#Scurf148: We Are All Animals at Night
How RARKPK is the cure to many modern-day big city malaises
On being undone by the cloying, saccharine, almost inane emotionality of Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani.
I could write at least a couple more taglines and headlines and catchphrases about the movie, but I need to get to the writing also, at least at some point. The movie that most of us have found enamored, cornered, and surprised by this last fortnight has been this one — RARKPK.
It came out of nowhere — seemingly inane, cliched, even a possibly mundane love story — but it took us all out for a date with our respective moods, malaises, and maladies. And, when we least expected it, swept us off our feet and cured us all of them.
Earlier KJo movies were little cultural dalliances we were all inured to. All those years ago, something shifted when K2H2 showed us that friendship is love is friendship. It blew up our little 90s hearts when we saw little Anjali whip out her Jaipuri dupatta for Tina as a not-so-subtle indication of passing on the power over her (toxic) love. Then, we all went and found our own versions of blunt Anjali haircuts, that sat ever so uncomfortably around our short, naked necks. Our Rahuls ever so clueless about our existence around their various Tinas. We tiptoed inelegantly around them, making silent gestures like dancing in groups with them, competing against them in Basketball games, and secretly pining for that ever so cathartic Rifatdbi moment in our non-hostel living school lives.
The movie gave us something for that moment but decades down the line we, along with Shabana Azmi, decided how poor a depiction of female sexuality and individuality Anjali was. So, while Azmi decided to write to Karan, we decided to meme-fy the movie, the dude, and by extension the rest of his art (and maybe life - art & artist???) too. From hailing K2H2 and K3G cultural mainstays, the movies became bulwarks for endless meme-fication.
So, this late July it was only natural that we all sauntered into the womb of our respective cinema halls fully expecting RARKPK to be below-average, tone-deaf, and singularly boring. But the versions of us who came out of those wombs were not the same rudderless bunch of tired souls. In those 2 hours and 45 minutes, the movie sought out our respective callouses and embalmed each of us ever so attentively, as a single parent would attend to a five-year-old’s late-night tepid, niggling summer fever.
Through those (sometimes tedious, sometimes mellifluous) minutes Karan reads to us the story of our times, but also not(?). Something unusual, something strange, as Damien Rice would put it. The movie is not a miracle and we’re no saints, but RARKPK sits at the peripheries of our battered souls, peering into the darkness, daring to ask the right questions, mostly at the right moments.
If we ignore the few, but seriously opaque and turgid dialogues that border on sanctimonious WhatsApp forwards on “various” “sociocultural” “issues” , the movie could also be termed as “important” and “singularly suited to its times”.
For one it brings us back to K3G’s tiring “It’s all about loving one’s family” line of thinking in a more warm, 2023, alert way. The families shown in the movie (both Chaterjees and Randhawas) are not your most simple-minded upper-class, upper-caste people. They are both ruined by the lack of connection with worlds outside of their own. So when Rani and Rocky swap houses and present themselves before these sets of elderly, so-called mature, people, all hell breaks loose.
Karan shows us how their mere morning routines break not only Rocky and Rani but also their respective housemates. It’s like a sacred, unsaid bond has been broken. The look on Mrs. Chaterjee’s face during the laundry scene, the disgust in Randhawa Dadi’s eyes during the morning aarti, I could go on. Both families are judging their respective “house guests” like they’re part of reality TV. And I’m not going to lie, the movie is a bit kitschy in a way that these people don’t shy away from behaving like participants from Bigg Boss or India’s Got Talent.
Shabana Azmi as Jamini Chaterjee and Dharmendra as Kanwal Lund are immaculately cast starcrossed lovers. Cossetted by money, unsettled by love, and unmoved by anyone else’s but each other’s loves, these two are a pair straight out of a Gulzar movie. Wait a minute, didn’t Gulzar abandon that script about a couple that tries to find each other’s post-retirement after they’ve lost their respective partners, families? Or some such.
