"Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge"

"DDLJ" should be completely accessible to Western audiences, particularly to audiences raised on classic Hollywood movies. They both, in essence, represent traditional art. The great strength of art that's traditional in both the form it takes and in the values it espouses is that it gives weight to the challenges that arise to those values. In his brilliant essay on the Anglo-Bangladeshi novelist Monica Ali's "Brick Lane" (included in his new collection "The Irresponsible Self") the literary critic James Wood writes, "Traditional societies, with their ties of marriage, burdens of religion, obligations of civic duty, and pressures of propriety [restore] to the novel form some of the old oppressions that it was created to comprehend and to resist and in some measure to escape."

Essentially, Wood is saying that rebellion is not possible unless there's something to rebel against. On a subtler level, he's acknowledging that most of us are not rebels and that, in novels and movies, the burdens of traditions that are foreign come to seem a stand-in for the responsibilities we're burdened with, responsibilities we may dream of escaping even as they form an inextricable part of what we are. And it is the inescapable duty those responsibilities entail that give our longings the disruptive power they hold over us.

"DDLJ" doesn't have the depth or the subtlety that Wood finds in "Brick Lane." But it shares with Ali's novel and with Jhumpa Lahiri's fiction an awareness of the poignance of the diaspora -- the simultaneous longing for the reassurance and continuity of tradition and for the freedom of the new world. Anupama Chopra points out that the assimilated Indian has long been a stock villain in Bollywood films, held up as proof of the corrupting influence awaiting outside Mother India. Aditya Chopra's sly switch is to make Raj, living the life of a spoiled rich kid in London, a rascal with deep respect for Indian tradition and to make Simran's fiancé Kuljeet (Parmit Sethi), the Indian who has never left home, the villain. Chopra overdoes it. Kuljeet is a leering bully who plans to keep Simran at home while he travels to London and samples the girls there. But the point is made: No culture offers a guarantee against corruption.

"DDLJ" is about how the lovers balance the responsibilities to family and tradition with the longing they feel for each other. You could say that by devising a solution that satisfies both tradition and romance, Aditya Chopra is trying to be all things to all people. But reaching for a broad audience is not the same thing as kowtowing to a focus group. To satisfy a wide audience, you have to have breadth, daring and confidence. Chopra pulls off something incredibly tricky in "DDLJ." Within the most idealized of contexts -- the movie musical -- Chopra insists on the unidealistic truth that life is never one thing or the other. He finds a way to honor romance while acknowledging the compromises that life inevitably demands.

Presumably, the Indian audiences who have flocked to the movie have had no trouble understanding what Chopra was up to. But audiences we think of as educated (or at least who think of themselves that way) often have a problem getting beneath the surface of movies that don't dismiss tradition or social niceties they have no use for. That's what happened when I saw "DDLJ" a few weeks back, when it was shown at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens as part of the Cinema India showcase. In one sequence, Simran and Raj get separated from the friends they are traveling through Europe with and have to share a room for the night (I warned you Chopra has no compunction about using old convention). The next morning, Raj momentarily fools her into thinking they've made love. Completely distraught and believing she's been "ruined," Simran must be comforted by Raj who tells her, "I'm not scum. I'm Hindustani. And I know what honor means to the Hindustani woman." Late in the film, when it appears that Raj will lose Simran to her arranged marriage, Shah Rukh Khan delivers an impassioned speech where he tells Simran they must obey her father. "All our lives, they [our parents] have brought us up," he says. "They gave us so much love. About our lives, they can decide better than we can. We have no right to make them sad for the sake of our happiness."

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