"Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge"

You can laugh at the stylization of a touch like that (although if "realism" is your standard of achievement, why are you going to the movies?). Audiences who are used to classic Hollywood musicals may have trouble getting used to their Bollywood equivalents. The song-and-dance numbers jump from place to place and even season to season while the performers go through four or five costume changes in the course of one song. The rhythms are created by the camera movements and the need to take in the picture-postcard background, rather than by the movement of the dancers' bodies. Hollywood has taught us that the best way of shooting a musical number is to show the dancers from head to toe without cutting away. Often it is -- if you're looking at Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly or Michael Kidd or Gregory Hines. The numbers in "DDLJ" aren't of that type; there's something refreshing about the artificiality of Bollywood style. For one thing, it's an implicit refutation of that idiot notion that song and dance should grow "organically" out of the story. (Why -- so we can have more dreck like "Oklahoma!"?) And in the case of "DDLJ," the numbers are so colorful, and the songs (by the brothers Jatin and Lalit Pundit, who work as Jatin-Lalit, and Anand Bakshi) are so catchy, that you'd have to be a bit of a stiff to resist them.

None of this is to suggest that, for Western audiences, "DDLJ" is enjoyable chiefly as a novelty. The key to the film's power and to the enormous satisfaction that it gives is that it has behind it both the traditions of popular movies and the traditions of Indian culture. I'm no expert on that culture, but I don't think you have to be to feel Chopra's deep respect for tradition, though with its connotations of something musty and antiquated, "tradition" might be a misleading word. Tradition is a living thing in "DDLJ." The characters feel the weight of its presence in every moment of their lives. Chopra's accomplishment here is to show, simultaneously, how that link to tradition strengthens them and how it comes close to suffocating them.

"DDLJ" is essentially a simple story of lovers overcoming obstacles to be together. Simran (Kajol) is the oldest daughter of Baldev (Amrish Puri), a Punjabi shopkeeper who has lived in London for 20 years but longs for home. Raj (Shah Rukh Khan) is the wastrel son of a happily assimilated millionaire (Anupam Kher). The two meet when they each take a Eurail trip around the continent with their friends. At first Simran can't stand the joker Raj, which, in the conventions of romantic movies, tells us that they are perfect for each other. By the end of the trip, they've fallen in love -- without quite admitting it to each other. The trouble is that Simran is engaged to a man she's never met, the son of Baldev's boyhood friend, as the result of a pact Baldev made with his friend years before to bind their families together. When Baldev hears Simran confessing to her mother, Lajjo (Farida Jalal), that she's finally found the man she dreamed of, he fears his daughter has become too used to Western ways and immediately moves the family back to Punjab so that Simran's wedding can take place.

It's here, according to Anupama Chopra (in her book published as part of the British Film Institute's BFI Modern Classics series), that Aditya Chopra broke with a major convention of Bollywood films. Instead of eloping with Simran (as in the traditional Bollywood move), Raj tells her he will not marry her until her father himself gives him her hand. He follows Simran to her family's Punjabi village, insinuates himself into the household of her bridegroom-to-be and, without seeming to do much more than being charming and trusting to fate, realizes his dream.

Next Page: What "DDLJ" shares with novels by Monica Ali and Jhumpa Lahiri

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