Bombay Talkies—Tension through Music

I don’t often get emotional while watching a film. However, during the two hours I spent watching Bombay Talkies, I was tense, sad, happy and serene—usually in different times, but often simultaneously. I thoroughly appreciated the storylines, the acting, the music and the cinematography.

With its release coinciding with the 100 year anniversary of Indian cinema, Bombay Talkies is a collection of four half-hour vignettes, directed by different filmmakers. All four are tied to, albeit in different degrees, to Mumbai and the film industry. The first, Ajeeb Daastaan Hai Yeh, tells the story of a stressful marriage between Rani Mukherjee and Randeep Hooda, and how Hooda realizes his homosexuality through sharing music with a gay man in Mukherjee’s office; the second, Star, shows Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s desire to become an actor in the film industry, but more importantly, a hero at home to his daughter; the third, Sheila Ki Jawani, shows how a pre-teen boy years to cross dress and be a feminine dance instead of a footballer as his dad wants and the fourth, Murabba, a touching story of a young man who travels to Mumbai to meet Amitabh Bachchan to fulfill his ailing father’s wish. While there are several themes in the movie I liked, in this reflection, I will focus on the first story, Ajeeb Daastaan Hai Yeh, which takes its name from a popular song from yesteryear that features prominently in the story. In particular, I want to address camera angles, music/catchphrases, and share a personal story.

Karan Johar manages to create remarkable tension in his vignette through his camera angles, focus and lens zoom. Even though he makes it clear in the first scene that Avinash is gay, the close-up camera shots of him and Rani Mukherji had me initially believing that they will fall in love; similarly, in their initial interactions, I was sure that Dev would get into a fistfight with Avinash over his wife. I can’t remember many Hindi films that contain close-up, vibrating shots to create tension. Instead, I recall most of them using repeated zooming in and out on a subject (also seen in television soap operas) to highlight emotion. I found Johar’s technique very powerful.

The use of old, soulful Hindi songs allowed Johar to amplify that melancholy theme of the vignette. Music was central to the story—Avinash realizes Dev’s love for music when he sees Dev’s room full of old Hindi tapes, he leads Dev to the girl singing at the railway station to make Dev realize that he too had homosexual leanings and the vignette ends with a penniless Dev listening to the same girl singing. It is significant that Johar uses two of the most famous, yet sad songs from the 1960s—Ajeeb Daastaan Hai Yeh, which consists of a female lead singing at the marriage of her love interest to another woman, congratulating him on finding love, even though the love story is strange, and Lag Ja Gaale, in which an actress is beckoning her love to hug her once more, for they might not get another chance. Both songs appropriately characterize Dev’s relationship with Avinash and with his wife.

Why did the story and the medium of conveyance of this vignette appeal to me so much? Because, like Dev, I also share a deep connection with old Hindi songs, especially the two mentioned above. While like ‘Bhule Bisre Geet’ is hardly something that makes a child popular, my fascination with music never bothered me. In fact, aware of the fact that my generation in India was fast losing touch with Hindi (I often had to ask my parents what a particular word or phrase in a song meant), I took it upon myself to translate my favorite songs from yesteryear into English, with the constraint that the translated version rhyme and sync with the original meter of the song. It’s an ambitious project, but perhaps one day I’ll be able to successfully launch a revised album (with all due respect to the lyricists who might feel I massacred their original intent, perhaps rightly so.)