Confession No. 3

Next up in the I-did-not-like-at-all-but-everyone-else-seems-to-love department: Dil Se.

I did not like this from the beginning, nor in the middle (I never really bought into the so-called love story), nor at the end (well, okay, the ending was dramatic, but if you have zero investment in the story . . . ).

I watched Dil Se right after reading two very long discussions (the first one over at Beth Loves Bollywood, about the Chak De! India scene where the girls beat up some boys who harass them at McDonald's, and the related discussion of so called "eve-teasing" [i.e. harassing of women; what a terrible euphemism] over at IndieQuill), and I couldn't help but notice that Amarkanth's (Shah Rukh Khan's) behavior in Dil Se matched some of the descriptions of  eve-teasing I had just been reading about in all the blog comments.  It was stalking! He mooned over her, just wouldn't leave her alone when she gave him no encouragement whatsoever (that I could see), and was generally a pest. Blehhh. Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention, but I didn't see that Meghna (Manisha Koirala) had any inner opinions one way or the other about how he behaved to her. He pushed, she didn't reciprocate, he pushed some more, she acquiesced. She accepted his behavior toward her but it didn't seem to matter to her what her own feelings were, or what she herself thought of the whole "relationship". That may have been part of what her character was going through and related to the past problems she was already dealing with, but I just couldn't handle it.

And to top it all off, the movie was BORING.

On the other hand, and this is getting ahead of myself to Confession No. 4, but I loved another drama with a similar theme that everyone else seemed to think was garbage! There is no accounting for taste!