Some notable directors deploy their talents across a range of genres and subjects. Others hammer insistently away at the same theme or idea in the hope that either the act of repetition or the benefits of experience will reveal new and deeper insights. For Karan Johar, the Hindi cinema's foremost director-producer-showman, that theme is forbidden love, which would set him squarely in Bollywood tradition - except that he approaches this theme from the perspective of a gay filmmaker working in a more than typically patriarchal society. (He is to Bollywood what Almodóvar has been to the lineage of European melodrama.) Johar's genius, when it manifests, lies in the fact his hammering never feels like hard work; rather, he fashions entertainments the way others throw parties, inviting his audience to come out and have a good time. Laugh, cry, sing, dance; work through your issues; bring a bottle and a friend. Our host didn't quite get the guest list right for his last project, 2016's Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, where cancer turned that forbidden love impossible and Johar badly fumbled the furore prompted by the casting of Pakistani actor Fawad Khan. But everything about Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani proves more serendipitous and life-giving. There will be fewer squabbles over the casting, for starters. The opening number alone sees Ranveer Singh's Rocky Randhawa, gadabout heir to his family's sweet empire, romancing what seems like half of the New Bollywood, while also laying the foundations for a subplot involving seasoned players Dharmendra and Shabana Azmi, separated by social norms at a pivotal moment in their youth. What follows offers two forbidden loves for the price of one - one that speaks to 21st century India, and one that reflects upon the India of yore. The film is credited to three screenwriters (Shashank Kaitan, Ishita Moitra and Sumit Roy), but may also owe a certain narrative debt to Karan Johar's therapist: its overbearing urge is to make peace with (or just make sense of) the past, the better to flood the present and future with happiness.
The process is fun, though - more fun than even Barbie, I'd say. (Confession: I've been watching the musical numbers on a loop for the past 48 hours, trying to keep the film's stardust in the air.) If Bollywood is just about the last place on Earth that still believes in the star system, then Johar believes in the star system most of all. He knows there is value in recruiting pretty, expressive, expressly charismatic folks and then setting these people before us like snacks of one kind or another. In Singh and Alia Bhatt (as Rocky's TV journo beloved Rani), he lays on two of the brightest hopes of any nation, reframing them as latter-day Delhi's very own Beatrice-and-Benedick (emphasis firmly on the latter syllable). Here are two characters who are so outwardly wrong for one another that, in movie terms, they can only be right. Johar delights in contrasting Rocky's slangy, tangled, faux-street syntax (neatly preserved in Nasreen Munni Kabir's English subtitling) with Rani's privately schooled, mediasphere-honed eloquence, and his loud, Ken-like wardrobe with her Manish Malhotra-styled elegance. Singh does genuinely heroic work in making supremely likable a character who first presents as a prize prat: Rocky has to get Rani - an unapologetic badass, not so much a gesture towards Strong Female Characterisation™ as a punch to the solar plexus - to take him seriously, because that's how we, too, begin to take him seriously. And we have to take Rocky Randhawa seriously, because that's how Johar gets us to look beyond the film's own gaudy accessories and take him seriously. That this is a new, mature Karan Johar can be seen from the social context in which he sets his young lovers' skylarking. However tricky they have it, the movie suggests, these kids enjoy far greater freedoms than their hunched and coiled elders, preconditioned to altogether more limited and limiting gender roles. (Somewhere towards the back of this plot: Indian society's renewed suspicion of any man who expresses themselves in a way that isn't instantly readable as macho. You might think the country's long and distinguished lineage of poets would alleviate some of these doubts, but then we live in fearful times.)
I suspect Western reviews of Rocky Aur Rani... are going to lean heavily on the descriptor "broad", but Johar realises that broad allows a director to cram more in: more actors, more extras, more perspectives, more poetry. Broad allows even the supporting players their moment in the spotlight; it means you can mix rousing urban party anthems with keening mountaintop laments, and throw in an oddly charming, jingle-like earworm that restates the title and themes from time to time. (Johar is nothing if not a communicator: he wants us to know exactly what he's getting at.) But don't overlook the precision in the direction, nor the film's many felicities of staging. When Rocky and Rani swap households before the intermission, they do so on a bridge that was surely chosen specifically to recall the hostage exchanges in Spielberg's Bridge of Spies. (And yes, these two are captives in their own households, prisoners to their families' fates.) And don't downplay the quality of the screenwriting: note how these characters are reshaped and reoriented by the experiences of others. Sure, some stretches play as conventional - steered by the plot mechanisms via which Bollywood has guided itself for the better part of a century, only now adorned with light-up hashtags and gags about cancellation. Not for nothing does the business subplot tie up with the rebranding of laddoos under the slogan "new thinking, same great taste". Yet even here you keep catching proofs of this filmmaker's instinct for great movie scenes and moments: Rocky standing, more bemused than usual, in a kitchen he doesn't know how to use; Bhatt going toe-to-toe with Jaya Bachchan, her predecessor in 70s Hindi cinema; two men donning skirted outfits to perform the Kathak dancing more typically performed on screen by women. In so doing, Johar begins to express his own thoughts anew, not least those on the topic of intergenerational conflict: he's spied how some unrealised dreams get fulfilled through our offspring, while others curdle into rage and resentment. At a time when some large part of the Indian cinema has effectively been turned over to filmed hate speech - fostering division, preying on prejudice, lighting fuses and standing well back - someone needed to make a forceful case for unity, pleasure, tolerance, love. By rediscovering his voice and raising it an octave, Johar proves just the man for the job: Rocky Aur Rani... is joy in film form.
Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani is now playing in selected cinemas.
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