Archie Month: Mujshe Dosti Karoge!

Mujshe Dosti Karoge! (2002)  is another movie that follows the Archie formula, a love story about the girl next door, her glamorous friend, and a lovable doofus who neither one can resist..  Or at least it starts out that way, but this love triangle is decidedly lopsided.

The movie opens in the past, in Shimla.  Childhood friends Raj, Pooja, and Tina (Athit Naik, Nandina Seth, and Barkha Singh) form a sort of puppy love triangle: Raj has a crush on Tina, Pooja pines for Raj, and Tina mostly enjoys the attention.  But everything changes when Raj's father (Kiran Kumar) decides to relocate to London in order to get ahead of the dot.com boom.  Raj asks Tina to email him, and she agrees, though since her family doesn't have a computer, she'll do it from Pooja's house.  

After arriving in London Raj sends Tina a long message about his new life. She gets bored and wanders off halfway through, but Pooja finishes the message and writes back, signing Tina's name in order to fulfill her friend's promise.  They keep writing back and forth for fifteen years, sharing hopes and dreams and a mysterious tune that popped into Raj's head when he visited a church, but Pooja never manages to tell Raj that she's Pooja, not Tina.  At the end of fifteen years, Raj announces that he's returning home to Shimla, and they can see each other in person.  Raj (now played by Hrithik Roshan) and "Tina" decide not to exchange pictures because they believe they'll recognize each other right away.

Ever pragmatic, Pooja (Rani Mukherji) tells Tina (Kareena Kapoor) about the forged emails, though first she has to remind Tina of who Raj is.  Tina agrees to keep up the deception, and it's just as well, because at the train station Raj recognizes Tina immediately, walking straight past Pooja in order to talk to her.  He notices Pooja eventually, though, and the three friends settle in to the old dynamic, with Raj pursuing Tina and Pooja following along after, though this time Tina starts to fall for Raj as well.

The romance progresses, though occasionally Raj wonders why Tina is so different from her emails, and Pooja gently explains that meeting someone in person can be different from interacting with them online.  By the end of Raj's trip, he and Tina are nearly engaged, while he and Pooja have become close friends; Pooja promises that she'll always be there for him, he just has to close his eyes and think about her.

Back in London, back at work, Raj finds himself talking more about Pooja than Tina.  He closes his eyes and thinks about her, and there she is!  Tina is applying to a college in London, and dropped by Raj's office to say hello.  He shows her around London, and while visiting an old church, Pooja absentmindedly hums the tune he sent her all those years ago.  Raj finally realizes that Pooja wrote the letters and so it's Pooja that he loves.  She tries her best to sacrifice her love for Tina's sake, but after a romantic song they decide to return to India and tell everyone that they're getting married.

They arrive in India just in time for the funeral for Tina's father, who has died suddenly.  Tina is now officially an orphan and all alone in the world, but fortunately she's just about to marry Raj, and he'll take care of her, right?  Pooja's parents have stepped in to act as Tina's family and perform all the necessary arrangements.

Raj wants to tell the truth anyway, but Pooja stops him; she's determined to protect Tina at all costs, so she asks Raj to go through with the marriage for her sake.  Raj agrees, but with a condition: he shouldn't have to make the sacrifice alone, so he will only marry Tina if Pooja marries someone else on the same day.  Enter Rohan (Uday Chopra), Raj's old friend.  He's interested in Pooja, and she seems to tolerate him, which sounds like a great basis for a marriage.

My major complaint about Kuch Kuch Hota Hai is that Rahul and Anjali are entirely passive, depending on fate to get them out of their romantic predicament.  That's not the case here.  Instead, Raj and Pooja actively sabotage themselves at every opportunity, turning an awkward situation into a tangled mess that can only be resolved by divine intervention.

The Archie roots are clearly visible here, since the central triangle are all friends, and the movie spends a lot of time talking about the importance of that friendship.  However, unlike the other Archie-inspired movies we've covered, the narrative insists that there is a clear wrong answer.  Tina is not a bad person, but she is very much an early Kareena Kapoor character.  Despite the heart of gold, she's deeply spoiled, self-centered, over-dramatic, loud, and prone to sudden fits of anger.  And she has basically nothing in common with Raj apart from being friends with Pooja.

 Which is nonsense, of course.  Tina can be kind of annoying, but annoying people deserve love too.  And Pooja is the only one of the three leads willing to tell the truth about what she wants, which is pretty basic to a successful relationship.  She's also willing to confess about the letter sin public.  Pooja, on the other hand, lied to Raj for over a decade and is so sure that she knows what everyone else needs that she'll sacrifice everything without ever asking them if that's what they want.

The thrust of the narrative is that Raj and Pooja belong together, and they fight against their destined happy ending like heroes from Greek tragedy desperately fighting against fate.  It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

Archie Month: The Archies

 The Archies (2023) isn't the first Bollywood movie to be inspired by Archie Comics, and it won't be the last, but for now it's the only one that's officially licensed.  Still, the movie has more to offer than just familiar character names.  There's a lot of style and a tremendous sense of place.

