Adventures without subtitles: Hum Aapke Hain Koun...?! (But no, really... koun?!)

The universe must just know about my no-subtitles resolution.

I chose to go without subtitles on Black, but my resolve wavered when I took up HAHK (can you believe I hadn’t seen it yet?) on YouTube late one night. Exhausted that day, I left the subtitles on. Somewhere around 30 minutes in, I fell asleep sitting up, glasses still on my face.

The next day, I took up watching it again at a more reasonable hour but left the subtitles on.

Lo and behold, the subtitles died less than halfway through.

Ah, universe, how you taunt me.

This was hardly a new experience. I had a similar problem with watching Maine Pyaar Kiya on YouTube more than a year ago. But that was way, way before my subtitless days, and I actually abandoned MPK after intermission when the subtitles went.

With HAHK, I knew it was a test of myself.

Adventures without subtitles: Black (2005)

I had been told many times that I needed to watch Black. For Rani Mukherjee. For its uniqueness. For its style.

Somehow in all of that I never managed to grasp until the opening credits that it was a Sanjay Leela Bhansali film. Perhaps you know my very consistent mixed feelings about that particular gentleman’s films, but if you don’t, here’s an idea: cinematography top notch, first half builds beautifully, plot unravels, depression results, second half crashes and burns. This somehow proved to be the exception to the second half crashing and burning rule, but much of the other stuff remains ever the same. Black is beautifully framed and filtered, with thought behind each shot (although I rolled my eyes at closeups where one can see Rani’s contact lenses) but its plot begins sloping toward the end, and yes, there is a lot of depression lingering around it. But unlike the other SLB films I've seen, Black remains unflinchingly somber, so the sadness meshes better with the rest of the film.

In ways, Black was a great place to start my adventures without subtitles. It has a lot of English and a lot of talking without spoken words, including sign language (which I studied briefly in middle school and so sort of understand).

Post No. 100: The Subtitleless Revelation/Revolution

I have always thought of myself as good with words. No, I’m not verbally eloquent by any means — in fact I’m probably one of the worst public speakers ever — but I’m a writer, a grammarian, a spelling bee winner, a polyglot. Learning language — English and beyond — has always come easy to me. I leapt ahead in Spanish classes as a child even when I started later than everyone else.

By pure exposure to Hindi films, I was able to pick up basic phrases fairly rapidly. As was my sister, who is more talented than me when it comes to languages (she’s on No. 5 or 6 now). After less than six months with Bollywood, Paagal Papaya and I were lobbing basic Hindi sentences back and forth in our usual mix of Spanish and our family’s own language (“Donkey Latin”).

Since then, I’ve formally studied Hindi on and off in bouts, bulking up particularly before I went to India earlier this year. I’ve used Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur, Living Language, Mango — just about everything. But all in short bursts. The bulk of my Hindi “study” has still been films and songs, particularly when subtitles lapse.

My comprehension level is high enough that I can watch a Hindi film without subtitles and understand most of what is going on. I saw Aashiqui 2 in India without subtitles (and Bodyguard in the U.S. without subtitles), and I was surprised at my own comprehension level.

When I was traveling in India, I also spoke basic Hindi with the tour bus driver and tour assistant. That’s far more bravery than I’ve ever had with Spanish, although I know much more Spanish and definitely can speak more. (Once, the assistant started talking way beyond my comprehension level, and when I finally guessed that he was asking how I knew Hindi, I had to tell him, “Main sirf thoda thoda bol sakti hoon. Bollywood se.”)

Since coming back, then, and being asked several times if I speak Hindi and how much, and answering only once in (albeit “perfectly accented”) Hindi that “main kuch Hindi bolti hoon,” I have wondered why I’ve settled for this level after nearly three years with Hindi film. Why am I not more fluent? Why haven’t I learned more? Why don’t I speak it?

And why, if I have the ability, don’t I watch movies without subtitles?

Yes, it’s true that it’s easier to watch movies with subtitles. Reading English is easier than working to hear and understand Hindi.

