Briefly… on Dil Se…

(original discussion appeared HERE)

“If you haven’t already you should check out Siddhartha Deb’s Point of Return or Outline of the Republic. Both books are set in the Northeast and I find it useful to juxtapose these fictions with Rathnam’s film.

Indeed Dil Se gets better with each viewing. I really like Rathnam’s ploy here. If the first half really takes you to an ‘edge of India’, and locates conflict in such a region, the second half takes you on another journey into the hellish claustrophobia of the ‘capital’. Delhi actually comes off as rather oppressive and somewhat scary place in the film. Rathnam’s point seems to be that we have those remote regions breeding violence precisely because the ‘capital’ is this way. The distance between the heart of this ‘empire’ and the far flung regions where SRK finds himself totally disoriented is unbridgeable in the film which is why the climax is entirely understandable.

Throughout the film Manisha’s character, her way of life are incomprehensible to SRK and Rathnam makes it so for the viewer as well. In the end SRK yields experientially to his lover. He still does not ‘understand’, he simply succumbs. I don’t see this as necessarily a ‘negative’ or ‘futile’ ending but one of radical passivity in some ways. Rather than kill the lovers commit a double suicide of passion.”