When rich girl Veronica Lodge (Suhana Khan) returns to her home town of Riverdale after two years in London, she's delighted to be reunited with her best pal Betty Cooper (Khushi Kapoor).  She's also intrigued by the idea of reuniting with Archie Andrews (Agastya Nanda), incorrigible flirt, aspiring musician, and former boyfriend.  It sounds like the perfect opportunity for an Archie-Betty-Veronica style love triangle, and that is exactly what happens, (It's right there in the title, after all.)

However, Archie's wayward heart isn't the focus of the movie.  Which is just as well, because Archie doesn't make a good impression during the first part of the movie; say what you will about Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, but Rahul would never forget Anjali's birthday, even if he was distracted by a date with Tina.  Archie tries to follow his heart, but his heart isn't very bright and he ends up kissing both girls in quick succession despite dire warnings from his level-headed (unless there's a hamburger involved) best friend Jughead (Mihir Ahuja).

But there's trouble in Riverdale.  Veronica's father Hiram (Alyy Khan) plans to buy up the businesses in the center of town, replacing them with a shopping center owned by him.  And his plan works, with basically no opposition; Veronica is briefly upset because Betty's father Hal (Satyajit Sharma) lost his bookstore, but Hiram arranges a new job for him, and helping the family of his daughter's best friend makes everything better, right?

However, that's not Hiram's only scheme.  He wants to build a luxury hotel, because every Bollywood billionaire tries to build a luxury hotel sooner or later, and he plans to build it in Green Park, the literal and figurative heart of Riverdale.  There's a local tradition that when a child turns five, they plant a tree in Green Park, so most of the town feels strongly rooted to the place.  There's no way the town council will approve a hotel in the park, so Hiram enlists Dawson (Vinay Pathak) to change minds by any means necessary, and to be the frontman so that the Lodge name is not attached to the project.

This is the sort of problem that will inevitably be solved by a group of plucky teenagers putting on a show, and there are plucky teenagers aplenty: Archie, Betty, Veronica and Jughead, of course, but also comedian and cub reporter Reggie Mantle (Vedang Raina), apprentice hairdresser Ethel Muggs (Dot.), nerd with a secret Dilton Doily (Yuvraj Menda), massive athlete Moose (Rudra Mahuvakar) and his tiny girlfriend Midge (Santana Roach).  In other Archie continuities Reggie is usually the foil, but here he's pretty much the moral center of the group, and is the one to discover the evil scheme in the first place.  Archie, on the other hand, requires a musical number performed by Miss Grundy's class before he starts to grow some political awareness, and it takes him a while to really dedicate himself to the cause.

Archie is an important character, and his narration acts as the barest whisper of a framing story, but the emotional core of the story is the relationship between Betty and Veronica; they might be rivals, but they're friends first, and Betty stands by her friend even when the rest of the gang suspects her of spying for her father, and the love triangle is resolved in an amicable and sensible way, without the need for Veronica to name her newborn daughter Betty and then conveniently die, leaving behind a stack of eight letters.

All that said, the real star of the show is Riverdale itself.  The Archie dynamic works really well when translated to a Bollywood setting, with Kuch Kuch Hota Hai being one of many examples, but making the movie a period piece and rooting it strongly in the Anglo-Indian community gives The Archies a tremendous sense of style and a cottage-core sensibility.  It's light, fluffy and utterly delightful.

That said, I am kind of baffled by the decision to make a movie about the Archie Comics characters, in which the band "The Archies" is an important plot point, and not have the band perform "Sugar, Sugar."  Maybe they're saving it for the sequel.

Archie Month: Kuch Kuch Hota Hai revisited.

 Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) opens with a death, which is an unusual choice for a romantic movie.  Tina (Rani Mukherji) succumbs to a fatal case of Bollywood Mystery Disease shortly after giving birth, leaving behind her grieving husband Rahul (Shah Rukh Khan), her newborn daughter Anjali, and a stack of eight letters, one for each of Anjali's first eight birthdays.  (And you may be wondering what a one year old is going to do with a letter, but I can assure you, this plot is going to get weirder.)

Eight years pass.  Rahul is a successful businessman, living with his mother (Farida Jalal) and Anjali (Sana Saeed) who is spunky, TV obsessed, and devoted to her dad.  They're mostly happy, but something is definitely missing, and Anjali feels her mother's absence keenly.  Still, it's her birthday, and she has one more letter to look forward to.  She opens it and discovers an extended flashback!

Tina writes about Rahul's college days at St. Xaviers, the Bollywoodest of Bollywood colleges, complete with quirky teachers, a cheer-leading squad, and intercollegiate music competitions complete with hand painted signs.  Young Rahul is . . . kind of a jerk, honestly.  He's a smug aspiring ladies man who wears a chain with the word "Cool" on it.  However, he has a best friend, tomboy Anjali Sharma (Kajol), and she keeps him somewhat grounded.  (Cut to Little Anjali looking surprised at the namesake she's never heard of.)

Rahul and Anjali are very close, though they fight a lot, especially after Anjali inevitably beats Rahul at basketball.  The other students at the college are weirdly invested in their friendship, though, and will perform a spontaneous musical number in order to get them to make up.  And then Tina appears.  Tina Malhotra, that is, Oxford educated and drop dead gorgeous daughter of the college principal (Anupam Kher), who has transferred to St. Xaviers as a favor to her father.

