"Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge"

At AMMI, the largely white, presumably liberal audience hooted at those scenes. It was as blatant an example of Ugly Americanism as I've ever encountered at the movies. The audience, which would have blanched at someone laughing at, say, a Kabuki performance or at the opera, had to make its little show of demonstrating that these values were not their values. If they had been just a trifle more observant, they might have had reason to question whether they were even the values of the movie they were watching.

On one level, of course they are. But Chopra never lets us forget the price tradition extracts. Because it deals with heightened emotion, romantic melodrama has often been described -- and derided -- as a woman's genre. But melodrama has often served to express women's experience, and because melodrama is essentially aggressive (which is what gives the form its redeeming honesty), it has expressed that experience forcefully. Throughout "DDLJ" tradition blinds men to the emotions of the women they love. Simran finds out about her engagement when her father gives her a letter from his friend. Reading it, she learns she is to be married to a man she's never seen; she runs out of the room in tears. Baldev's reaction is pride that his daughter is still modest. He literally does not see the tears, just as he doesn't see (or pretends not to see) how distracted and unhappy Simran is when the family returns to Punjab. It's Baldev's elderly mother who notices Simran's unhappiness and points it out to her son, who dismisses it.

The movie's most extraordinary moment -- and I think one of the most extraordinary moments I've ever seen in a popular movie -- is a scene between Simran and her mother. It's one of those scenes, like the scene in "The Best Years of Our Lives" where Teresa Wright announces to her parents that she's fallen in love with a married man and intends to break his marriage up, where a traditional work suddenly gives expression to feelings that threaten to smash tradition to the ground. And because those feelings appear in the context of a mainstream movie, they seem riskier, more daring. (Works for specialty audiences rarely threaten that audience's entire value system in the way that a mainstream work can.)

Lajjo finds Simran sitting by the window in her bedroom. We hear a lonely sound of wind whistling through the trees and, when the camera moves around, a painted backdrop of trees against the blush of an evening sky. Lajjo tells her daughter about her own childhood, how her father told her that women have the same rights as men. And she talks about how that promise was denied her at every turn, how she was expected to sacrifice her own happiness again and again as a sister, a daughter, a wife and a mother.

Simran, who has been gazing out the window, averting her eyes from what she has every reason to expect will be a speech about how she must do her duty, is suddenly startled enough to turn her eyes to her mother. This is a woman she has described to Raj as more like a friend than a mother, and yet the expression on Simran's face (Kajol doesn't utter a word in this sequence -- she doesn't need to) tells you she's never heard Lajjo talk like this, has never even imagined she would.

"Once you were born," her mother continues, "when I held you in my arms for the first time, I made a promise, never to let happen to my daughter what happened to me." A flicker of hope enters Simran's eyes -- which makes what follows all the crueler. "I had forgotten," her mother tells her, "that a woman hasn't even the right to make promises. She is born to be sacrificed for men. For their women, men will never make sacrifices." And she follows this with an even more amazing line: "Therefore I, your mother, come to take from you your own happiness."

The power of the scene isn't in spite of the melodrama but because of it. The heightened, even "corny" (a phrase I detest) cadences of the language intensify the emotion so that Lajjo's bruising candor takes your breath away. There's a horrible irony at work in the scene. Lajjo talks to Simran as the friend Simran always described her as; who can imagine a mother offering such a bleak future to her own child? And just when you think the scene can't go any further, Lajjo delivers one of the most damning lines any spouse has ever spoken about another on-screen: "Your father won't care for your tears."

Of course, Baldev has to learn to care for Simran's tears, and he holds on to his daughter by -- literally -- letting go of her. To pull that off, you have to have not just breadth -- the confidence that you can meld two contradictory impulses into a seamless whole -- but generosity. You have to be willing to allow, as Aditya Chopra is, that a character like Baldev, who comes close to being the movie's villain, has the capacity to change. There's a flash of this in an earlier scene, a musical number during the celebration of Simran's engagement. Lajjo has joined the dancers and suddenly the crowd parts to reveal Baldev standing there watching her. Everyone freezes, expecting him to chastise his wife for making a spectacle of herself. She starts to move off the dance floor and is stopped by her husband singing, "O my precious one ... I could still die for you my love." You can call it obvious, but it's these obvious moments, full of unexpected, expansive emotion that we go to the movies for. Like everything else in "DDLJ" it's a simple gesture given weight by the bigness of the emotion and the CinemaScope screen.

I'm not giving anything away by revealing that Raj and Simran wind up together. The beauty of Chopra's conception is that we are watching a myriad of unions. It isn't just the hero and heroine who are wed, it's male prerogative and female persistence, tradition and innovation, the home and the world.

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