Subhash K. Jha speaks about Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi 
By Subhash K. Jha, December 13, 2008 - 12:01 IST
Tender as that dewdrop that perches on the window- sill after a monsoon shower, and yet as strongly assertive as that bindi that a woman puts on her forehead to declare her marital status Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is a curious and compelling mix of fragile and powerful emotions meshed together with a skill and subtlety that suggests the maturation of both the director Aditya Chopra and his leading man Shah Rukh Khan.
Indeed, if Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge was the consummate boy-meets-girl 'chic' flick, Rab... is a comprehensive and evocative homage to the dreams aspirations loves lies and heartbreaks of the average middleclass couple.
Deftly edited (by Ritesh Soni) to imply a deep and indelible link between feelings and time passages, Rab Ne... Exudes an exceptional vigor in portraying, two lives that could do with some of that quality.
Vigor is vigorously absent in our working-class hero Surinder Sahni's life.
We enter his bleak existence as he brings home a bride into his Amritsar neighbourhood filled with gawking mohallah -wallahs, all curious to know why Suri went to attend a marriage and came back with the bride.
It's a long story. Aditya Chopra , in no hurry to make his point, captures the coming together of two very incompatible people (couldn't get any more incompatible than SRK and the confident debutante, could it?) with an elegance, charm, wit and warmth which one would expect to have gone with the wimp....and I do mean the wimp.
Wonderfully wimpy in his demeanour, Shah Rukh invents two different body languages the slouch and the swagger, to bring out the yin and yang aspects of the Great Indian Middleclass Dream.
One of the questions, that bothers the wimpy Amol Palekar-meets-Vinay Pathak hero is what does an Indian girl want? Diamonds, a Swiss account, a Japanese honeymoon?
"Just a man who loves her to death," sighs Suri's new bride. But she also adds she has none to give. And you wonder, are working-class dreams really that simple?
Aditya Chopra keeps them uncluttered and largely cleaned-out of unnecessary complications. In a playing-time of 1 hour and 40 minutes, there are just two main characters, a muted uncomplaining repressed besotted working-class husband and his distressed but dignified wife, occupying a house in Amritsar that's perfectly lit up. And by perfection we don't mean the perfection of cinema.
The kitchen, the two bedrooms upstairs and downstairs (the couple stays separately under the same roof until their hearts collide on the dance floor) the portico and the acres surrounding the protagonists convey a feeling of lives that have been around long before Ravi K Chandran's supple camera was set up.
Yes, you connect instantaneously and permanently with this warmly-written saga of a couple that discovers love in the strangest of places... the dance floor, for example, where Suri invents a remarkably hip-and-swaggering duplicate Raj, a doppelganger that's the opposite of Suri himself, and sweeps his own wife off her feet.
The comic drama that ensues is both engaging and heartbreaking. In portraying the working-class underdog and his larger-than-life double Shah Rukh Khan faces the greatest challenge of his career.
How to keep the two characters apart without making them appear black and white? The imaginary guy on the dance floor Raj, a sleaze ball with two left feet, transforms gradually into an emotional human being as lonely as our poor Surinder. They both want to be loved. Awwww!
Shah Rukh plays his poignant working-class protagonist without making him look pitiable. The invented character Raj (a spoofy but not synthetic version of the flamboyant Raj from Dilwale Dulhaniya....) is even tougher to play.
You can't do underdog and super-hero without making both appear caricature. Shah Rukh manages to keep his feet in two boats without rocking either. And yet, rocking all the way.
Often he just lets his screen-wife, the super-confident down-to-earth debutante Anushka Sharma take over the screen. This time Shah Rukh is an attentive listener. He listens to the call of the heart and transmits the pain of love to the audience with a serious scarcity of the strenuous.
The third skilled performance comes from Vinay Pathak as Shah Rukh's emotionally unabashed best friend who conveniently, is a beautician (blissfully not gay) who helps Suri transform into Raj at the flick of a switch.
There's no denying the fact that the director has chosen well. And we don't mean just the actors.
A large portion of the narrative leaves the couple in the sprawling Amritsar home to find their bearings, and one another. It's these scenes that show the director's subtle skill at portraying lives that long for love and companionship but don't know how to get there.
There are vignettes from a middleclass marriage like the sequence where the wife eager to fulfill her kitchen duties, serves Suri biryani.
But Suri, masquerading as Raj, has gorged earlier during the evening on paani-puris with his wife. She can be honest about her full appetite. He can't.
The dishonesty that colours and prejudices any intimate relationship is dealt with such sincerity and honesty you wonder if the institution of marriage was invented as a pretext for cinema such as this.
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Rab Ne Bana De Jodi sweeps the nation