There have been variations of this couple on screen — the ones worming their way into each other’s lives after an entire era of separation. So it could get repetitive and monotonous. Rocky and his friend even muster a little prayer before they dive into google to find Jamini Chatterjee, 1968, Shimla. She might as well have been dead. But there she was alive. Not just in real life, but also in Rani’s blog.
(Sidebar: I wish we, or at least I, got to some of Rani’s writing.)
There is a tenderness with which Karan attends to these reunited lovers. It could have been a tad less cheesy, for sure, but didn’t we all need this sickly sweet, glorious, puppy-love story? I for one was moved to stillness in the scenes where they kiss, dance, embrace, cuddle, dance, sing, sneak out kisses… Jamini takes the ladder in the thick of the night with Rocky’s help into Kanwal’s room where Rani waits for them — K2H2’s ladder scene but only better?!
I didn’t know I needed that.
We see a love story develop before our eyes, ever so slowly, just like the instant photo Rocky clicks. One moment there’s nothing, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, their love is all over the place, pouring itself through the void, gushing into the minds, hearts, and even houses of the Chaterjees and Randhawas. The ultimate unspooling! As we’d say in Hindi, raita phail gaya.
It was bold for Karan to take a kind of strong stance against the much cinematically valorised Punjabi community. After years and years of Dharti Sunehri Ambar Neela, while we did get Udta Punjab in 2015, this 2023 reminder of the malodorous rot within the Punjabi minds was refreshing to see on the big screen. It went beyond the templatized police vs drugs vs rapes vs sex scandals versions we see repeated on OTPs on a monthly basis.
https://twitter.com/stelladilli/status/1688618734817050625?s=20
As much as many conversations in RARKPK seem to be superficially embedded in our woke Twitter culture discourses, much of the movie takes place independently and in spite of these same muddied, muffled, limited (if viral) conversations. In its 145-minute runtime, the movie travels between various genres — a romantic story (Kjo), social satire (Anubhav Sinha), rich people saga (Zoya), coming-of-age for parents (AK), and musical (SLB). And in doing so, it embraces all its forms, like a true blue Hindi movie of its olden and current times. The mainstream masala romcom we were all pining for all these years!
I could go on and on and on about Rocky and Rani’s story and how it starkly reminded me of my own love story with M… The familial discord, the violent clashes in opinions, a breakup within the family, long-hidden fissures exposed after just one kiss with this Bengali man… Sigh!
The movie, much like the *defining* relationship of my life (thus far) underlined the various ways in which we are all just animals in the night. Had it not been for M, I wouldn’t have addressed my ongoing issues with my father in the head-on fashion that I did; had it not been for him I’d not have maybe found, nursed, and nurtured that fire within me that would lead me to become my own person; had it not been for him, I’d not have learned how to live life on my own.
(Dear reader, how much of that is a good thing — we are yet to uncover.)
RARKPK is nothing spectacular, if anything it’s over-the-top, cliched, and seriously flawed as the haters would call it. But if you peel off the outer makeup, and really juxtapose it against the times we are living in then maybe it is kind of a tender, humane story of our times. RARKPK shows humans behaving in part like animals (even during the day — Rocky rubbing the lassi off of Rani’s upper lip!!!), experiencing emotions that are excommunicated from daily life. I think this could be the only movie in its own, singular genre — a smorgasbord of unlikable people melding into growing up adults, plenty of cultural simulacra representative of its times, and a new generation so utterly chaotic, confused but also golden and convinced and living in the grasps of an eternal loving! The movie sings a joy so stark, so singular, I wonder how deeply damaged Karan would’ve been when he made ADHM (a beyond-the-pale romance ATM)! More on ADHM some other time… Till then, let’s please try and find my jhumka!
I have recently published a melancholic dirge of an essay for Majuscule lit. You can read my previous essay for them here.
You can read some of my writing here:
Leave a comment or maybe two if you felt something about RARKPK or about this dispatch, or anything in particular:
Sending good vibes to all those who need them, and even more to those who don’t.