Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Dil Bechara - an overrated disappointment

This is my private blog. I am not even advertising it anywhere. If you came here by yourself, don't curse me.

Dil Bechara was released in the aftermath of Sushant's death by suicide. While the reasons for his suicide remain highly debated in TV newsrooms and made mincemeat of by opportunists, a rising wave of supporters for SSR just wouldn't allow any criticism about SSR at all.

I know very little about SSR. His only movie I ever saw was Dil Bechara because the music was by AR Rahman. Both the movie and the music was a disappointment. But this cannot be said out loud, so I had to return to my bunker for expressing it. One, this wretched tradition that you cannot say anything ill about the departed. Two, in the Indian tradition, the person immediately receives the title 'swargiya' (heavenly), irrespective of how lousy they would have been during their lifetime [even this cannot be said out loud because how dare a person with a Christian name, say anything critical about the Indian tradition]. Three, the sympathy wave for SSR has been turned into a binomial battle between those who support nepotism and those who don't - only in Bollywood, not necessarily in other spheres of life.

The film had a very predictable, dark storyline - whatever thin whiff that was presented as a plot. Full of imageries, dialogues and sceneries associated with death and its surrounding eerieness. I learnt about that fateful lung infection which causes you to carry an oxygen pump (Pushpinder) wherever you go.

One expected that the film would break out of the cast of sad cancer-based movies and resonate with hope and humour. It did for a short while, but quickly returning to death and despair. His final word on-screen was 'Seri' a Tamil word. As a Tamil-speaking person, I was mildly enthused but was again disappointed that, that part of his background was not explored at all. In comparison to the multiple references to the Bengali background of Kizie Basu, his love interest.

The final scenes of the film show SSR grotesquely with phlegm and sputum and everything. When you look back, it is quite scary to think that SSR decided to end his life after doing this extremely dark movie. Most of the dialogues in hindsight seem very prescient and hence his fans would reminisce with shocking horror. As a non-fan, I wasn't impressed. The lead girl's (debutant) acting is praiseworthy.

SSR, I hear left his long-time girlfriend from his TV serial times when he shot to fanfare on the big screen. He seems to have more than a  million followers on social media. Some say, he has a property on the moon too. He seemed to have a line-up of movies which released even after his death. He was in no way on the downward curve of his career. All of this makes his end, more and more intriguing.

I have no personal beef against SSR. Dil Bechara will reach a cult-status with his fans, because he went too soon, after this. As a movie, it was not appealing in the least. And somebody had to say that, objectively!! These days it is very difficult to make that distinction in the public sphere. The assumption that if you like a person, you need to like their work. Alternately, if you do not like a person's work, it is construed to mean that you hate them. The world needs to break out of this idiotic thinking. A lot of acrimony would be spared!!