Karan Johar's Return To The Cinema Of The One Percent

THE Karan Johar world of family histrionics is back after a long time. It has a somewhat upgraded look and a decidedly woke underbelly, but it still answers to a familiar calling card — family is everything. Not for the first time, in a Johar film or at least one where he is involved, does a love-struck couple embalm the wound that family can come to represent. Unlike Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, Johar’s seminal exploration of familial friction, this time the battle takes place across families; cultural mores clash, eyebrows are raised and more specifically, differing ideas of masculinity go up against each other. One thing though, has remained common in the two decades separating K3G from his latest. Like most of his family feud cinema that espouses a soapy look and grammar, Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, also takes place in the economic stratosphere us mortals refer to as the ‘one percent’. Strikingly, despite the shifting sands of aspiration and accessibility underneath, the pull and effectiveness of Johar’s cinema about the elite, remains as solid as it was at the turn of the millennium.

In Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, Rocky (played by the indomitable and an in-form Ranveer Singh) and Rani (a typically bubbly Alia Bhatt) decide to spend time with each other’s families to win their approval. Thirty years ago, such an exercise was unthinkable, but Johar suggests that social transactions have been re-written to the point where families are now more accommodating of the idea of love. It somewhat rings true, because in Rocky Aur Rani, the families don’t quibble over the possibility of a new knot, but merely its incompatibility with the rest of the yarn. Two seniors — Dharmendra and Shabana Azmi — even stand in for that decades’ old idea of seeking ritualistic fits rather than emotional partners. An era when the family, in Azmi’s words, steered the marital vehicle even after it had left the garage room of ceremony. “Backseat driving,” she calls it matter-of-factly. It’s modernistic without being thoroughly modern.

The striking bit about Johar’s latest film isn’t the generational upgrade of inclusivity, or the fact that he derides his own previous work. Rather, it is the consistency of its economic plane, the opulent sets and ambience his cinema tends to occupy, and the ludicrous effectiveness of it still. In an age where our cinema has shifted to small-town stories, social activism as a form of cinematic glory, Johar exhibits the gall to stick to the apparatus that is both his gift and his weakness. Weakness because he remains a filmmaker incapable of grounding his lens. A flaw, that to his credit, he is more than willing to admit to. The strength of it is the knowledge that stories about familial friction remain as old and as dear to Indians as the Mahabharata. Family is both our zone of comfort and our source of pain. It’s the thing that we all, despite our socio-economic uniqueness, undergo and therefore relate to. The nuance here, however, isn’t in the details but their elimination.

In some sense Johar has more in common with Ekta Kapoor’s brand of glittery domestic feudalism, than with the likes of his mentor Yash Chopra. Kapoor’s rendition of the family soap during the turn of the ‘90s, somewhat echoed the move to startling mansions, pompous sets and preoccupations with nary an economic banana skin in sight. To whet that increasing appetite for aspiration, Indian audiences chose the smokescreen of entitlement to fight other battles. The presumed presence of money makes it easier to endure a story about cultural liberation. In Rocky Aur Rani, Rocky sets out to introduce his family with a voice-over to explain how their ultra-rich sweets business has been built through trauma. 

It feels like an unnecessary preface, one that never quite settles or attaches itself to the story. These are moneyed families, which makes them and the audience that much more relaxed about the jeopardy that cynics, relatives and neighbours represent — people we can’t get away from. Ironically, both family residences in the film are monoliths, standing alone as if in the middle of nowhere. But it’s what makes Johar’s cinema preposterously effective, because it so obviously lays down the deception. The kind of deception that we as audiences are willing to buy — for the cost of a ticket, of course. Because to meet our prejudices and biases half-way, the journey at least can be scenic, the milieu it stands for, rewarding. For in reality, morality neither fills stomachs, nor does it help clear debts or pay rent.

This isn’t eat-the-rich-cinema, by the way. Not by a long shot. Johar celebrates grandeur and entitlement, and makes social blindness savoury. In Rocky Aur Rani, he even allows Rani a woke career as a journalist — where she mouths off a minister — as an echo of the kind of fantastical landscape his cinema is built in. Here privilege becomes the canvas and while its lens is turned away, the remaining 99 percent can dig themselves into a moral quandary, without the weight of their own self-image bearing down on them. Because inside a theatre, relatability need not always translate as realism. It can instead, walk the corridors, wear the saris and speak from the pelvis of gyrating bodies, in ways we could and possibly will never do. It’s precisely why we go to the cinemas. To tell ourselves we just might still.