right at the center of it. The regional industries are proximal either to the desi-ness(etc.Telugu) or the sublime approach(Malayalam) but Hindi cinema, once the entertainment powerhouse, is struggling to engage its own audience like in the past, let alone the whole country like it used to do once. Now, am I senselessly generalizing this? I don’t think so. If you think I am wrong, let me loop back to the start of this write-up. Ask somebody around his/her twenties how many films from 10 years ago he/she has a nostalgic relationship with (if you belong in the age group, ask yourself). You may ask now, what is this guy whining about? Isn’t Indian cinema still the spicy fiesta we all crave for? Doesn’t it still have songs and dances? Yes, it still has. Today’s heroes are funnier, the cheesy rom-com is still in business, the beats are peppy and Hrithik Roshan still dances like there is no tomorrow, but it…. still feels like these things don’t quite add up to anything substantially appealing. The tune-in attempts to the western tastes from the early 2000s have taken away something from Indian cinema, especially Bollywood, something that held together the aforementioned commercial factors to form the wholesome festivity our movies were once upon a time. Still trying to figure out my point? Think about what it would have become if ‘Yeh jawani hai deewani’ had a much better script. That’s what I am talking about. And that’s what we lost while trying to ‘internationalize’ our films.
Okay, are the western audiences impressed? Well they don’t really seem to be. They seem to be happy retaining the notion of Indian cinema being all songs, dances and merriments (the Indonesians, meanwhile, did explore the archives to remake a Bollywood dance number, knowing exactly where to look). A famous Malayali vlogger who resides in Germany recently claimed his German (note that) friends still invite him over to watch the 20th century Bollywood films. Do you get the feeling I am overselling this songs’n’dance thing? Well, I am not trying to, at least. I am trying to state that the quintessential song and dance Bollywood was one of the most marketable factors our cinema had and we blew that chance trying to adapt to something quite alien to our tastes. Want to learn something from the Chinese? They never tried to change their cinema for somebody else’s tastes. Even their better films where written off as cheesy once, but they kept making them and shipping them off to the (truly) international markets, and by the time the flamboyant classics like Hero and Crouching tiger hidden dragon hit the markets, the international viewers were conditioned to see greatness in the Chinese context. Do you think Korean movies were always this welcome elsewhere in the world? Nope. Their movies were considered over-emotional and the intonations funny by the western world once, but they improved vastly on their kind of cinema, without westernizing their films or anglicizing their tongue (even after all this success in the western world, we hear very few English words in Korean films).I am not forgetting that Korean lifestyle is much closer to the west than ours is, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that they never compromised their own way of filmmaking for anything, especially not for chasing the wild goose. The Japanese went a step further to make films so impressive Hollywood started making their own versions of them. We, on the other hand, kept playing the wannabe-game, and still sort of do it.
So, what are the takeaways? One, we abandoned the radiant ‘desi-ness’ in our films we adored once, leaving a void that can’t be filled with today’s half-hearted attempts at entertainment. Two, by doing so, we lost that inimitable exoticism that is eminently sellable in international markets. Three, we missed our chance to create a unique brand of Indian cinema built upon our festive, religious culture, like the Koreans and Chinese did with their cinema and culture. Towards the end of the 90s, the world started to notice our quirky filmmaking (remember the unexpected overseas success of Taal?), but we ditched it all of a sudden and started to emulate western cinema and foolishly try to sell it back to themselves (how can we forget the Barfi! embarrassment at the Oscars?). DDLJ represents the kind of cinema that we ditched for making ‘subtler’ films, the kind that plays more to hearts than brains. People still want this. Any doubt? See how the Telugu industry that still holds onto the retro style filmmaking to an extent gives a hard time to the Bollywood thespians. Karan Johar openly admitted that the success off Bahubali was a tight slap to Bollywood’s face. Telugu movie stars are becoming sensations in north India too, but I believe Bollywood, with its pan -Indian and international clout, had a better chance of continuing our ‘spice-cinema’ legacy. But who knows, maybe Tollywood is destined to do so. Maybe it’s filmmakers are going to keep our ‘masala cinema’ culture alive, and make the world pay attention to it, again. May be it’s their turn to make us fall in love with the DDLJ-brand of cinema…all over again. Like I said, who knows?
vijay
November 6, 2020
If there is anything more annoying than weekly writeups/columns for 10th anniversary of this, 14th anniversary of that, I do not know what it is. First this trend needs to be put to rest. It seems like whenever writers run out of ideas for their columns they resort to this as a filler.
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ravenus1
November 6, 2020
Are you equating smarter, more balanced writing with films that forsake the heart for the brain? Is making characters more self-aware and fallible pandering to Western sensibilities?
I watched DDLJ on cinema in the 90’s and even then I was disgusted that a consummate lout who sponges on an indulgent father’s income with the brazen expectation of just inheriting the family business, is allowed to spout nonsense about sanskaar and bhartiyata, his grand virtue being that he did not take advantage of the girl when she was drunk, BIG-FRAKKING-WOW.
