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When Akash talks from the kitchen you realise that how spatial the sound is, how it’s traveling from the left side of the screen in a way that’s accurately tuned to the layout of the room. Sid and Sameer are in the frame Akash is in the kitchen to fetch some ice (for his black eye). The most striking use of it comes in a scene at Akash’s place. “I didn’t know movies could speak to me like that,” he says.ĭil Chahta Hai, along with Lagaan, are credited to have standardised the use of sync-sound in mainstream Hindi cinema. (Shakun) Batra is among a new generation of filmmakers whose influences are almost entirely Hollywood-and for whom, Dil Chahta Hai became that life changing movie. Much later in the film after the friends split apart, when Sid visits Sameer, a drilling sound from a nearby construction site creeps into the room to remind us of Akash’s absence. The jump cuts that come into play when the three friends make a stop on the highway in their road trip to Goa - in the “Masti mein rahe dooba dooba hamesha sama…” segment of the title track - both condense time and emphasise the minutiae of traveling: they step out, do some stretching, exchange seats. This sense of fun gets into the filmmaking as well. But when the scene builds up to the moment when Sid, for no good reason, throws paint on Akash (Khan), Dil Chahta Hai had announced its anti-serious, anti-Bollywood mission statement: we were going to have fun. The grim prelude has prepared us to expect something serious, a bad news perhaps.
MOVIES LIKE DIL CHAHTA HAI MOVIE
It was almost as if Farhan Akhtar was leading us to this whole other world of movie pleasure we’d never tasted when, two minutes into the film, Sid (Akshaye Khanna) calls up Sameer (Saif Ali Khan) late at night and summons them to his place. But no one expected it to be this cultural milestone.
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If Dil Chahta Hai felt like something we didn’t know we needed, Lagaan showed that this is what Hindi film entertainment can be.Ĭompared to the status accorded to it today, Dil Chahta Hai had a relatively low key start. It was as if a bubble had been burst, a bubble in which a generation of moviegoers, filmmakers, and moviegoers who will be filmmakers, were growing up in a limited exposure, pre-internet India. And Aamir Khan had brought about that change.” In 2013, in an event to mark the centenary of Indian cinema, when he was asked to pick the most significant turning point in Hindi cinema, Johar, unsurprisingly, picked 2001. I felt, suddenly in that year, the syntax of cinema had changed. “There was a part of me that got a little afraid. No one tells it better than Karan Johar, in his memoir “An Unsuitable Boy”, where he writes how watching Lagaan, and Dil Chahta Hai, landed joint blows to his confidence as a filmmaker. Both starring Aamir Khan, the films had a kind of combined impact on Bollywood. Dil Chahta Hai was reflecting the changing aspirations of a new India. Lagaan was mirroring the rise of a new Indian cricket team. What’s extraordinary about these two classics is their timing, in our lives, in cricket, in Hindi cinema, in India. There were great years, like 2006 ( Rang De Basanti, Lage Raho Munnabhai). There were good films and bad films before Lagaan and Dil Chahta Hai, as there were after. Childhood years are tricky business nostalgia is worse. Looking back, it seems as though everything in mainstream Bollywood that came before Lagaan and Dil Chahta Hai was so naive-even if that’s not true. It was the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s.