Something about a movie I can't get enough of
I have read at some places that Dil Se was to be named Ladakh – Ek Prem Kahani. I don’t know how true that is considering only half an hour of the nearly 3-hour long movie is set in Ladakh. However, I have some special attraction towards that half an hour of the movie that ends right before the interval. I remember being an 8-year-old and watching Dil Se for the first time on the portable Black and White television of mine. All these 18 years before I watched it again, one part that had remained with me was the Ladakh bit. I watched it a month ago and somehow my 26-year-old self smiled at that 8-year-old self of mine. For once, I liked my younger self for liking and keeping with itself that part of the film for so many years.
There are three scenes in particular that I want to write about.
The first is when Meghna tells Amar, who is sitting alone and smoking, that there’s a storm on its way and they should take shelter in the Gompha nearby. It’s the first time that Meghna, who has always been eluding Amar, shows any sign of emotion at all towards him, who had been chasing her since the time their tryst began at the railway platform in the first scene.
What follows a rather cheesy conversation between the two is a masterpiece though. As Amar continues with his efforts of trying to let her know his love, the two are almost caught in a physical scuffle. And that’s where Meghna, a victim of violence and much more as a kid, falls apart. The scuffle triggers her PTSD and she’s unable to cry and seems to be gasping for breath. This is one of the finest bits of acting I have seen by Manisha Koirala on screen. Also beautiful is Amar’s utter inability to deal with the episode. He just seems to not know how to react to what is unfolding in front of his eyes. He panics, just like most people would when confronted with something of this nature. I particularly liked the acting here because it showed how average he actually was, contrary to his opinion of himself where he probably thought of himself to be some Bollywood hero chasing his muse.
What follows a rather cheesy conversation between the two is a masterpiece though. As Amar continues with his efforts of trying to let her know his love, the two are almost caught in a physical scuffle. And that’s where Meghna, a victim of violence and much more as a kid, falls apart. The scuffle triggers her PTSD and she’s unable to cry and seems to be gasping for breath. This is one of the finest bits of acting I have seen by Manisha Koirala on screen. Also beautiful is Amar’s utter inability to deal with the episode. He just seems to not know how to react to what is unfolding in front of his eyes. He panics, just like most people would when confronted with something of this nature. I particularly liked the acting here because it showed how average he actually was, contrary to his opinion of himself where he probably thought of himself to be some Bollywood hero chasing his muse.
The second scene comes minutes after the Satrangi Re song finishes. After rebuffing Amar’s proposal to marry on the grounds that she doesn’t have time, Meghna, for the first time opens up a bit in this scene. Not by herself, though. Amar brings that out of her. Knowing well that the woman he’s dealing with has walls built all around her, he tries to penetrate them not with questions about the past but with the imaginations of the future. He tries so hard. He cooks up a juvenile situation and leaves it at a point where Meghna has to respond. She doesn’t for the most part. She enters the imagination only at the point when kids are mentioned. She smiles, she chirps for a while and plays along with Amar’s sweet nothings before pricking his bubble by saying, “I’ll die like this” with the snap of her fingers. And Amar, as if giving up on his efforts to be clever, comes to the point in response. “Who’s asking you to die? Just say that you love me.” I love this conclusion. One can witness the innocence of his love for her in these words. Done with the beating around the bush that proved futile, he just spills it out like a child. It’s so evident all that he is doing is to get an expression of love for him out of her.
The third and final scene concludes the Ladakh part of the story. Caught in this desert storm away from the desert storm of her life, Meghna gives Amar a peep into her own life when they talk to each other at night before going to sleep. She talks about her affection for the pigeons of the village temple and her mother’s hands and gives some wings to Amar’s hopes, who feels he has walked a couple of steps in the direction of wooing her. She also reveals how she hates everything that Amar embodies and that Amar is– a free soul who can afford to laugh, to have fun and even to love, something that neither her past or nor her future has allowed or will allow her.
The next morning the dream ends for Amar as he realizes on waking up that she’s gone again. Just like the never settling sand, she’s flown away to other lands. Before going away, she writes to Amar, not surprisingly, on the sand.
“Some people are like names on the sand. One gust of wind blows them away.”
It’s Amar’s immediate reaction to the incident that blew me over as a movie-watcher. As he frantically wipes off the words written on the sand while Sukhwinder’s Sitaron Se Jaha plays in the background, we see a kind of anger that he hasn’t displayed before this in the film. It wasn’t that Amar was losing her for the first time. She had slipped out of his grasp thrice before this, one time even getting him roughed up in the process. However, the agony this time stems from a sense of betrayal. There is also this agony of having failed in getting her to love him, especially when he thought he was succeeding in doing so. This hurt proves to be the final nail in the coffin for whatever he felt for her, at least for the time being.
If you want to watch/revisit the scene, you can find the second and the third part here.
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