On demand: "Dil Se..."

The first Indian movie to crack the UK box-office Top 10, 1998's Dil Se... was an intersection between three emergent masters of their craft: the gifted Tamil writer-director Mani Ratnam, the generational Hindi star Shah Rukh Khan and the increasingly prominent composer-auteur A.R. Rahman. Notice of significance was served by the opening song "Chaiyya Chaiyya" - the one on a train, granted overnight passage to the pantheon of great modern Bollywood numbers - although in retrospect this number serves as a signifier of where everyone's going, exhilarating forward progress and lushly romantic misdirection, bringing the mass audience on board before subsequent reroutings and derailments, with resulting mass casualties. The train is carrying Khan's All India Radio reporter Amarkanth Varma to Assam to interview the locals on the subject of fifty years of Indian independence; these locals prove altogether divided on how much progress has been made exactly. Here, Ratnam reveals a more critical project: weaponising a star - and a newly minted pin-up like Khan at that - to broach the story of the Tamil freedom fighters and the political violence of the 1990s. Khan can certainly put a charming face on this, setting out to court local beauty Manisha Koirala with good intentions and a boyish smile. But there are places and moments on this earth where even the best intentions and the most boyish smile offer little to no protection against the chill winds and ferocious storms of history. In many respects, it's remarkable Dil Se... became the blockbuster that it did.

This is, then, a complex text: simultaneously a love story and a political tract, Indian cinema's Titanic and Wuthering Heights as well as its Reds and Under Fire. In Rahman's title song, the two stars pitch woo while bombs go off around them: where Khan's early, starmaking vehicles saw the actor stretching his arms and legs on picturesque mountaintops, Ratnam dared to wonder what would happen if he was forced to pursue his beloved through a minefield. Given the violent tonal shifts, the film relies more than most on Khan's supreme adaptability, his abundant gifts as a storyteller: the latter are much on display in Amar's radio reports, with their on-the-hoof Foley work, as well as his interactions with those (non-professionals?) cast as the Assamese public. Yet Ratnam deploys Khan tactically, too: Amar is, for much of the duration, visibly just a boy, out of his depth and comfort zone, playing with fire. The opening scene - which finds him huddling on a railway platform, waiting for that train as a storm blows in - is but an early indicator he's going to be tested; he will spend much of the following two hours being beaten up, whether by his sweetheart's nearest and dearest, the local police, soldiers on both sides of this battle, his beloved herself, or simply the harsh realities of late 20th century India. The movies had made Khan famous, a dreamboat, an idealised swain; Ratnam, in one of those cruel but brilliant decisions on which great directorial careers often hang, made him a fool for love.

It is, then, a Mani Ratnam film above all else, the work of someone in fierce control of potentially explosive material that could, with less certain handling, have blown up in everybody's face. Almost thirty years on, we can say with some assurance that no-one - perhaps not even the laurelled Ritwak Ghatak - has shot the Indian landscape more comprehensively and more sensuously. That train song yields to a long hike through the desert, incorporating some lust in the dust; when the film does finally arrive among the mountains, Ratnam and his then-regular cinematographer Santosh Sivan (who went on to direct 1998's The Terrorist and 2001's Khan-starring hit Asoka) frame the peaks not as romantic reverie but an extreme in their own right, a place where people lose their lives. The pair eventually have to confine themselves to a more conventional destination - urban Delhi, where Amarkanth returns heartbroken come the second half - so as to tie this story up. If what follows the intermission proves more reined in than what's gone before - expressive close-ups replacing the expressionistic longshots - the film gains in tautness for it. Here, the political dovetails decisively (not to mention woundingly) with the personal, as Ratnam shows where his characters' misplaced passions finally carry them: Koirala does her most impressive work in a flashback that seeks to explain why she feels compelled to do what thousands of others have been driven to do before her. A teachable example of how to broach heavyweight social issues within a popular format - and curiously foresighted, given the especially fractious decade that followed - Dil Se... builds towards a setpiece on a par with any of the same era's Hollywood thrillers, before its unforgettable finale.

Dil Se... is currently streaming via Netflix, and available to rent via YouTube.