Director: Yash Chopra
Country of origin and year of release: India, 2004
It would be easy to write one of those elevator sell, quick summaries of Veer-Zaara:
Romeo and Juliet, but in India and Pakistan.
That summary wouldn't be inaccurate, given that the film tells the story of Veer, an Indian pilot, who rescues Zaara, a Pakistani girl, and that they do fall in love with each other. But to simply describe it as that wouldn't do it justice.
As well as telling the Veer and Zaara love story in flashback, the narrative is structured and anchored by the legal story framing it. We begin our film with Shaamiya Siddiqui, Veer's lawyer, who is played by Rani Mukherjee. She is a new young lawyer, seeking to make her mark in the male dominated Pakistani judicial system. And she has been given a case that, seemingly, she can never win: That of Veer Pratap Singh (Shahrukh Khan), an Indian man who has been detained for twenty years in Pakistan, accused of being a spy. In that time, he has refused to provide any kind of defence or explanation, or, indeed, to speak at all.
Reportedly based on real life Pakistani human rights activist Asma Jehangir, Shaamiya is pivotal to the film. It is she who persuades Veer to tell her his and (by extension) Zaara's story, and it is she who fights to change minds, to bring a case to challenge his imprisonment.
The tense legal scenes are intercut with vivid Bollywood recollections from Veer of his romance with Zaara (Preity Zinta), which are relayed in luminous scenes that show both the Indian countryside and Pakistan's cities at their best. Veer, we discover, grew up in a small village but went on to do very well when he qualified as an Air Force pilot, rescuing those in need. Zaara, meanwhile, grew up in wealth and pampered luxury in Lahore. They could never be together. Not just because of their two countries relationships with each other, but because - in the case of Zaara - her fate was already sealed.
As I suspect is the case with Bollywood films in general, there is a real sense of spectacle to Veer-Zaara. I felt something of this spectacle, and sense of scale, years ago when I first saw the equally good Monsoon Wedding, but I'd say that Veer-Zaara is probably closer to my western sense of Bollywood. Mainly because it features characters bursting into song on a regular basis and Monsoon Wedding doesn't, but also because it's so incredibly long. It is, to date, the only film I own on DVD that includes an intermission. It is so long that it makes Gone With The Wind look like a taut 90 minute drama in comparison. You really need to be prepared to set aside an entire afternoon or evening for it. And to have a huge box of tissues to hand.
What makes the film such compelling viewing is the engaging performances from the two leads as well as strong support from Mukherjee as Shaamiya and Divya Dutta as Zaara's friend and confident. The cinematography is also, frankly, gorgeous. What also makes it is the sense of Zaara we get through Veer's re-telling of their story: The Zaara he portrays is rebellious and outspoken, not given to sitting at home and waiting for her life to start. Through his telling, the viewer gets a real sense of not only his character but hers, and why he loves her.
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