Notes on 'Dum Laga Ke Haisha'

The cinematography in Dum Laga Ke Haisha is often disappointing, not so much in the evoked colors but in the placement of the camera. The action happens too close to the screen, and there is a tendency to cut when a longer, distant shot would have heightened the comedy of the situation further. There are exceptions to this, which do make for some exceptional moments in the movie. To highlight my point about the camera being too close, I take here for example the sequence in which the hero and his family, dependent for their living on an audio cassette recording business, invite a father-son duo to dissuade them from opening a CD-recording shop close to theirs. Much screwball, theatre-type action happens, and the camera only needs to be ten or so feet away for us to enjoy a long shot that would have held the cast together and let the actors play. The camera, however, goes frantic on us. It closes up on the hero, or on his father, or on their invited duo, then takes a distant position to try to show the entire ensemble, etc. There is comedy here, but its effect is diluted in the emphases that the director in forces on the eye, almost all of them unnecessary.

In outdoor scenes, again, the camera is too close to the characters. Take the scenes where the hero participates in RSS-like shakha congregations, all of which are held on the banks of the Ganga. Yet, the river is never more than a mere suggestion in all those sequences, with only a sliver of its flow showing in some of the images. Generally speaking too, opportunities for excellent backgrounds were lost in this movie because the director/cinematographer wanted to be needlessly close to the characters. It is notable that Haridwar, the city where the movie is ostensibly shot, isn't a visual factor in the movie at all!

An exception to this tendency is seen in the very last shot. The hero and the heroine begin to kiss - it is important to show their awkwardness so the camera starts from being close. But then it recedes, there is that long shot, and suddenly the place, the background, step into the image and heighten its beauty. There is the narrow entry on the left side that can be seen now, there is a little water tap on the right side which can be seen now, there are two diya shelves on the wall that become visible, and so on. We are allowed to soak in not just the kiss but the place of the kiss.

Another exception is the divorce-filing long shot, in which the hero and the heroine's family are both present in front of the magistrate. The camera is placed such that all the characters are visible, and it doesn't flinch. There is no cut, the actors have to get their act together, and the outcome is as intended, hilarious.

The dialogues and dialogue delivery are generally fine, except when the dialects are messed up a bit. Haridwar's local language is likely to be closer to the Meerut-Muzaffarnagar khari boli, intonations of which are regularly employed by some characters, especially the elders in the hero's family. Ayushman Khurana, the hero, gets his lines wrong though. When he says 'Main nahi karungo' to the proposal to marry a fat woman, it seems like there was no one to tell him that karungo is Rajasthani dialect thing, and unlikely to be employed by anyone in Haridwar. Ayushman often appears to be the weakest link in the ensemble only due to this inability to get a grip on how to say things. The heroine - whose name I do not yet know - does an excellent job all round.

It is irritating when hinterland movies in Bollywood get their dialects wrong. Even big directors can't seem to get it right throughout the length of a movie. I quote Omkara as an example, which is impossible to place in Western or Eastern UP because of the regular shifts in dialect.

Overall, despite the disappointments, Dum Laga Ke Haisha was a good experience. This is primarily because of the script, and also the screenplay in at least seventy per cent of the movie. When Indian cinema shuns the arbitrary genres it binds itself in (say Bollywood), it immediately becomes an art form that has access to a historically unique reality. The stories of this reality are easily available easily told easily received, something which hasn't been done enough to date, largely because of the lucre behind glitzy contrivance.

***
It is no doubt that the movie is about the weight of marriage. But it is not so much about the weight of the decision of marriage as it is about the weight of making it work. The main couple's reasons for getting married make for some comedy and tragedy, but these are presented mainly as givens. Had the idea been to make a movie about getting into marriage, we could have had a feature about the different marriage-related reasons... and decisions of three friends -- one who marries for money and gets a fat wife, one who defies tradition and marries his childhood love, and one who gets lucky and gets a pretty wife in an arranged marriage scenario. Note how this element is present in the movie we have, but is underplayed. This alternate movie would have stressed their different journeys, their personal reasons for getting into the race, their victories and losses.

But Dum Laga Ke Haisha is not that movie. Instead of the contrast between friends, it focuses on the family, how the family contributes to, or makes difficult, a marriage. Instead of attempting a study in contrast, it gives us a singular specific version of marriage and its near failure. We have the movie we have, and I believe the real movie is superior to the hypothetical one. Multiple-tales-in-one does not have a new feel anymore; it is such tight, single-story dramas that have become rare. The success of Dum Laga Ke Haisha should serve as a suggestion for more such movies. Think of it like a Hrishikesh Mukherjee film that is as comic but more intense, and that too because its story is not ensconced in the bourgeoisie but is willing to touch those whose economic concerns are a component of their decisions. And of the so-called grey underbelly of India, it remains a much more realistic portrayal than anything Anurag Kashyap has attempted.