But if I just depend on subtitles, how am I ever going to learn?

And what am I missing by reading subtitles?

About two years ago, not long after we started Bollywood Queens, Paagal Papaya was compiling a post (that never quite got finished) on Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani. She watched the film, loved it and started a post. But for the post, she needed screencaps. So she watched the movie again, without subtitles, for screencaps. “It’s completely different when you watch it without the subtitles,” she told me. “You see so much more of the acting.”

Is that what I’ve been missing out on in the past three years? The true value of the acting? (Even when it’s overacting.)

Certainly I’ve missed out on the poetics of dialogues, whether I could have understood them without the subtitles or not. I’ve long been able to understand when the subtitles are off. And that includes understanding that the subtitles rarely if ever do the language justice. (This is particularly frustrating with Urdu classics, but that’s another story.)

Curious, I tested this resolution by going back to a film I’ve seen a hundred times with subtitles — DDLJ. What did I miss so many times by watching DDLJ with subtitles? That SRK speaks absolute gibberish in the scene with the police in Switzerland. That everyone in the film talks really fast, unless they’re speaking of love or delivering a particularly poignant dialogue. (That does mean there is a lot that is too fast for me to understand, too.) That there is a pretty big change in Simran’s tones and behavior from one half to the next.

None of that is earth-shattering by any means.

But it does make me wonder what else I’ve missed.

And so, after nearly three years of Hindi films, comes my new resolution: Whenever possible, I am going to go subtitleless.

I don’t expect it to be easy — especially since Netflix will keep enabling me with subtitles that I can’t turn off. I don’t expect the resolution to be perfect. I don’t expect to get by unfrustrated. I definitely don’t expect to understand everything. (Especially, to my chagrin, jokes. A multilingual professor of mine once said true mastery of a language is achieved when you can understand a language’s jokes because of the plays on words involved. I’m still nowhere near that level with Hindi yet.)

But I do expect to grow in understanding. And that’s the real goal here.

Expect updates on the progress of this resolution as it goes on.

NEW: Aashiqui 2: An exercise in futility … (and watching a film in India as a non-Indian)

When I was in India (more blog posts on that at my other blog), I was determined to go at least once to the theater. It didn’t happen in Delhi like I’d hoped for, but it did in a smaller, dirty mall theater in Agra. I was trying to see Shootout at Wadala (which I still haven’t seen), but it wasn’t playing at the right time, and I was forced to settle for Aashiqui 2, of which the only thing I knew was that it was a romance (kind of a duh once I figured out what aashiqui means).

I was able to understand more of the dialogue in Aashiqui than I probably would have understood with a subtitleless Shootout at Wadala — I was also perfectly able to understand the teenagers in the line who were making fun of us and our inability to understand the movie (“subtitle hai?” one laughed with a look in our direction) — but enjoyment factor? Much lower than hoped for.

Synopsis: Rahul Jaykar (Aditya Roy Kapoor) is a famous singer at perhaps the height of his fame but attempting to drown it all in alcohol. Drunk driving one night after a brawl at a concert, he almost runs over Aarohi (Shraddha Kapoor). Later he follows her to a bar where he discovers that she too is a singer — “better even than me.” He’s determined to help her break into the music business, even after a manager that he fires for sabotaging the woman he has come to love. The only problem: Aarohi rapidly becomes more popular than Rahul, who can’t handle it and spirals even farther out of control despite maintaining a live-in relationship with Aarohi.

All told, Aashiqui is a nice little love story for awhile. Maybe half. Maybe less.

You might be able to call nearly the whole a love story, but it certainly isn’t nice.

Once Rahul turns back to drinking, it gets ugly. Really ugly. I lost count of the times that Rahul goes off on Aarohi, and it’s gone past the point at which she should’ve left for pure self-preservation purposes long before the film ends.

Modern enough  for sex, not modern enough for the woman to have a sense of self-preservation.

