Bollywood Inquiry July 2020: DIL BECHARA & SHAKUNTALA DEVI

Bollywood Inquiry is a monthly column on the biggest new Bollywood movies.

Dil Bechara

Sushant Singh Rajput’s career started less than ten years ago and, in that short amount of time, he became a bona fide star, taking the lead in several acclaimed films (my personal favourite is Sonchiriya). Winning critical and popular acclaim through a string of varied, vibrant performances, he was the beloved outsider who flourished in Bollywood’s sea of nepotistic practises. Outside of performing, he was recognised for his charitable efforts. Sadly, he is no longer with us, but the immortal power of cinema will allow generations to continue to discover his talents.

SSR’s passing coincided with the release of his final film, Dil Bechara (transl. The Hapless Heart), a Hindi adaptation of John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars, the best-selling novel about two cancer patients who fall in love. I was melancholic about seeing the actor posthumously play Manny, the leading male role before I even saw the first frame. A highly successful book transferred into a highly successful American film, we know how this story goes. But it’s an impossible task to separate the premise from the tragedy.

Fortuitously, SSR’s final role is a very playful one. Manny’s cancer is in remission and the brush with death makes him amplified to enjoy life to the fullest, staying positive at all times. When he’s having fun making a zero-budget movie with his blind friend JP (Sahil Vaid), he serendipitously eyes Kizie Basu (Sanjana Sanghi) on the street and invites her to join them. It’s essentially love at first sight, both aware of their mortality as they spend the rest of their unknown quantity of days together.

The film independently works well to provide humour, poignancy, and catchy music (A.R Rahman’s title song is an earworm), but much of your enjoyment will depend on if you cared for John Green’s story the first time around. It may play better for those who haven’t read the book or seen the original film because this takes plays almost beat-for-beat the same and, well, it’s a pretty nice story anyway. The breathtakingly over-stated cigarette metaphor is present in this version too, but the hammer over my head feels lighter because I already suspected they’d keep it in.

On the other hand, mercifully, there’s no scene equivalent to making out in Anne Frank’s house and the ending is at once both thinned and more streamlined, focusing on the relationship between Kizie, Manny, and JP, reducing the role of another important character in the process. That role is the elusive genius artist, with whom the protagonists are obsessed. Previously played by Willem Dafoe, his counterpart here is inhabited by Saif Ali Khan, equally as abrasive but ultimately less important to the narrative.

Ultimately though, a compare and contrast essay between both films would be irrelevant because Dil Bechara is targeted squarely at the fans of Sushant Singh Rajput. In that regard, it’s a lovely tribute. Manny is another memorable character in his oeuvre who inhabits the philosophies and silliness that characterised many of the other roles that the star took on. Containing SSR’s unparalleled energy in a bittersweet storyline about humanity makes Dil Bechara an indisputable tearjerker. Goodbye Sushant, you will not be forgotten.

Dil Bechara is now streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.

Shakuntala Devi (Anu Menon)

Shakuntala Devi begins in a very interesting way. It’s quickly established that the titular character is a renowned hero, but the success of her character is undercut with a scene that depicts Shakuntala’s (Vidya Balan) daughter Anuparma (Sanya Malhotra) walking into a lawyers office and saying she wants to sue her mother for illegally harming her financial standing. Shakuntala’s greatness is immediately detained before we get to know her. By the end, this biopic isn’t as radical as this intro suggests, but it’s still enjoyable.

Shakuntala Devi was an Indian writer and numbers whizz whose extraordinary ability to mentally calculate complex numbers earned her the nickname, “the human-computer.” Her nonpareil talent was globally recognised and much of the film is structured like we’re following her on tour, going around the UK and US showing off her arithmetic skills and setting world records for her absurdly quick mental calculations.

We cut back to the young Shakuntala, an amusing prodigy who quickly monetises her gifts when she learns how impressive it is to the people around her. But the timeline of Anu Menon’s film starts getting a bit out of hand, jumping between time and space whenever it feels like. However, this doesn’t mean it’s easy to get lost in transition. 

The protagonist’s goal is so singular and her conflicts are ones that she has to deal with for a long time, so the timeline hopping is not only a manageable mental task for the audience but it also creates fine points around the persisting difficulties in her life and challenges her ability to prioritise what’s important. Namely, her home life, particularly her difficult relationship with her daughter. The film focuses on this element as the heroine’s greatest motivation and, simultaneously, her biggest flaw.

This was the most melodramatic film I’ve been subjected to in a hot minute. It gets so schmaltzy that it’s easier to surrender and cry along than to roll your eyes at the most cloying sequences. Your capacity for soap opera is tested greatly,  and you must accept that Anu Menon will put your proverbial back against the wall. Though the sentimental pressure is intense, it’s an oddly warm and pleasant sensation too, mostly due to the endearing performances of Malhotra and Balan.

The two wonderful actresses treat the material with the bombastic poignancy it desires. I commend them for being so playful with their characters. Even the heaviest topics – poor parenting and generational trauma (Shakuntala has had a difficult mother-child relationship both ways) – are somewhat frothy. Not too much to undermine their seriousness but just enough so that the film can confidently arrive at its tidy, jolly ending.

All-in-all, Shakuntala Devi is very much the epitome of a decent Bollywood biopic. Dramatic moments are inflated and comedic moments are designed to be commercially viable to the masses. Regardless of its flaws, I honestly miss seeing these lighthearted diversions in a cinema, where they really wield their power to take you on escapist journeys in heightened realities.

Shakuntala Devi is now streaming on Prime Video.

Next Month

And that concludes July 2020’s edition of Bollywood Inquiry! The pandemic’s impact on the global film industry means distribution plans are being shuffled around every day so I’m not entirely sure what to expect to see in August. But I do know that there’s a new biopic coming soon to Netflix, Gunjana Saxena, about the life of Indian’s first female combat pilot. Check out the trailer below and stay tuned for next month’s column.

To read previous Bollywood Inquiry columns, click here.