dangermousie | Random Movie Rec of the Day: Tere Naam (India, 2003)

Tere Naam was my favorite Bollywood movie of 2003. It stars Salman Khan (in what most agree is his best performance ever) and Bhoomika Chawla (if I am not mistaken, it was her first Hindi-language movie). It's an unusual and disturbing movie that is not something you should watch if you are feeling in the mood for cheery, dance-in-Switzerland romp. It also has one of my favorite soundtracks.

Plot: Radhe (Salman Khan) is a violent loafer. He hangs around the college he's went to quite a time ago with his group of "friends," instead of looking for a job. He's a small-town thug, who is not too bright or well-adjusted. For one thing, he is frighteningly quick with violence. He is not a bad person however, and has a rough (very rough) sense of justice. And he develops quite a crush on Nijara (Bhoomika Chawla), a sheltered Priest's daughter who goes to the college. Nirjara is almost pathologically shy and hides inside her shell. Radhe tries to show his liking for her, but since he has no more social skills than a 5 year old, all he does is terrify her. So, what now? He has all these emotions that he has no idea how to deal with and they are destroying him. Not to mention that it seems one of his rough justice, violent outbursts might have been one too many and he's really out of his league...I am trying not to spoil this, but the movie veers off in a rather different, heartbreaking direction.

So, why do I love a movie about a violent, dim thug and a utterly shy, too-sheltered girl? The characters are flawed, not glamorous, and sometimes downright unlikeable. And they end up paying a terrible price for this. See Dangermousie watch Tere Naam. See Dangermousie bawl.

If you want to know more, there are spoilers behind the cut

So: some things I liked (in particular).

1. Salman Khan as Radhe. Before TN, I saw him in KKHH, HDDCS and HAHK and none of those led me to believe he could act like this. Tere Naam is the movie that made me a fan. It was amazing: all the toughness and the confusion and the rage, and yet the vulnerability underneath. I couldn't take my eyes off him (heck, I even liked the hair, which was pretty out there.)

2. The ending. It's odd to say this, because it made me so upset, but it's somehow tragically appropriate. I would have been happy for a HEA (he stops the wedding, she nurses him back to health etc), but this made so much more sense, story-wise. And yet, when he sees her dead body, and then later when he ignores his family and friends and walks into that van...I was choking up.

3. The love story. This wasn't the typical love-at-first-sight, evil parents type of story (and I love those). This was gradual and believable in its slow development. I loved that it wasn't all roses and dancing around trees. Was this healthy? No. But was that true love, messy, and painful and obsessive? Yes it was. Love can twist and torture you horribly, epsecially if you are not used to emotions, and what was shown felt real. I love the kidnapping scene. It's dangerous, and twisted, and full of pain and passion. You can see it's tearing Radhe up, and he doesn't know how to deal with it. It's not necessarily neat or romance novel romantic, but it's real. It's not what I'd chose for my own romance, but it's what would happen with those particular characters in that situation.

4. The greyness of the characters. I loved most what I know bothered some people: the fact that Radhe, the hero, loafs around a college he graduated from a long time ago, that he has a violence problem, that he doesn't know how to deal with hopeless love, that he loses it to the point of kidnapping Nijara. Does it make him my dream man? No, of course not. But it makes him a fascinating character to watch. He does wrong things, he makes mistakes, but his heart, overall, is in the right place. And even if you are a supreme moralist, I don't think anything he did or could have done in his whole life was enough to deserve what he got in the end: the worse possible private nightmare as, I think, he is punishing himself. She died because she loved him. In a way, the whole horrible situation is his fault. So he'll go back to that place (which must be unimaginably awful if you are sane) as some means of reparation/punishment.

I also think Nijara is fascinating. She seems like someone who is repressed and bottles her emotions (which in some way makes Radhe more attractive to her, I think). In some ways she is just as disfunctional as Radhe, though I do understand her suicide. This wasn't the typical "if she's stong and shows resolution, her bf will take her away." In her view, no matter what else happens, Radhe will always be a vegetable. She is shown as very quiet and submissive and traditional throughout the whole movie. But when pushed too far, she does react (e.g. with Radhe on the train, or with her father when she tells him about Radhe). That's what she did here. She didn't argue, she just reacted quietly, effectively and with a minimum of fuss. Which, in its result, is pretty dysfunctional, IMO.