Love is …
If any film could be called the perfect culmination of a trend, it is Karan Johar's Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. The debutant director takes all the successful elements that characterize young love films of the 90s - the importance of family and friendship between the lovers, and stirs in his own contemporary take on what is hip and young to make a love story that people cherished as if it had happened to them... or wished it had happened to them!
Karan Johar's film is an ode to everything that has worked and still works so beautifully in Hindi cinema to make the perfect Hindi film. And the icing on this delicious cake of love lost and regained is a superb sense of style and instinctive talent for storytelling.
This is the Hollywoodization of Hindi cinema, by importing an American-style campus where college is fun, lecturers wear miniskirts and students play basketball. The heart of the theme is how friendship - from the back-slapping buddy variety between the easy-going tomboy and the college stud - blossoms into love. Anjali (Kajol), despite her tomboyish ways of scorning feminine frills, is the first to discover the intensity of her feelings. And the way Kajol expresses her confusion, awkwardness and pain is brilliant.
The intervention of the 'foreign' element is essential to the story and to underline Rahul's confusion, Anjali's painful realisation and Tina's generous wisdom in life and death. Rahul's deep affection for his best friend can only turn into love when he sees her clad in the diaphanous attractiveness of chiffon and luxuriantly flowing hair. A man can fall headlong in love with the sexy young thing with proper Indian values despite her foreign education and rediscover a lost young love, but a girl must remain faithful to the memory of first love even when she gets engaged to someone else.
shahrukh khan – kajol
I don't think any star couple in recent years has matched the on-screen magic of Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol. Watching them up close and personal has made me realise how the comfort level between two stars can enhance their performances. The way they look at each other or how they complement each other's expressions in the scenes is amazing. The most interesting thing about them is that they share nothing but friendship off-screen. Usually, successful on-screen couples have a romantic relationship in real life too, which enhances their on-screen chemistry. However, in the case of Shah and Kajol, they are just friends in real life and yet they manage to bring out the romantic chemistry so effectively on-screen.
karan johar
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge
Yet another talented scion of a film family made his remarkable debut with a film that became a trailblazer. Aditya Chopra's DDLJ is the first film to make the aspirations and lifestyles of the Indian diaspora an integral part of a thrillingly narrated film with a tight screenplay. This is also the first film where the bright chemistry of the lead pair, the brilliant Kajol and the charismatic Shah Rukh Khan, sets the screen ablaze. This is a multi-coloured fire - the initial sparks of inevitable enmity, the gentle warmth of budding friendship, the smoke signals of courtship and the hot flames of heartbreak before love, with its enduring passion and commitment, conquers even the unforgiving patriarch.
The shifting scenery - from London to Europe and the lush fields of the native Punjab - mirrors the emotional graph of the plot with wonderful accuracy and fluid grace. DDLJ unashamedly celebrates all the colour and richness of Indian rituals and celebrations, just as it reiterates the enduring virtues of traditional Indian values - of family ties, respect for elders and love that must await the approval of the patriarchy, even as Farida Jalal (who has made the sacrifices usually demanded of Indian women) urges the young lovers to elope. It is this recognition and the protest expressed that makes it an Aditya Chopra masterpiece.
