With the evolution of storytelling and stories, there’s now a critical line of thinking that places pragmatism — in on-screen characters, relationships and love — as the prime indicator of honest art. It’s not always about “once upon a time” and “happily ever after” anymore. Human equations and co-inhabitant attitudes have reached a stage of such self-awareness at this point in modern-day civilisation that the very concept of a romantic comedy — a genre spiritually at odds with the cynicism of life — is a fading one.
Devices such as serendipitous meetings, airport dashes and drunken rants have gone from being genre staples to reductive plot templates designed to appease world-weary audiences. As soon as these “movie” motifs appear now, its aversion to realism is viewed through the same fictitious suspension-of-disbelief lens as, say, heightened sci-fi dramas or supernatural thrillers. The romcom has long been escapist popcorn-populist fare, but now there’s the added baggage of such films having to be less aspirational and more relatable.
Love in real life
Because, as we discover with age and little wisdom: boy might always meet girl, but boy doesn’t always end up with girl. Earlier, the sole purpose was to tell all-or-nothing love stories. Either they’re eternally meant to be or there’s (mythical) death and destruction involved. The focus was only the timelessness of emotions, rather than the internal language of feelings. The general consensus was that there’s no point of narrating tales that aren’t gratifying or mortally affecting.
But more writers are now choosing to tell stories of a protagonist’s most “important” relationship, as opposed to the person’s only or last relationship. The ones that got away; the game changers. This puts the spotlight on the metamorphosis of characters, instead of the politics of their coupling.
Blue Valentine (2010) is an example of how even the process of a young marriage dissolving can be a riveting observational exercise. That it is about gradual decay and not solutions contributes further to its growing legend of new-age relevance. La La Land (2016), too, explores the essentiality of a young relationship in context of their career graphs. Some trysts exist solely to inspire its participants to discover passion and find their true calling.
Home truths
Hindi cinema, though, is still at the crossroads. Masses haven’t yet taken to the rationalisation of love. The reasoning is: why show us a story for almost three hours if there is no resolution? Never mind that not ending up together, too, is a resolution of sorts. An example is Shakun Batra’s first film, the Imran Khan and Kareena Kapoor starrer, Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (2012). It essentially told a story about a young, flawed couple who were never quite in love to begin with. The feelings were one-sided — Rahul fell for Riana, and not vice versa – which is why this was actually a coming-of-age tale disguised as a slick, contemporary romcom. Theirs was eventually a “defining” courtship, not an eternal one: a memorable phase that didn’t make but only changed their lives. They didn’t end up together, and viewers couldn’t quite digest that the film was finally about them as individual entities and identities.
Ditto for this year’s Meri Pyari Bindu – another similarly themed film about the necessary transformation of a man (Ayushmann Khurrana) through the classic manic-pixie (Parineeti Chopra) syndrome. He finds his calling (a writer, of course), but she ends up marrying someone else. They make peace with it as dysfunctional childhood friends, but viewers might have had a tough time making peace with two people who took them on a journey that conventional cinema had conditioned them to expect togetherness from. It hit close to home — an area usually off-limits for reluctant realists putting on their fantasy hats when they enter a dark hall. These films then become just another relationship, in which we’re made to heavily invest before the rug is pulled out from under our feet. And most, especially in India, go to the movies to see what love should be like, not to see what it is really like.
Moving on
That being said, I’ve only recently understood that “forced” happily-ever-afters, at least in some cases, were more than just commercial writing motifs. It wasn’t merely to leave us with smiles —and hope — for our heartbroken heroes. There’s more to cinematic happenstance than they let on. When Sunil (Shah Rukh Khan, in Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa), moments after attending Anna’s wedding, meets a beautiful girl (Juhi Chawla) on the exact night she moves to Goa, it’s not only because his character has earned closure. That’s usually how life works, too. Not as obviously, or as poetically, but close enough. Perhaps these endings are more real than the brand of precise treatment and magic timing movies afford them.
When a grieving Sid (Akshaye Khanna, in Dil Chahta Hai) sees an ethereal stranger at his married friends’ picnic in the end, the smile she gives him signifies an underrated aspect of life: moving on. We don’t know the exact moment, but it does happen — somewhere between intense sadness and profound joy. Survival, at times, is aided by the power of serendipity, too. For instance, a broken author might write about heartbreak, and perhaps find a soulmate in someone who sincerely responds to those very words. Ironically, it’s the pain of separation that is required to unite them. Some movies don’t choose to show this moment, but you can bet it happens, long after the end credits roll. Long, or shortly, after the disillusioned protagonists have perhaps “matured”.
There is in fact immense truth — and pragmatism — to Munna Bhai MBBS’s catchy ‘Apun Jaisa Tapori’ song. An older Munna Bhai (Sanjay Dutt) sings the story of life to a heartbroken, suicidal boy in the hospital. He sings about how he fell in love with Hema, and takes us excitedly through his unabashed infatuation. And then her marriage, followed by a brief outburst of violin-tinged despair: the moment when we feel we might never find tenderness again. Then he ends playfully with, “Phir kya? Mohalle mein Aishwarya aayi!” (What happened next? Aishwarya landed up in the neighbourhood!) — a rakish phrase that best sums up the heart’s optimistic open-endedness. Because, often, “happily ever after” is a collection of many new beginnings. Some of them are tragedies, and some romantic comedies.