07.30.06

Movies Reviewed: Two Must-Sees from Bollywood

Posted in Bollywood, Movies at 3:47 pm by Moody

Veer-Zaara: Drama, Musical/Perfoming Arts; 2004; Unrated; 3h 16m. Recommended.

~ and ~

Devdas: Drama, Musical/Perfoming Arts; 2002; PG; 3h 02m. Recommended.

On a warm day, not so long ago, I decided almost on a whim to visit our local Indian store. It is a place that sells Indian foods, ingredients, spices, drinks, henna, etc., and also carries movies to rent or purchase. It is a good place, a place that smells delightfully of patchouli and other spices even before you’ve reached the door. On the day I visited, the couple who (I believe) own the store were working behind the cluttered counter. The jam-packed store was cool and shaded, the lighting was subdued for a convenience store, and the atmosphere was comforting, welcoming. Still, they looked at me almost apprehensively, perhaps wondering why I happened into their store. I’m a typical, middle-aged caucasion guy in appearance, and I didn’t head directly for anything. I probably looked like a misplaced tourist. But all I needed to do was say that I was interested in their video collection, that I wanted to know what Bollywood films they, as Indians, would recommend, and suddenly there were smiles. The man, who appeared to be in his late fifties or early sixties, was pleased to start pulling down movies for me to look at. He gave me a dozen recommendations and told me that those were only the first to come to his mind. He asked me questions about what I was interested in, helping me to narrow down my choices to a few choice selections.

Out of the twelve laid before me, I walked out with what I could afford: one movie: Veer-Zaara (starring Shahrukh Khan as Veer Pratap Singh, and Preity Zinta as Zaara Hayaat Khan). Kisha and I watched it that day and both absolutely loved it. Now, it was in fact my first Bollywood film. Until then, I’d seen bits and pieces of other films, mainly in documentaries about Indian cinema, but I’d never watched one. So I didn’t know what to expect, really, however much I figured I’d enjoy the experience. Fact is, I was blown away.

Veer-Zaara is an epic love story. A handsome Indian man, a squadron leader in the Indian Air Force, falls in love with a beautiful Pakistani girl after rescuing her from the scene of a bus accident. After falling for her, as she struggles against falling in love with him, Veer finds out that she is already promised to another by her father, who hopes to improve his political position. He struggles against his love for her, but ultimately neither can deny it. After their love is exposed by an act of transcendent courage, Veer winds up in prison in Pakistan, condemned to silence for the rest of his life lest he bring shame down on Zaara and her family. But Veer finally does tell his story to a lawyer, Saamiya Siddiqui (played by the lovely Rani Mukherjee), who, as a woman, is fighting to prove herself in the name of women everywhere. We first meet Veer in prison, twenty years after everything went wrong. The story that unfolds is both uplifting and heart-breaking, and the ending will…. Well, I’ll leave that to you to discover. Musically, the movie is a delight, transporting and fun, serious and moving. It took me a little time to get used to the Indian style of singing (”How do they get their voices to sound like that?”), but I came around quickly and can now say I truly love it. The music and dancing make a wonderful medium for conveying emotion and promoting the story’s tone, and they are, of course, completely in keeping with the Indian mise en scène. This is typical of Bollywood fare. Or, as the young Indian man in the store told me with a chuckle and smile the next time I came in for a movie, “All Bollywood movies have that!”

And so it was true for Devdas (starring Shahrukh Khan as Devdas Mukherjee, Madhuri Dixit as Chandramukhi, and Aishwarya Rai as Parvati ['Paro']). The songs throughout the movie are some of the most lovely, poignant, bittersweet and ecstatic I’ve heard.

Though this was to be a much different movie in other ways, one thing is also true between it and Veer-Zaara: it is truly epic in scope. Even richer in color and dance, Devdas (which was an Official Selection at Cannes in 2002, the first Indian move to be so honored) is Shakespearean through and through where its plot is concerned, and it pulls this off magnificently well. Romeo & Juliet comes to mind, naturally enough, because the film is loosely based on the play. That said, it should be obvious that this movie is thoroughly in the genre of tragedy. It is, perhaps, the Bollywood equivalent of Julie Taymor’s Titus, though not nearly so bloody or violent.

The plot, in short, is that Devdas and Paro were childhood friends whose love grew strong, but Devdas was sent away for ten years to England for his education. When he returns, he has changed, grown in some ways but in others has become distant. As Paro and he rediscover their love, Devdas’s family plot to undermine the young lovers because their classes are different. Paro’s family are “bride sellers” and Devdas’s family are landlords, and love is no bridge between the two so far as Devdas’s family are concerned. Through a series of unfortunate events and missteps, Devdas loses Paro. She is married off to an aristocrat who will never love her, and Devdas finds his way into a bottle, spurning the love of a courtesan who’s heart opens to him in his despair. Kisha and I literally clung to each other as the momentum of the film picked up toward its breathtaking end. I get goosebumps just thinking about its final scenes.

You owe it to yourself, as a lover of movies, to check both of these classic Bollywood films out. You won’t be dissappointed. You might, in fact, fall in love.

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