Sushant Singh Rajput

  • Dil Bechara (2020)

    (Google Streaming, December 2021) My first reaction to Dil Bechara was not subtle nor positive: “Oh, no, not another teens-with cancer romantic tragedy. Oh no, not a remake of The Fault in Our Stars.” But once I got used to the idea of the film, my second reaction was more nuanced: I don’t want to sit through The Fault in Our Stars again, and I would not want to get through a sequel. But I will sit through an Indian remake of the film, if only for the change of scenery. And you know what? There is indeed something interesting in how the same story is adapted to another culture, taking intriguing freedoms with the base material. The core remains the same, as our cancer-stricken heroine meets friends in a support group and falls in love with a creative young man. Romance, creative endeavour, a trip to Paris to meet a reclusive artist and some mourning populate the rest of this teen drama. It’s noteworthy that the reclusive novelist of the original The Faults in our Stars has been replaced by a mysterious musician, Paris instead of Amsterdam, and that moviemaking ends up being integral to the conclusion. Relocating the story to middle-class India makes for an intriguing change of pace, and the film benefits from heartfelt performances from its lead couple Sanjana Sanghi and Sushant Singh Rajput. Western viewers may miss a crucial piece explaining the film’s popularity in that this proved to be Rajput’s final film, the actor having committed suicide before the film’s release. (His death led to a complex and impossible-to-summarize social media firestorm that ended up affecting much of Indian cinema in 2020.)  As far as doomed-teenage-romance films go, Dil Bechara is an honest solid example of the form, enlivened by its Indian setting for western moviegoers. I didn’t love it, but I found it more interesting to watch than I expected, and that was probably the best possible outcome for such a film.