Watching DDLJ for the primary time at 25 and hating each minute

Thirty years. That’s how lengthy this cinematic relic has been held aloft because the holy grail of Bollywood romance. It took each fibre of my mortal being to outlive its three hours, however for the sake of cinema historical past (and on the danger of being ceremonially excommunicated and lynched by filmy loyalists), I’ll attempt to preserve issues quick, civilised, and solely reasonably heretical.

Shah Rukh Khan’s flip because the patron saint of delicate pink flags has lengthy been celebrated because the archetypal romantic hero. He radiates a boyish attraction that’s supposedly meant to melt his smug expat bro power. Kajol in the meantime, appears to embody the docile virtues anticipated of “good Indian girls” in diaspora tales. Simran’s sudden gullibility is so ridiculous as a result of she falls in love the second this man-child says “sorry” for joking about assaulting her whereas she’s unconscious. 

If Raj’s reverent heart-eyes on the pious object of his affections praying in a Swiss church weren’t already grating, his daytime fantasies of carrying his newly sanctified bride in a pink lehenga down a church aisle throughout the later, Tujhe Dekha Toh sequence, made that subtext embarrassingly loud. His persistent ‘courtship’ depends on a collection of humiliating flirtations adopted by an apology as a reset button. This immodest template for romantic license is one which Indian cinema appears to have absorbed and emulated for years to come back. From my restricted understanding, earlier display screen romances indulged in unabashed melodrama. Yet whereas DDLJ proclaimed itself some type of radical vanguard of “trendy love,” it nonetheless strengthened the identical gendered dynamics of obedience by way of shiny non-resident privilege.

Then we hit India, the place apparently escaping arranged-marriage purgatory is off the desk as a result of Raj insists on Bauji’s “permission.” Here, the lyrics of “Mehndi Laga Ke Rakhna” and the Karva Chauth sequence solely additional sanctify feminine sacrifice as devotional intuition. And the climactic slapstick smackdown fairly actually levels Simran because the prize to be launched solely after the patriarch concedes possession. The movie makes an attempt at difficult this internalised misogyny by way of performative nods and juxtapositions with the Western thought of modernity, nevertheless it’s finally devoid of any significant structural critique.

Three hours of Shah Rukh’s unrelenting nonsense, appeared to have lastly fried poor Amrish Puri’s brains together with my very own. Somehow on the finish of all of it, I’m presupposed to rejoice over Simran escaping a gun-slinging Punjabi launda, solely to land within the arms of a slightly much less insupportable, entitled London brat.

There are some sparkles of half-baked observations on first-generation immigrant disillusionment that exist virtually regardless of the romance. But the hypocrisy of DDLJ is that its flimsy advantage signalling in the direction of progressiveness finally bends the knee to the very authority it pretends to defy. 

People defend this movie as a “product of its time.” Absolutely not. “Its time” was 1995, not the Stone Age. Fond nostalgia and “good‑ol’ usual enjoyable” can’t defend this from scrutiny. For the lifetime of me, I can not fathom what makes this movie so beloved. Maybe my technology will simply by no means get it. Or possibly I’m simply too sane. Call me a snobbish, fun-sucking hater if you happen to should, however assessing this movie by way of a up to date lens solely exposes its vaunted ‘legacy’ being commemorated for attaining lower than the naked minimal.

So, ja DDLJ ja. I hope we by no means cross paths once more. Happy thirtieth, I suppose.