Dhadak, if you haven't been following, is the much-trumpeted Hindi remake of Sairat, the Marathi drama that quietly struck a chord with local and festival audiences back in 2016. With its unvarnished, naturalistic performances and its sometimes awkward but unfailingly sincere gestures towards a bigger (indeed, 170-minute) picture, Sairat might almost have qualified for the tag "naive art", had it not been shot and scored with such consummate skill. Dhadak, which has been produced by mega-mogul Karan Johar, stars the scion of one of Bollywood's more illustrious families, and runs to just two hours in a bid to facilitate more screenings per day, clearly isn't naive: everybody here knows full well where this story's heading, and (hopefully) what they've got to do to get it there. So what's changed? Rather a lot, as it happens, and in ways that prove instructive of the difference between regional and commercial cinema, and what gets purged from more artisanal forms of cinema to generate major international hits. What gets added, too: as the new film's somewhat arbitrary-seeming decision to replace Sairat's opening cricket match with a chilli-eating contest hints, most of these alterations are tied up with issues of consumption and taste.
Firstly, there are changes of scenery and context to reckon with. Sairat unfolded around a small village where the old ways of courtship had set firm, but Dhadak carries us to a spruced-up and plugged-in Udaipur, where - we are informed - Jennifer Lopez once performed for a local entrepreneur. (The Jenny from the Block tour was unlikely ever to have passed through Sairat's humble backwater.) The kids in the foreground are now catalogue-pretty. Archi, the first movie's haughty heroine, has become Parthavi (Janhvi Kapoor, daughter of the late star Sridevi), well-groomed daughter of an ambitious right-wing politician; Parshya, Archi's ardent young swain, is now Madhu (Ishaan Khattar), who forsakes his predecessor's bumfluff for precisely clipped stubble, snazzy duds, and the beginnings of a six-pack. Madhu is the son of a guest house owner - thus more middle-class than farmboy Parshya, as Dhadak's audience will likely be more middle-class than Sairat's. Narrowing the social gap between these two star-crossed lovers complicates what Sairat was getting at: Dhadak's lovers are such an obvious match that it seems all the more absurd that forces should conspire to keep them apart. Still, we might wonder, where might two teenage runaways raised in the heart of the city flee to? Dhadak's answer is other cities: first Mumbai, then Kolkata, and a series of studio sets that don't seem greatly dingier than where they were before. It's not the characters' circumstances that are reduced, but the sacrifices involved: this flight has a little of the Gap year about it.
The smartest decision director Shashank Khaitan has taken has been to retain the original film's melodies, which always were glorious. The insane, tabla-smashing "Zingaat", time signature roughly comparable to the blood pressure of a hummingbird entering tachycardia, was the solid-gold party banger of 2016 and is no less so in its remixed 2018 state. It's too perfect that this song should immediately precede the lovers' first kiss, and the plot's first violent incursion: in its nervous excitation, its capacity to get even the semi-dormant matinee viewer worked up, "Zingaat" still sounds like an orgasm or terrible kicking waiting to happen. Khaitan has also streamlined many of the original's rougher edges, in particular clarifying the political backdrop. In Sairat, the heroine's father - and chief obstacle to lasting happiness - was just a man like any other backwoods patriarch; he could have been your own father, which is why his actions became so unsettling. Here, the character has become more obviously villainous: a sneering demagogue played by Ashutosh Rana with dark eyes and waxed moustache, he resembles no less a figure than Al Swearengen, the fearsomely controlling saloon owner of HBO's Deadwood, albeit a Swearengen removed of any complexity. If the original formed a heartfelt statement on the everyday infelicities of the caste system, what Johar and Khaitan give us is a story about two pretty kids being separated by an unpretty man, and a film that has to flash up some statistics before the end credits to underline what it's really been getting at.
As Dhadak went on, the more I wondered whether those rough edges weren't an essential component of Sairat's masterplan: it's why it's not quite accurate to describe that film's art as naive. The original built up its romanticism over its first half before gradually stripping it away, the better to show what two disinherited youngsters had been left with in reality. Where Sairat set about that task with a chisel, Dhadak prefers the chainsaw, ruthlessly lopping off anything that might bring a mass audience down: the time that lets us observe characters changing and growing, scenes of struggle and despair and isolation. All of that survived in the original, which took a stock movie set-up and followed it past the usual happily ever after, into the realms of real life; that imposing running time was an integral part of its methods. Dhadak, a sleek yet naggingly plasticky replica, is less interested in giving us the whole picture than a pretty picture, of the kind that has traditionally sold tickets. It is that, unarguably, and it's unlikely to disappoint anybody who hasn't experienced the original and just wants to swoon and cry as cued. The young leads, as capable as they are handsome, conjure up some chemistry and emotion between them, and the ending, rather craftily reconfigured to throw off anyone who has seen the first movie, still drives home some kind of a point - though with such a reduced build-up, it now delivers a short, sharp shock rather than the profound, thought-provoking tragedy it means to be. Again, it's illustrative of the differences between the two productions. Sairat was a not inconsiderable slice of life, but Dhadak - in everything from its casting to its lighting - is only ever just a movie. What this story gains in riches, it's lost in richness.
Dhadak is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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