"Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge"

Too often, an unshared enthusiasm -- particularly when it comes to foreign pop -- becomes a p.c. way of trumpeting your superiority. (In movies, that's always been typified by the art-house dandies who wouldn't be caught dead at the multiplex.) The challenge for a critic who champions the pop culture of another country is both to capture what makes it distinctive (and refreshingly different from what we are used to) while also talking about what makes it accessible to audiences beyond its borders.

The 1995 Bollywood musical "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge" ("The Braveheart Will Take the Bride"), the debut film from then 24-year-old director Aditya Chopra, is one of those pieces of pop culture that easily traverses borders. The movie is touring the U.S. through August as part of the Cinema India showcase "The Changing Face of Indian Cinema." (It's also available on DVD.) Released in the same year as "Titanic," "DDLJ" (as it's known to its fans) has had the longest continuous commercial run of any picture in the history of Indian cinema. It opened in October 1995 and as of 2002 (the year Indian film critic Anupama Chopra's smart and useful monograph on the movie appeared) it was still packing a thousand-seat movie palace in Bombay.

"DDLJ" is one of the most successful films in the history of the world's largest film industry. And if you're an American outside of the country's Indian communities, chances are you've never heard of it. Bollywood films get no commercial release in the U.S. and yet the fact that "DDLJ" is unknown is still strange. This is a picture that should be part of our shared experience of movies. It offers the large, unsubtle, overwhelming satisfaction of the best popular entertainment. It's a flawed, contradictory movie -- aggressive and tender, stiff and graceful, clichéd and fresh, sophisticated and naive, traditional and modern. It's also, I think, a classic.

Chopra has no compunction about indulging in clichés and conventions. He allows his actors to mug shamelessly, and he employs sudden spikes of music like an unwelcome jab in the ribs to underscore the movie's dramatic revelations. Yet he's been blessed with the ability to transcend cliché. You can laugh when the hero, Raj (Shah Rukh Khan), picks up a wounded dove and heals it by rubbing it with the soil of his native Punjab. Or you can be moved by the conviction in the moment, the love Chopra reveals for India in the scene, and his braveness in not worrying about whether the scene was realistic (it isn't -- so what?). Chopra is that rare mix in a popular entertainer, both shrewd showman and true believer. (And apparently, something of an eccentric. According to Anupama Chopra -- no relation -- he gives no interviews and refuses to allow himself to be photographed, believing that if he loses the ability to attend movies anonymously with a regular audience, he will lose his ability to make movies for them.)

At 189 minutes, a length that audiences for Bollywood films are used to, "DDLJ" may seem long to Western moviegoers (though I wasn't bored for a minute). And, for roughly the first 70 minutes, the movie is unaccountably broad (Shah Rukh Khan, who settles down in the second half, sometimes seems the offspring of John Stamos and Jerry Lewis). Throughout the movie, the interiors sometimes have the anonymous flatness of the deadest Hollywood movies of the '50s and '60s. But even during the uncertain patches, Chopra reveals himself to be a whiz at the expressive use of color and landscape. (It's a pity that the DVD transfer renders some scenes dark, depriving the colors in Manmohan Singh's cinematography of the brightness they have on-screen.) The opening scene contains a lovely cut from the heroine's father feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square and speaking of his longing for his homeland to him feeding the birds in Punjab while dancers with colorful silk veils emerge out of mustard fields behind him.

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