Watched these two Bollywood films this weekend to destress. If I dont make notes about what I see, I never end up remembering that I have indeed seen this film.
Bhaag Milkha Bhaag is inspired from the true story of Milkha Singh, the Indian athlete who is also known as the Flying Sikh. He won for India the Gold medal for 400 metres race at the Asian Games (1958,1962) and Commonwealth Games (1962). The film looked at the personal life of the player rather than his life as a sportsperson. Milkha migrated to India during the partition at a young age of 12, lost much of his family. Making a life in India forces him to come to terms with many hardships and socially deviant works (not sufficiently explained in the film). He falls in love with a girl who asks him to have a dignified job, which takes him to join the Indian Army. Through the Army, he grooves into running. The film shows his hardships, losses and his fight against his own internal demons that make a compelling case for how deep seated internal trauma can come in the way of achieving your goal even if you may be great at your skill.
Rocky aur Rani is a yet another film in Bollywood that offers its viewers new perspectives to (combat) patriarchy. More recently, Bollywood has become aware of its new audience that is young, woke, working, exposed and empowered as compared to its earlier generation. The film is an attempt to put the contesting ideologies of these two generations together on the one hand, but also ideological values of conservatism and liberalism in dialogue with each other. There are many types of characters in this film. All privileged. The lead characters belong to a conservative patriarchal and a liberal intellectual household respectively. Seemingly crafted from, and for a north Indian perspective, the film largely depends on polarized instances to build its point. Yet, there are moments due to the particular characters that allow the viewer to reflect on the smugness behind the liberal intellectual and the helplessness of the conservative individual. More importantly, the film brings crucial confrontations in both these worlds that seem more filmic than real. In real life, according to me, patriarchy and cultural elitism plays out even more indirectly than dramatised in the film.
The performances of Jaya Bachhan and Shabana Azmi were mediocre, and I do not understand why they were required in the film.
The film also gave me a chance to consider the very real clash for modern love between physical attraction and its immediacy versus intellectual longing and its long term need. One point that the film asserts time and again is how, sometimes, one can meet someone for just a little while but take a lifetime for it to recognize it as love; and on the other hand, you may spend a lifetime with someone and still not find love in it. Between this however, what I came to think about is lingering the role of rationality in the moment of decision-making for life. Feeling love (in the moment) and falling for it (for life) are concurrent for only a few fortunate ones. All others, to be sure, only experience love in passing.
