Piyush Roy
10 million views in just 24 hours – make the recent online launch of Aditya Chopra’s next film, Befikre, the fastest 10 million views gathering Indian film trailer ever! The Chopra Junior’s debut outing, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (DDLJ) still holds the record of the longest continuously running film, still attracting audiences at Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir theatre, two decades since its release. References to DDLJ’s iconic recall in public memory is celebrated in the Befikre trailer too, but with a‘contemporary’ take.
Towards the trailer’s end, the hero, played by Ranveer Singh tells the heroine, essayed by Vaani Kapoor, to not ogle at a guy passing by, as he won’t turn back. In the turning back of a parting friend, DDLJ had famously suggested an interesting litmus test to ascertain the first signs of falling in love. The trick has become a reference in popular love lore manifestations since the mid-1990s, just as Maa Santoshi’s Friday fasts became a national hobby post the Jai Santoshi Maa film’s sleeper success in the mid-1970s.
That interpretation may not hold as steadfastly after the release of Befikre, as the heroine corrects the hero, stating, ‘all that looking back as a sign of love was 1990s, (it’s passé), I am just checking his butt…’
Hopefully social commentators won’t start going gaga over this physical turnaround happening from the Yash Chopra stable of clean, spiritual romances. Neither should fringe feminists start going ecstatic reading in Kapoor’s statement an acknowledgement of the female gaze and the girls’ articulation of equivalent ‘locker room’ talk.
We live in a day and age when the Presidential candidate of the world’s most powerful democracy, in its most discussed national election, repeatedly blurs the line of private gossip to dish and defend below-the-belt public banter that’s heard, engagesand is debated upon.
No longer is there a hell of a difference between the loose and the footloose!!!
The characters of Ranveer Singh and Vaani Kapoor in Befikre seem to blur the moralities around those binaries well, and given Aditya Chopra’s past record around defined characterisations, these two too, am sure will blend well. Commitment phobic young protagonists are not alien to Indian cinema anymore, popular or otherwise. These two just take the game of truth and dare a little further to levels that those who have played it in the West would be familiar with. What would be interesting is how Chopra Junior resolves the love aspect in a very obvious lust transaction? We have seen some pretty convincing drifters come ashore – be it Kunal Kohli’s Hum Tum way, Siddharth Anand’s Anjaana Anjaani way and/or Imitiaz Ali’s the Tamasha way.
What will be the Aditya Chopra way in? And how his young cast negotiates the bends and the turns there of, will be a major game changer in what happens to their careers next? Ranveer Singh, in spite of some Best Actor awardslast year, and some truly free and fabulous parts is yet to be counted in the serious ‘acting’ league of a contemporary like Ranbir Kapoor. Vaani Kapoor (of Shuddh Desi Romance guest appearance fame) gets to make her mark in a role that analysts would ideally like to contemplate with Parineeti Chopra, Deepika Padukone or Kangna Ranaut. If she delivers, then Befikre will be her guaranteed jump into the big league; a big banner, she’s already got.
But the film’s biggest risk taker and the one who needs a super success for return and recall is Aditya Chopra. The scion of the Yash Raj banner hasn’t wholly and solely helmed three of the most formative aspects of a film’s making – direction, screenplay and story – since DDLJ. This time he is the producer as well. In a career of four films, his last directorial outing, Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, had happened eight years ago. In the genre of Hindi film romances with some substantial difference, Befikre seems to be the movie that could be the DDLJ of our times, in its promise of a new spin to age old yarn.
The film’s first promo song – Labon ka karobar (sung to carefree delight by Papon) – featuring a collage of pairs kissingacross locations and professions, merging age, race, gender and sexuality diversities, is a substantial offer of that potential.
Come December, the deliverance too will be loud and clear, because this is no subtle or small an experiment, and hence its fate too will be way beyond another aar ya paarmasala blockbuster.
