Dil Se.. (1998)

To my dismay, my current Netflix list consists mostly of movies from the last few years. Guess I've seen most of their older promising streaming content. I chose this one (whose title means "From the Heart") partly to buck the trend a little and partly because it has been a while since my last viewing from India. To my surprise, I had seen a little of it before, having looked up the portion that amounts to a music video of "Chaiyya Chaiyya," a song strangely coopted for Inside Man (2006).

That number's cheeriness does not reflect the plot well. Delhi radio program executive Amar falls for a woman at a train station and happens to see her repeatedly, but she mostly resists his charms. Little does he realize that she walks a dark path that doesn't lend itself to attachments, tho she sometimes finds it advantageous to get close to someone in his position, under the pseudonym "Meghna." They develop complex feelings about each other, especially as Amar pieces together that she belongs to the secessionist forces whose leader he once interviewed.

You probably wouldn't guess from the first maybe two-thirds of the story what the last would be like. It gets off to a slow start despite Amar's fast-lane courtship efforts. And might I say, he pisses me off. No way will I root for a suitor who won't take no for an answer, especially when all he knows about her is her appearance (don't expect me to believe in love at first sight); only near the end does Meghna tell him even her name. Rarely does she give the slightest hint of opening her heart to him. It gets arguably worse after he agrees to marry another woman but wants to run off with Meghna. So imagine my relief when he learns the hard way how much trouble Meghna is.

I'm afraid I don't know enough about the history of India to appreciate this film in full. I knew that India gained its independence relatively recently, observing a 50th anniversary herein, but I didn't know about the tribal massacres in some areas decades later. Many in poor Assam, unsatisfied with the government's (in)action, sought further independence by any means they deemed necessary.

Meghna eventually details some of the horrors she witnessed and experienced in childhood to explain why she would join a terror cell. I agree with Amar that it's no excuse for killing innocents in the present, nor could there be any such excuse. Ethics aside, what good could it accomplish? What country ever successfully began with random bombers? Yet Meghna insists that she has No Choice, undoubtedly thanks to indoctrination.

I appreciate when the plot finally thickens, as with Amar drawing the suspicion of India's equivalent of the FBI. (Indian authorities do get nasty, according to Bollywood.) In the last act, whereupon my "action" tag kicks in, he has to show more badassery than a radio personality, even an interviewer of terrorists, is likely to have cultivated. It still doesn't end well -- which may, ironically, be just as well from an artistic standpoint.

While consistently serious enough, it can make for an unusual mix of genre elements and moods, so I might recommend DS for something off the beaten path. I just wish it had more substance to justify 163 minutes.