DIL PE MAT LE YAAR!
("Don't take it to
heart, friend")
Hindi, 2000, 151 min.
Directed by Hansal Mehta, Music by Vishal.
If satya be told, here's another film that serves up a neo-realist on-location
view of life in the mean streets of the Mahanagar of Mumbai, helped along by
many of the same cast members who performed so brilliantly in the earlier picture.
At times, it succeeds, adding to SATYA's tale of the criminalization of an urban
newcomer a yet-more-cynical (but also more confused) subplot involving journalistic
and cinematic exploitation and voyeurism.
A lovely credit sequence offers vignettes of pavement dwellers and pigeons,
streets and seascapes, with a song "welcoming" both joy and sorrow.
Like the hero of SATYA, Ram Saran (Manoj Bajpai) is a recent arrival in Mumbai,
in this case a UP bhaiya from Jaunpur, who has found honest work as an auto
mechanic and writes touching letters home to his mom and dad. Though he shares
a tiny room with eight other men and rides a motorscooter with a broken headlamp,
he dreams of cars, flats, and, someday, a blushing bahu to bring back
home. He's made friends with the pudgy Gaitonde (Saurabh Shukla), a failing
wedding videographer, and through him with the fast-talking, Dubai-returned
Tito (Aditya Shrivastava), whose pals include real gangsters. He also meets
the beautiful newspaper reporter Kaamya (Tabu), a jaded yuppie who is touched
by his rustic manner and honest work ethic, though not by his growing infatuation
with her. Their awkward maneuvers on the brink of the chasm of class and education
that separates them make for some of the film's most poignantly accurate scenes
-- culminating in the sheer revulsion she manifests when he openly declares
his love. As if to definitively put him in his place as a subject of her pity
and her gaze, Kaamya makes Ram Saran's "inspiring" story into a screenplay
which she tries to sell to film director Mahesh Bhatt (appearing as himself).
In a strange move, the story is at first rejected by Bhatt, then (revised by
Kaamya following Ram Saran’s attempted love scene) enthusiastically accepted.
From here on, the film gets murkier, blurring the line between Ram Saran's downward-spiralling
life and its own (possible) filmi sur-realization. In the end, we see Kaamya
accepting a Filmfare trophy, apparently for the tragic tale we have just witnessed,
followed by a bizarre coda that alludes to GODFATHER II, with Ram Saran as Michael
Corleone, though with unclear motives -- are we witnessing the ultimate filmi
apotheosis of Ram Saran, or just a director who has run out of ideas? If there
is a deeper meaning here, it would appear to be a deeply cynical one: at the
turn of the millennium, the subaltern hero (to whom the Hindi cinema once devoted
much attention) can get neither a date nor a life; the best he can expect is
a representation of himself from those who have the power to portray, and he
ends as a mere simulacrum of one of Hollywood’s most exported icons. The
so-so score resembles that of SATYA, by the same music director.