Rahul is immediately captivated by Tina, and tries being an enormous jackass in order to win her heart.  When that completely fails, he tries a different tack, announcing to a classroom that "Love is Friendship," that friendship is absolutely necessary for any romantic relationship to work.  That gets Tina's attention,and when he asks her to be his friend she says yes.  Unfortunately, his declaration also gets Anjali's attention, and she starts wondering if her feelings for Rahul aren't so platonic after all.  The Archie romantic triangle is in place.

Unfortunately for Anjali, it isn't much of a contest.  She's an awkward tomboy with no experience in matters of the heart, and her attempts to dress up and look pretty like Tina lead to humiliating failure.  Tina, on the other hand, is glamorous, worldly, and has a keen emotional intelligence that Rahul and Anjali both lack.  Tina suspects that there's more to Rahul and Anjali's relationship than just friendship, and she tries to talk to Anjali about it before seriously pursuing a relationship.  Even after Anjali's vague denials, she still feels that she's an interloper, but Rahul has no such doubts, and confesses his love.  Anjali is heartbroken, and after an emotional farewell to Rahul and Tina she leaves college and they never see her again.

Tina ends her story by saying that she knows Rahul is lonely now, and that she still feels terrible about coming between them, so she charges Little Anjali to find Big Anjali and finally reunite her with Rahul, which seems like a lot of pressure to put on an eight year old; she immediately recruits her grandparents to help, but it might have been better for Tina to ask her father in the first place rather than waiting eight years for her daughter to develop sufficient reading comprehension.  

Big Anjali, meanwhile, is older, more confident, and wears saris rather than gym gear.  She's engaged to Aman (Salman Khan), a businessman who is handsome, charming, sort of annoying, and utterly besotted with her.  Her mother (Reema Lagoo) has doubts; she knows that Anjali never got over Rahul, and that she isn't really in love with Aman, but Anjali is determined to go through with the wedding.  Thanks to literal divine intervention the actual marriage is delayed until December, so she goes to work at a summer camp in Shimla, run by the cheerful but buffoonish and Britain-obsessed Colonel Almeida (Johny Lever.)

Little Anjali learns about the summer camp by calling her namesake and listening silently until she hears something useful.  She and her grandmother enroll in the camp, the Anjalis meet and bond, and then the older Anjali discovers just who her new student is, and what happened to her friend Tina.  Then Little Anjali activates Phase II of her plan, calling her father and pretending to be sick so that he'll rush to the camp.  He rushes to the camp, sees both Anjalis together, and completely fumbles the reunion.  Little Anjali and her co-conspirators do their best to push the two together, old feelings resurface, new feelings start to boil over, and the pair are just about to confess their mutual love when Aman returns.

Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was writer/director Karan Johar's first movie, and the first step in his examination of increasingly transgressive love stories.  However, Rahul and Anjali are really not that transgressive; he's a widower and she's engaged to another man, but widowed men remarry all the time in Bollywood, and even Aman knows that she's just not that into him.  It's not like there's family pressure forcing Anjali to keep the engagement, either, since her mother clearly has doubts about the whole situation.  Everything could be resolved happily with five minutes of honest conversation, but instead Rahul and Anjali suffer in silence up to the very last minute, inspiring the people around them to make what Pretentious Movie Reviews calls the "Wow, Such Values Face", marveling at their stoic but pointless sacrifice.

Kuch Kuch Hota Hai has been reexamined in recent years, and as a member of the Pretty In Pink generation I think that's healthy.  I don't agree with all of the criticism I've seen, but Rahul is kind of toxic at times, especially in his younger days, and the movie does stick to a very conservative idea of family structure, with Little Anjali needing a mother being one of the driving elements of the plot.  Rather than argue fine points, though, I will tell you why I think that Kuch Kuch Hota Hai is good, actually.

It goes back to Archie comics, which Karan Johar has said were a specific inspiration for the film.  For the Betty-Archie-Veronica triangle to really work, both of the potential love interests have to be viable choices; Pride and Prejudice doesn't fit the Archie model, for instance, because Darcy is good but stuffy while Wickham is charming but actually a monster.  More than that, like Betty and Veronica, Anjali and Tina are genuine friends, with a relationship that extends beyond Rahul.  When Anjali discovers the truth about Little Anjali, her first reaction is to take a moment to mourn her friend.

The plot is, of course, absolute nonsense, with a constellation of plot holes shining through the script.  But like many films of this era, the plot is just a vehicle for delivering emotions, and emotions abound.  Even at this early stage of his career, Karan Johar has a real knack for writing characters, and the actors chosen to play those characters are fantastic.  Kajol is the real standout here, conveying volumes of meaning just through facial expression; you can literally highlight the exact second when her heart breaks, in the middle of a joyous dance number, without a word being spoken.

The movie is a mess, but it's a wonderful mess.  Just don't take it as a guide to healthy relationships.

Hiatus over!

 I'm back from vacation, and for the rest of January, it's Archie Month.