Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Movies

Movies, especially the Indian variety, have the nicest of endings. Ten minutes before the climax, everything is chaos. The girl is almost going to get married to the villain who has through the most machiavellian of means managed to convince the girl that he is the one that she should be marrying and not her true love who only used her as a point of leverage to further his own self-interest. I wonder if the heroines in the movies watch hindi movies. If they did, they'd know how to tell the villain apart from true loves. But for some strange reason, the women in movieland do not watch movies. The truth probably lies with a letter which is in the possession of some sanyasi somewhere who does not have the transportation to come to the location of the wedding. But of course, a dog, a snake and an elephant who are all friends of the hero and heroine (they were befriended during the 2 weeks when the hero and heroine stayed in the jungle to hide from all the bad people) manage to wheedle the letter from the sanyasi with consummate ease and double back to the log cabin where the hero is being held captive (the elephant smashes the log cabin down and all the wood splinters fall miraculously away from the hero. To make sure all contingencies have been taken care of, the elephant smashes the log cabin in which the villain's handymen are staying. This time though, the wood falls right on the thugs and manages to handicap all of them. ) The hero, the snake, the dog and the elephant then go back to the mantap (running, with the snake overtaking them), when the villain is *still* seconds away from tying the knot. Chairs are thrown, flowers are shed, coconuts get broken, words are exchanged- no one knows what's happening. In the end everyone sees the truth. Suddenly the mantap's all ready for a marriage again. Chairs are back in place. Flowers disappear from places they are not meant to be. Coconuts self seal and repair themselves. We don't know how all this gets done- it's never shown. And the boy and the girl get married and live happily ever after. The villain either turns a new leaf and becomes a priest or goes to jail (when he comes out 20 years later, he will seek revenge .He'll try and get his son married to the daughter of the blessed couple who, of course, unaware of all this, is playing with the dog, the elephant and the snake).


Pardon the long detour. But I love them. I love how honesty and sincerity and love and devotion always wins. I love how justice is meted out fairly. I love how all the bad men get punished and the good men get retributed. But most of all, I love how everything comes together in the last ten minutes of the movie. They say art imitates life. I wonder if such things happen in real life too. Hmm. It'd be nice if it did. I'd take irrational events and crazy co-incidences any day if it means happiness. I'd like a little bit of melodrama in my life too. It's fun apparently.

1 comment:

PS said...

I think, desi movies are all about metaphor.
Sometimes, they are astoundingly and precisely directed to create or maintain certain value systems.

The language and social issues are simplified is often such that 10 year old kiddos are able to understand it fully. I think, thats a great thing, in some way.

Interestingly, if you see hollywood movies, even the ones meant for kids, one wonders whether the kids there are able to understand the exact humor - it seems too adult-catering.
Like in shrek 1, the guy looks at a tall tower built by the prince and hints at "compensation" by the prince, who is short in stature. Now, of course, this humor is not only not for kids, but has a value embedded in it which is a bit derogatory towards shorter guys, and promotes snide remarks at physical features.
Yeah, while there are exceptions, on the whole, I like desi movies better, even though they are totally gone in the art of film-making - in the least, most of them don't promote crap like this.