What we get, we praise (sort of)

Thanks to Rockstar, I've been reminded of the one artistic element no artist can hope to control: the audience.

I was having a conversation with a friend who didn't like the film. At all. He said I must have been in a sappy mood to have liked it. I pointed out that I'm always in a sappy mood. He insisted the film was not about love in any real sense, that the lead character was irresponsible, that he slept with a married woman without trying to 'fight' her marriage in a proper way.

At that point, I refused to discuss the film. I thought he just didn't get it. One of my aunties certainly didn't get it. She did not dislike it but she said, 'the film is about this new modern culture....'

I wanted to protest - no, it isn't about that at all. Other conversations with friends, film enthusiasts, aspiring film makers, film technicians, critics - all pointed the same way. I kept thinking 'No, they don't get it'. But then I saw the IMDB listing for the film. The brief description says: 'He woos... rises to become a rock-star - then self-destructs.' And I wanted to say, no, no, he does not self-destruct; he does not even woo.

But IMDB pages are usually put up by the guys who make the film, eh? Has Imtiaz Ali written that description? Is that what the film is about - self-destruction? Did I get it wrong?

And yet, I feel as if I really do get it. Despite my impatience with excessive romance in films, I felt Rockstar more sharply than other love stories, even the ones Imtiaz Ali has made before. In fact, I felt as if the filmmaker was pushing so hard to capture that emotion - a gnawing, unending hunger for love - that he forgot to be ruthless with the script.

A more rigourous application of Ali's (excellent) screenplay sense would have papered over the unwieldy bigness of this film's plot. One of his chief strengths as a writer is believably likeable characters but usually, he gives them only just enough screen time to drive the story forward. Not this time.

And yet, this film felt more honest to me.

Life allows us the opportunity to experience every shade of loss on the colour card of love. But none of us can quite understand another's compulsions until we suddenly wake up one morning and find ourselves transformed. So it is with our responses to certain films.

For instance, I was a child when I first saw QSQT. I could not understand why my older cousins liked it. It was a stupid movie, I thought. First they (the romantic pair) are stupid enough to run away and live in the hills. Then they are stupid enough to die. What's the point? And why would anyone want to run away with a boy?

This was the phase when I watched black-n-white films happily as long as there was Johnny Walker or Mehmood in the cast. Johar Mehmood in HongKong was my idea of a good watch. I liked Charlie Chaplin. I even liked a strange film where Sridevi was playing a fairy (have forgotten the title). I used to like films with kids in them, and I enjoyed child-like behaviour. Cake-throwing sequences were my favourite.

As a teenager, I began to enjoy love stories. DDLJ and KKHH marked a departure in my tastes. I understood the desire to fall in love before getting married (though I had never met a boy who even vaguely interested me) and I assumed it would be very hard to forget a 'first' love.

I did not know then that is is not only possible to forget first love, but also to feel ashamed of it. I also did not understand guilt in love. So when I saw Arth, although I felt its emotional honesty, I did not understand it fully.
There is a scene where Smita Patil (her character) is saying that she feels as if the tiny black beads of the mangalsutra (belonging to her lover's wife) are scattered underfoot. They hurt her skin. i.e. She finds it impossible to move without hurting.

I thought that was kind of crazy - a manifestation of a mental breakdown. It took me many years to figure out that guilt was driving her towards a breakdown.

For the most part of my 20s, I did not fully grasp the nature of marriage. I didn't know how deep the claws of social conditioning dig into our flesh. Despite consuming books and films about unhappy couples, I thought marriage was a permanent concept. That it was inevitable, and that any love outside it was vaguely unclean. All my friends and cousins thought the same way.

But life taught us new lessons. Married friends began to write back to describe their marital experience in one word: "Yuck!" My generation has seen itself go through undesirable affairs, divorces, abuse, despair, very strangely won loyalties. And so, when I see Heer (Nargis Fakhri's character in Rockstar) two years after she's wedded a stranger in a strange country, unsmiling, mentioning doctor's appointments, it makes total sense. I don't need scenes specifying how and why this girl is dissatisfied. I can fill in the blanks.

When I was younger, I had romantic notions about sacrificing your feelings for others' sake. I did not know that feelings could not be sacrificed. They can only be suppressed. I did not know then that suppression of feelings can kill you. Not all at once. But in small, everyday ways - through stress and depression, through mysterious aches and pains - we can all be destroyed.

So I had no difficulty believing that Heer was either mentally or physically sick. In my interpretation, Heer's cancer is entirely metaphorical. What does it matter, the name of the disease? Unhappiness itself is a kind of disease. Living with a person you do not love can be frightening. It carves hollows into your face. It strips you of all self-respect. And if you do not have a clear idea of who you might love instead, or how much, you grow afraid that perhaps you are incapable of love.