I will not grudge DDLJ its long running fame, but I’m also glad that we’re no longer inundated with its peculiar brand of NRI-friendly retrogressive rubbish about Indians who spend all their lives in another country soaking up every advantage it offers and then keep whining about the lack of “mitti ki khushbhu” and “apne log, apna culture”. Good riddance to that rubbish.
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Madan
November 6, 2020
I have lots and lots of thoughts on this, as someone who grew up in that period and didn’t like DDLJ very much. It’s not because I was going to grow up to like the more Westernised tone of movies from the noughties onwards. I like some of them and some I think of as just fluff (ZNMD, Rock On).
First off, the masala epoch was already dying in the 90s. It was dying not because something else was replacing it. It was dying because it grew increasingly mediocre and the movies grew more and more forgettable. This is what sparked a fresh ‘parallel’ wave by the mid 90s with Satya, Shool, Dushman. Maybe a soundtrack like that of DDLJ sounds memorable compared to the autotuned crap of today but it was already a huge step down from soundtracks like Yaadon Ki Barat or Hum Kisise Kum Nahin, maybe even just from QSQT.
And this wasn’t just due to lack of musical talent. The same Jatin Lalit came up with more emotionally resonant work for Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa because the characters had the everyman quality of films of yore and were not walking on clouds.
Related, the problem with movies like DDLJ is they became more of a celebration of Indian rituals, especially wedding rituals, and propelled the trend towards big fat weddings. No wonder a long running play based on big fat weddings goes by the name of Blame It On Yashraj. And because of this, they lacked the strong emotional arc of Indian romances the way they used to be. While I don’t like that one either, Raja Hindustani is truer to the Hindi romantic movie formula.
Movies like DDLJ or KKHH stopped being about making you fall in love with those characters and instead about making you ASPIRE to be like them. In that sense, they paved the way for the Hinglish epoch of the 00s. And when people grew bored of Hinglish, the small town epoch of Ayushmann Khurana films or even Dangal or Panga was born.
As for naming classics from the decade gone by, how many Hollywood films of the 2010s can you name as classics? if I put an additional stipulation that they cannot be superhero franchise movies or biopics, the number of classics would dramatically dwindle. There is a general saturation of movies and they have to compete for our attention in an era of multiple distractions. As a musophile, I can certainly name a bunch of English rock/pop albums from the last decade that I have listened to over and over on loop but I know that not many listen like that to music anymore.
You couldn’t binge watch entire seasons of shows before. This is an era of consumption, not engagement, for better or worse.
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Vikram s
November 6, 2020
Very well written, liked the points you make… My beef with our current cinema (mostly hindi) is that some of it thinks that it’s an ocean’s 11, and squeezes all the local (the word is nativity) flavour……and has a ‘i am too cool for all this’ vibe
Any local flavour is in the small town north Indian settings and self-consciously ‘quirky’ characters… While I write this, maybe the returning to hinterland is probably a reaction to being a flop overseas when they tried to pander to ‘global’ flavour…
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Alex John
November 6, 2020
@ravenus1
I wasn’t particularly focusing on DDLJ as a film in this article. The film is, at best, a nostalgic part of my life which can’t be shrugged off easily.
I was just trying to point out that our film industry/ies could have been much bigger and diverse (from a commercial angle, of course, but there is nothing wrong in thinking commercially) hadn’t we given up on the unique ‘masala-brand’ of cinema that was on the roll before the ‘self-aware’ cinema arrived. I’m all in for the kind of films that we have today, but a mix of it and the old-fashioned song’n’dance cinema would be, to my belief, an admirable combination of greatness and international acceptance.
I want to emphasize this, I am talking about nothing else but selling the overall cheesiness in order to sneak in the selective best we have, exactly the way the Chinese and the Koreans do these days.
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Aisha
November 6, 2020
We don’t need to bring ALL of the songs, dancing, and melodrama back. I think song & dance still has a place, but it has to be inserted in the right places, used for moving the story forward over montages. Song & dance will only elevated a movie nowadays if it’s treated as more than promotional materials
The problem is the “westernized” movies aren’t Indian enough. They still need to find a middle ground between writing in-depth characters and nuanced stories (which could be considered the western part, even though that’s just good filmmaking) and injecting an Indian ethos.
I don’t see Taal as a regular masala movie. I think there was real craft to the Indian components, whether it be the dancing, songs, or emotions, that made it rise above the rest. It was westernized (aka well-made) in that matter.
We can talk about the financial success of Telugu masala films all we want, but it would be disappointing for other Indian film industries to be inspired by those movies over the little gems emerging from the fringes.
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Anu Warrier
November 6, 2020
I watched DDLJ on cinema in the 90’s and even then I was disgusted that a consummate lout who sponges on an indulgent father’s income with the brazen expectation of just inheriting the family business, is allowed to spout nonsense about sanskaar and bhartiyata, his grand virtue being that he did not take advantage of the girl when she was drunk, BIG-FRAKKING-WOW.
You stole the words right from my mouth!
I saw the film and enjoyed it while watching it – because, Shah Rukh. But I still remember having a conversation with my husband about how if it weren’t someone so ‘cute’ the behaviour would be so egregious. And even with SRK, how I wanted to smack him.
