Once more, with intensity

Bollywood has a special understanding of fantasy and reality. In it, cinema and reality don’t separate themselves, they merge osmotically into each other. The recognition of this is caught best in the names of heroes in movies. They often use their own first names, like Vinod, Amit or Akshay. It is an acknowledgement that in a cinematic society, cinema as myth and society as reality blur in social life.

When Madhuri Dixit’s Aaja Nachle was released, reviewers failed to understand this grammar. The story is about a dancer who comes back to her little town to revive a dance troupe as a tribute to her guru. We are simultaneously watching the story of a major film star returning to the movies after several years. She is older now, her face may not carry the youth and freshness of the earlier years. The second drama asks whether the fans will accept this older woman. The two stories in fact become parallel scripts, double lenses through which the audience watches the movie.

The reviewers, of course, lambasted both stories, contending that both the film and the drama of Madhuri’s return were failures. The most generous eked out a couple of stars. What I would like to argue is that not only were the reviews bad, but that they were failures of the cinematic imagination that drives India.

Let me rephrase the script sociologically. In India, today, two events have a dramatic quality as social facts. One is the growth of the small town as the agent of globalisation, and the second is the explosion of the body and its fragmentation. The body as a floating signifier includes the body of the beauty contest, the body as organ, the sexual body of the new generation and the bonded body of tradition, all seeking to define the body politic.

Aaja Nachle is a movie that understands these scripts brilliantly. It is a story of an Indian dancer, who returns to her small town. She seeks to recreate the legend of Laila-Majnu as a contemporary play. The Laila-Majnu of the play merge with the fantasies and romances of a small town. The developers are planning a large mall and therefore the theatre has to come down. The play captures small town fantasies, doubts, failures and the need to dream again and again. Small towns contain large dreams and little neighbourhoods enact big fantasies.

All Madhuri has for...

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Once more, with intensity

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