Dil Se..

The lens you need to fully understand and appreciate what Dil Se.. is about is that none of the three primary characters here are people or person. They are merely embodiments of the trifecta the story in question is, or one could argue the very trifecta that makes up every single human being in existence. Amar, our male protagonist represents Love. Professionally, he is a journalist from All India Radio who wishes to know what the rural community of North India thinks about the government after fifty years of independence. But to him, nothing else in the world matters except Meghna. He falls head over heels for her, pursues her relentlessly and is willing to throw everything away, including his life for this girl he barely knows anything about. It would be illogical to view Amar as a person or character because he isn’t a person or character in the first place. But it would make total sense if you see him as what he represents in human form - Love. Amar aka Love has nothing but zest, happiness, positivity and a big wide heart. He is ‘blind’, powerfully energetic and relentless, because that’s how Love is. And who better to play the very embodiment of Love if not for the King of Romance himself, Shah Rukh Khan. You could even look at the way Amar fights; there’s not a cell in this man’s body that recognizes violence, which is exactly how and what Love is.

Our female protagonist Meghna on the other hand is a mysterious woman Amar meets one rainy night at a secluded rural train station. She is diametrically opposite to what we know of Amar; aloof, quiet but most importantly, as we learn through the course of the film, holds a mountainous scale of traumatic pain from the past. As a result, Meghna is a terrorist set out for vengeance and she represents Hate / War. Like Amar, she is relentless in her pursuit. Nothing would change her mind, just like nothing would change Amar’s. Now what would happen if these two were to fall in love? Dil Se.. which means From the Heart.. an absolutely magical celluloid assembled by Mani Ratnam and his team truly from their hearts, tells you exactly this tug of war in the form of cinematic poetry!

The most appropriate adjectives to describe my experience of Dil Se.. and Dil Se.. itself would be haunting and enchanting. You could easily tell Mani Ratnam and his cast and crew of extremely talented artists have put in everything they have to make this happen. The writer-director’s painstaking blocking and staging leave no stones unturned to tell the story using every tool at his disposal! One unmissable brilliant example would be the alternating warm and cold colored lights in All India Radio’s recording studio supplied by the flapper entrance door to Amar and Meghna in their conversation about uncertainty. Santosh Sivan’s stills or the handhelds or the tracking where he captures the moment-to-moment action the way it needs to be captured to do the proceedings full justice is nothing short of perfection. Suresh Urs’ dissolve transition when Meghna narrates her past, is once again, a haunting imagery! The editor also made sure the video and audio flow like a river with no rocks disturbing its smooth sail; you’ll notice this when the narrative transitions in and out of the numbers. Dance and concept choreography for the numbers, be it the love story in a war backdrop in Dil Se Re, the foot-tapping Chaiyya Chaiyya, the disturbing and evocative contortions in Satarangi Re, the fusion of South and North India during a conflicted wedding phase in Jiya Jale or the wistful Ae Ajnabi that only appears in bits and pieces through the radio are easily some of the most well-directed, well-written and well thought-out pairs of song and picturization ever! And speaking of numbers, I’ve saved the best for the last, A. R. Rahman’s legendarily iconic songs and background score are the main reasons why I used the adjectives in the beginning. There is absolutely no way his work here would not enter the deepest parts of a human’s beating heart, and my God his work here is a nothing but a synonym; a perfect marriage to this story, the characters, the frames, which makes up the entire motion picture event itself!