We came to the conclusion that Kaajol’s character was just exchanging her father for someone exactly like him – long live the patriarchy!
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Anu Warrier
November 6, 2020
With regard to the article – I grew up with Malayalam films which retained the local flavour without having to become ‘westernised’. But I love the Bollywood ‘masala’ film – the real one, not the wannabes who sacrifice the emotion for the gloss. And yes, I too wish we weren’t so besotted with having the West ‘accept’ us. AB had it right when he said we should be making films for our people, not for the Oscars.
That said, I actually liked Barfi – I don’t think it was an embarrassment at all.
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Satya
November 6, 2020
You couldn’t binge watch entire seasons of shows before. This is an era of consumption, not engagement, for better or worse.
Agreed.
Now, my take on DDLJ – SRK kind of made it less creepier than it should have been. But then, in the long run, I think it limited SRK’s abilities as an actor leading him to be typecast. So, not a win-win deal really for me.
I don’t say I hate love stories – take Kabhi Haa Kabhi Naa, Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman or even Yes Boss. His roles were actually relatable in those films and I could empathise with what the characters go through. DDLJ, on the other hand, is utter bullshit. I begun to wonder, if any guy like Raj would really win a Simran IRL. He would rather end up as that college bully who is usually the butt of jokes when it comes to romance.
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Yajiv
November 7, 2020
I, for one, am very glad we left the DDLJ-style blockbuster behind. I agree with @ravenus1 that the “NRI sanskaari patriot” trope was not only hypocritical but also foolish and frustrating. At least modern-day jingoism (a la Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgan films) is more in-your-face about it so you know to engage or steer away from it from the promos alone.
And agreed that DDLJ was dripping with patriarchical nonsense. Anu made an astute observation that Raj was basically a younger version of Simran’s father (in terms of his ideals). I find it hard to believe that an incel like him (theres really no better word to describe him) would succeed in getting the girl in real life. Real-life Raj probably would have ended up in an arranged marriage! (not that there’s anything wrong with that ofc)
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Alex John
November 7, 2020
@Anu Warrier
I wasn’t actually trying to analyze the quality of DDLJ as a film, but was using it to refer to the kind of cinema we still could have used to entertain ourselves and to reach out to the other parts of the world (not just the west) and find a niche for our own style of filmmaking.
And I didn’t say Barfi was an embarrassment because it is a bad film(it was a cute one), but because its filmmakers shamelessly ripped off scenes from western films and had the audacity to send it back to themselves to have its quality checked.
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Aman Basha
November 7, 2020
@Alex John: One part I’d like to dispute about Barfi is that although Anurag Basu is from the Bhatt school of plagiarism, he did, IMHO, a Tarantino style rip off here where you could trace every scene and moment to somewhere earlier in film history but these moments would coalesce to form something dazzlingly original and unique. I don’t think Barfi’s plot was ripped, or we’d know by now. The problem I’d say is that Tarantino takes a lot of these moments from ‘lowbrow’ cinema while Basu ripped off Buster Keaton, Chaplin and other classics.
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Alex John
November 7, 2020
@Aman Basha,
I don’t quite agree with that, Aman.
Take the ‘Notebook’ scene in Barfi! for instance.The scene and the dialogues were lifted from the original film and placed in Barfi! without actually adding anything to it. This has nothing to do with the Tarantino style of filmmaking.
I will write something here that put the movie-writer in me to shame-it took me years to realize the ‘person in front of the car’ scene in Pulp fiction is actually inspired from the same scene in Psycho-but the feeling of shame is somewhat alleviated because I know this has more to do with Tarantino’s style of filmmaking than my tardiness.
I don’t believe Anurag Basu did anything of that sort in Barfi! because the sense of deja vu descended on me in no time while I watched the copied scenes in Barfi!.
And this is the only thing I hated about Barfi!, which otherwise was a catchy entertainer, thanks to its leads.
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Madan
November 7, 2020
Be that as it may, Barfi doesn’t any more exemplify modern Hindi cinema than DDLJ did 90s Hindi cinema. I complain about DDLJ but God it’s more watchable than drek like Ishq or Dhadkan. Once you focus on just the few much loved classics of an era, you are always going to get a flattering perspective of cinema of that period and conclude, as you have, that we made a mistake by leaving it all behind. What you don’t get from that perspective is the sheer mindblowing amounts of terribly made and terribly written films we had to put up with then. I was legit more interested in Tamil cinema then because most of the time, Hindi movies then were just boring, boring, boring, relentlessly so. No technical or lyrical ambition of any sort for the most part with a tunnel vision focus on box office returns. Even a film like Gupt was welcomed for at least offering respite from the cookie cutter crap. Today you could be sure a film like it would be ripped apart by critics for its many flaws. “At least appreciate the intent” was a thing then because there was very little of it.
I think the fact that we can have both a Baahubali today AND a Andhadhun (an adaptation that actually gives it due credit and then goes way beyond the film it draws from) and have both succeed enormously at the BO speaks for the depth of cinema on offer today and the choice. The issue is in fact with the choice. There is so much clutter that we have trouble getting what we want. But I’d still much rather than that than having to put up with something because it was all the entertainment you could find.
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