बुधवार, 15 फ़रवरी 2012

Bollywood And The Art Of Complex Emotions

Bollywood And The Art Of Complex Emotions
Great film-makers are also great intellectuals. But the challenge for them to is to represent complexity in a manner which is simple to understand, yet profound in its impact and meaning.
Bollywood, over the years, has captured various real life themes and conflicts on celluloid with panache They have ranged from love triangles to social conflicts to relationship complexities. While good film-makers over the years have handled love triangles and socially relevant movies with great deft and subtlety, for the Hindi film connoisseur, fascination lies in the drama that unfolds when two people are entangled in a complex set of emotions, where there is a tussle between what the heart says, the dictate of circumstances, and the unpredictability of personal nature.
While many films over the years have tried to build plots around emotional complexities, only few writers, directors, lyricists, musicians, actors have combined to produce a classic which leaves an indelible impression on the viewer, and stands out as a paradigm of sorts even years later.
One such film is the Gulzar-directed 1975 release Aandhi, with the amazing Sanjeev Kumar and Suchitra Sen in the lead roles. Aarti, played by Suchitra Sen, harbours political ambitions, whereas her husband JK, played by Sanjeev Kumar wants to remain a commoner and lead a normal family life. Aarti gets caught between her love for her family, her father who is upset with her decision to choose marriage over career and her own ambition to lead a public life. As a viewer, you wonder how love overruns ambition, leading to marriage, subsequently waging a battle with the inner personality which just a while back had consciously chosen to subjugate `larger desires` for a life of love and family bonding. While you feel JK is right that he had set the context well enough before marriage, and Aarti knew while she could have the joy of marrying her love, the price would be a life away from the public glare, yet you can't help but take notice of Aarti's side of the story too.
If this be a real life situation and you view it as an outsider, you will probably empathise with both the husband and the wife. The wife may seem apparently wrong at having gone back at her commitment so to say, but life as a process often does not stop just at the altar of love or statements of intent; it forcibly extricates the suppressed desire for expression of social identity, creating a conflict between personalities, thereby shunning love to a corner of life from where it becomes a mute observer of people involved in a crisis of pain, elusive pleasure and betrayal. The beauty of the climax of Aandhi lies in the way love stages a fightback of sorts, and how two people give away some part of their long held identities so that both love and the individuals can co-exist harmoniously without endangering either love as a common binding factor or their identities/beliefs as an anchor for self actualisation.
Great film-makers are also great intellectuals. But the challenge for them to is to represent complexity in a manner which is simple to understand, yet profound in its impact and meaning.
The other film which has fascinated me with its handling of emotional complexity is Yash Chopra's 1981 release Silsila, starring Amitabh, Rekha, Jaya Bachchan, Shashi Kapoor and Sanjeev Kumar. Yash Chopra is the master of love contexts and has made films which capture complexity of emotions cutting across age groups. While Silsila is a mature love story where adults grapple with intense head-heart conflicts, his 1997 Dil To Pagal Hai, starring Shah Rukh Khan, Madhuri Dixit, Akshay Kumar and Karisma Kapoor is a more racy film involving the emotional pyrotechnics that go with such a plot.
Of course, while love triangles have an inbuilt emotional complexity, irrespective of the quality of the script and film as a whole, it is films like Aandhi, with just two central characters involved in a complex process of life, which fascinate with their inherent class, timeless contextual relevance and artistic brilliance. Such films not just entertain us, but also provide us with incredible food for thought from time to time.
So keep watching Hindi films and also this space for more insights and commentaries on Bollywood.


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