Dil Se.. is the quintessential example of excellence moviegoers expect to receive when a crew of technical experts in their respective cinematic fields come together. The perfect combination of frames, silence, sound design and score here , once again, haunts! But none of the technicalities would matter if the screenplay isn’t filled with strong scenes and the actors performing those scenes aren’t up to the task. On that front ladies and gentleman, Dil Se.. knocks the park out of the goddamn park! Dil Se.. is primarily composed of Amar and Meghna’s interactions, and not one, not a single one of them isn’t arresting, distinct and addictive! We begin their journey, as Amar would say, with the shortest love story in the world. Amar meets Meghna, buys her a tea as she requested, but she leaves before he could make it back from the shop. It’s sweet, it’s cute yet it’s also very sad. After witnessing what I would call one of the best opening sequence ever, I knew Dil Se.. was going to be something special. And it was, from start to finish! Be it the forceful coercion at the Ladakh desert, the intense spasm cry, night yearning followed by the morning farewell message on the sand, the wrong identification lie, the dislike lie, the marriage lie or the performative love story narration on the radio, it’s captivating, captivating, captivating! The rooftop tension when Amar feeds Moina’s ears with their past conversation about having kids is easily one of the greatest scenes in cinema! Also, I will never forget the snippet where Amar accidentally spots Meghna bathing - the silence, the lighting, the frame and the score perfectly conveys how longingly Amar looks at and feels toward Meghna. I won’t lie when I say many moments like this one raised the hair on the back of my neck.

The climax is about these two relentless forces trying to stop each other. Amar aka Love appears from a sunlit after-end of the dark corridor Meghna aka Hate appears from. They meet in the shade in between. They embrace each other for the first time. But you and I know Love and Hate could never exist together; it’s practically impossible since they are diametrically opposite to one another. Ironically, that is the reason why their chemistry is as electrifying as it is, as opposites attract each other the most. They embrace each other for the first, and the last time. Until the end of the show, it’s pretty easy to notice Amar never stopped at anything to stop Meghna, because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be Love. But what’s more subtle than that is you’d never hear Meghna say she loves Amar. Because if she did, she wouldn’t be Hate. She constantly negated Amar. Because if she didn’t, she wouldn’t be Hate. But from everything she went through with him and through her facial and body expressions alone, you know she loves him. Let’s talk about Manisha Koirala, the legendary actress who played Meghna.

Manisha Koirala is a staple in Indian Cinema for many, many years. Her film and role selections throughout her career has been a glory to follow, but Meghna in Dil Se.. is easily the role of her lifetime! She has to play a character whom has no purpose to live anymore after the atrocities she has seen since her childhood. Manisha’s face embodies that depressive sadness so well but at the same time, she is extremely gorgeous, and once again, haunting and enchanting! You would immediately understand and agree with Amar’s craze for her! At the verge end of her life and purpose approaching the fiftieth year celebration of Indian Independence, she meets this man who brings a new meaning, a renewed breath of her life to her walking corpse. From then on, you see the changes she go through. The yearning to hold his hand is there. The yearning to fall in love with him as hard as he fell for her, is there. The pain in her eyes to see Amar engaged to another woman is palpable! Doubts begin to shatter her beliefs and trauma. But she could absolutely do anything about it. There’s not a way to escape, not in this life. And nobody could have, in all and any aspect, become Meghna other than Manisha Koirala!

Amar runs after Meghna like she’s the sun and moon of his life! No matter how he’s rejected, he picks himself up and runs on the track that leads to her. He goes through a pivotal transformation with the entry of Logic aka Preity Zinta here and pushed to “What am I doing with my life?” moment when he chases after one of Meghna’s colleagues. The background score for that chase sequence alongside how it’s filmed on camera with Amar rolling down the stairs on a lady with a puppy is executed to the T! All the actors are presented here at their most natural beauty without a touch of makeup, and speaking about all actors and the trifecta aforementioned, the last embodiment here is Logic, played by Preity Zinta. She is the fulcrum that holds these other two together. She supplies vital plot information, more importantly represent what is the right and / or practical thing to do without giving in to either one of these emotions. She handles her life circumstances amazingly well and her outlook on life is, once again, practical, as we learn during the burger story session. Her chemistry with Amar is fantastic as well. One could argue she could have had a more prominent function but one could also argue Logic isn’t the strongest suit for most humans, certainly not in the context of this film, therefore her prominence here as it is, is sufficient. All in all, to quote Amar slightly differently, Dil Se.. is easily one of the most magical and best, if not the most magical and best love story ever told in any literary medium ever!