Analyse this

Our low expectation of Hindi cinema could do with a push.

The most entertaining put-down I’ve read recently was a long blog comment directed at all those annoying people who ask movie reviewers the question, “Why can’t you just enjoy the movie for what it is? Why do you have to analyse it?” Here’s a short excerpt from the comment:

When we analyse art, when we look for deeper meaning in it, we ARE enjoying it for what it is. Because that’s one of the things about art, be it highbrow, lowbrow, mainstream, or avant-garde: some sort of thought went into its making, even if the thought was, “I’m going to do this as thoughtlessly as possible!” Now, that doesn’t mean you HAVE to think hard about everything. But when you go out of your way to say that people should be thinking LESS — that NOT using one’s capacity for reason is an admirable position — you are not saying anything revolutionary. “Not thinking” is the default state for most of humanity.

The “don’t analyse, just enjoy” line is very familiar; I hear it whenever I try to discuss a very popular film using sentences more complicated than “This movie rocks from beginning to end!” This happened most recently with Rajkumar Hirani’s enjoyable 3 Idiots. I thought the first half was outstanding, but watching the second half I was thinking: why do so many good Hindi films establish a nuanced thought process and then simply cop out of it at crucial times? Why does it feel like five different writers were sitting in a room, each trying to tug the film in a different direction?

For an example, take a superb 20-minute stretch in the film, the scene where the three heroes (fun-loving students at an engineering college) make a public spectacle of their colleague Chatura (a teacher’s pet who learns everything by heart without understanding it) by switching around the words in a Hindi speech he has to recite. The sequence begins by placing us, the viewer, in a position of identification with the three leads. We approve of their prank and we laugh our heads off at Chatura as he makes the unintentionally ribald speech (it’s one of the great paisa-vasool scenes you’ll see). But then — in the scene that follows — it briefly turns the tables on us by allowing us to see his anger and humiliation; to see him as a victim of a deeply flawed educational system.

Taken together, this amounts to a brilliantly sustained sequence of moral complexity. But the train of thought is never followed through. Instead, the film makes the predictable, mass-audience-pleasing decision to turn Chatura into a buffoon and a comic foil, as if he were personally the villain of the piece instead of a tiny cog in a giant wheel.

This also leads to a big dichotomy between the film’s stated “message” and what actually happens at the end. 3 Idiots spends over two hours preaching about personal satisfaction being more important than “success” as society defines it (status, bank balance, size of car, etc). But in the last 10 minutes it can’t resist giving the audience the very superficial thrill of seeing that the hero (the Aamir Khan character) has ended up more successful, in a conventional sense, than the pompous Chatura.

I spoke to a friend about my irritation with this type of laziness. “Well, yes,” he said, “But we expect our Hindi films to be wishy-washy about these little things, right?”

I know what he meant, but given the many improvements in mainstream Hindi cinema over the past decade, I’m starting to wish that our default expectation mode about basic internal consistency didn’t still have to be set SO low — especially when the film is so good in many other ways, as 3 Idiots undoubtedly is.