You know that if you cannot love and be loved in equal measure, you are doomed. Before you know it, there is something wrong with you. A bad relationship usually translates into a bad self-relationship too. Lovelessness is all-pervasive. You cannot get rid of it by taking a walk or meeting a new set of friends, or shopping. There is only one way of getting rid of it and that is to find a true lover.

But to find love when it is clearly forbidden - that is difficult. It will not just disrupt your life. It will destroy your self-image.

In the cinema hall, there was a group (teenagers or people in their early 20s) seated a row behind me. After the scene where Heer kisses Jordan, then pushes him away, these youngsters started to giggle. They made comments about how they liked that part, because it was fun, and/or funny.

I found myself wanting to turn around and smack someone. I wanted to shake them and say: It's not funny, okay? This is not a funny scene. It comes from a place of torment. From holding yourself one inch short of happiness because happiness means going off a cliff of morality. And you don't want to fall.

Heer does not push Jordan because she doesn't know what she wants. Jordan doesn't want to kiss because he wants to sleep with her. He just wants to acknowledge the truth of their relationship. They used to be friends. They are no longer just friends. They have found unhappiness, and also found that there is a cure for unhappiness - being with each other. Kissing her is a way of telling her that he recognises this.

Heer also knows she is beyond the point of return. Some part of her is already past caring for consequences. But she pushes him away because she does not want to become the woman who has an adulterous affair at the first given opportunity. She is 'neat-and-clean', no matter how hard she tries not to be. She is curious but she is not the girl who wants to disrupt social structures. Nor is Jordon. Actually, gandh machaani in dono ke bas ki baat nahin hai. That is part of their tragedy.

As they begin their love affair in his hotel room, Heer cannot shake off her (social/moral) conditioning. She runs, afraid of what she has become, afraid of this feeling that has become stronger than her. Jordan has fewer qualms because he is still single. He need not feel burdened. But he will not chase her beyond a point. It is she who has to signal to him that their passion is equal. And the director conveys all of this messy emotion in about 30 seconds, with not one line of dialogue.

When I saw this deftness of touch being reduced to 'Ranbir acts so well' by critics, I felt I had to say 'not fair'. But then I realised that perhaps they are not seeing the same film.

I was seeing a very angry film. Poor Janardhan is furious because he hadn't asked for this kind of hurt. He wanted to make it big; he made it big. Now he knows that the glamourous, moneyed space was a trap. But it is too late to snap out of it. Or too soon. He is hurt but not broken. He is upset that he cannot control anything. He is angry that he cannot have a woman he is, in fact, entitled to. He wants her; she wants him. It should be simple. The world really has no locus standi.

Yet, the world butts in. It makes her run. It makes her try to break up with him. It makes her say things she doesn't mean. Later, when they manage to steal some time together, it comes crowding in to demand explanations. Stupid convention, law, tradition, media - it is ripping his life apart. And he will defy, defy, defy.

But finally, there is nothing to defy, because the story reaches a point when he is, actually, guilty. He's damaged his beloved. And his anger loses its heat. That last scene (in my reading of it) was supposed to convey a kind of defeat. A laying down of arms. When there is nothing left to win or fight for, what do you do?

You do what you can. You play music. You go to work. Perhaps you learn to live again. Perhaps, you die. Perhaps, you pretend to live. Who knows what happens to Jordan afterwards?

Every story comes from a point in the artist's heart, even if the events of the story are not from his/her own life. The rest is just craft. You are dependent on your medium to make yourself understood. But no matter how well-crafted a film (or book, or art installation, or photo exhibit) might be, understanding is not guaranteed. Because understanding is a two-way street.

I enjoyed it because, despite its flaws (some bad acting, definitely), I get Rockstar. I think. Not because I'm especially sensitive or too sappy (which might be true), but because the whole spectrum of grief interests me. I catch glimpses of it in every relationship. I puzzle over it. I hear it in songs. I read it. I write it. I watch it. And I am often dismissive of films that have no emotional depth. The filmmakers I love most are the ones who want to look at love and loss right in the eye and show me what they see.

I suppose, it is safe to say that beyond craft, beyond vision, plot, narrative, style, context or the combined talents of everyone involved in a project, there lies that elusive element - recognition. Every film, every book needs an audience who can recognise themselves in the story. Sometimes everyone can. Sometimes only a few people can. It is a bit like dancing to your own tune, except you do it in public. Those who are not in sync with that particular tune will be annoyed. And those who are in sync will fall in step.