And yet Aarohi stays with Rahul, who by then has gone past being openly hostile to her success — he’s yelled at her, broken their apartment, stolen money from her, pushed her down, raised his hand to her. I understand that it’s too much to ask for all successful Bollywood heroines be as bold as Konkana Sen Sharma’s Sona in Luck By Chance (she breaks up with Vikram even as he’s apologizing; kya backbone to shoot down a repentant Farhan Akhtar!) but come on. Aarohi is modern enough to live with Rahul without any sort of commitment, but she’s not modern enough to look out for herself once he turns abusive? It’s gone past general self-preservation and into personal safety in Aashiqui. The ideology is just downright dangerous.

And still Aarohi hangs on. Another case of the ridiculous helpless woman syndrome.

I can understand loyalty to a degree, but in this case it’s utterly absurd and even infuriating to make a character stay past so many points at which she should have left. And maybe if she had, it would have helped Rahul see his own self-destruction. As it is, Aarohi keeps picking him up just long enough for him to fall again.

Instead *SPOILER ALERT* we end up with Rahul saying he’ll get help/rehab (after he’s already been through it, of sorts, once in a retreat with Aarohi) — and then killing himself.

It would be tragic, really, if it didn’t come at such a profoundly stupid point in the plot arc.

Yes, Rahul draws on the Devdas aura with his excessive drinking and has a frustrating ineptitude like the Bengali alcoholic of old, but this is not the man who realizes his error as his body fails and dies on Paro’s doorstep. This is a man who in a rollercoaster of a battle with the bottle hits a high note, waffles a bit and decides what the hell, let’s just end it all here, effectively shooting all of Aarohi’s longsuffering support in the face.

 

Let's get better with sexytimes, fall off the wagon, then give up on it all. Thoroughly eff the heroine, right?

I did not need another reason to dislike Aditya Roy Kapoor — every half-assed performance I’ve seen him give before was enough — but I sure did get it. Does he portray the scumbag Rahul well? Well, probably better than any other character I’ve seen him portray, but it’s not exactly a mark in his favor. There are definite moments when you feel for Rahul, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll end up loathing him by the end. He’s not just broken; he’s dangerous, harmful and broken.

I have markedly less hate for Shraddha Kapoor (too many Kapoors!), but neither do I have high praises. She is beautiful and sweet, yes, and somewhat endearing with her innocence, but she isn’t anything to marvel at. Another mostly throwaway heroine. (Honestly, about the same opinion I had of her after Luv Ka The End. It may have improved slightly with Aashiqui, but I wasn’t bowled over.)

Kind of how I felt about this movie!

 One thing I definitely didn’t dislike? The music. It was haunting and lovely and moving in all the right places. Although one would hope for that in a movie focused on two singers.

Sum total? I was very displeased with Aashiqui’s arc, but I’m glad that among all the things I didn’t get to do in India, at least I got to see a film and work out my Hindi comprehension. (Though yeah, I’m still not happy I had to endure mouthy teenagers to do it. I hate teenagers.) Oh, and after paying for the Rs. 275 Platinum reclining, comfy seats at the top of the theater, I now understand why 90 percent of my desi friends like to sit at the top of the theater (rather than somewhere in the middle like most of my nondesi friends).

Understanding is fun, and comfy too.

Bodyguard (2011): ...????

OK! I would love to be discussing BODYGUARD with you guys right now, but there's just one slight problem with that.

I went to see it at the AMC in Jacksonville, where I've seen several Hindi films with their appropriate subtitles (including the first one I saw on the big screen: Tees Maar Khan). This time, however, AMC decided it felt like screwing us non-Indian Bollywood watchers and cut out the subtitles.

OK, to be totally fair to the folks at AMC, the problem was that they didn't have things proportioned correctly on the screen (forgetting to correct for the different proportions of Indian films from American ones). The tops of heads were often cut off, and subtitles across the bottom paid the price of a smaller screen as well.

Still, I was unexpectedly confronted with my first subtitles-less Hindi film. I've only been exposed to Hindi for about nine months, and it's been sporadic during that time. I know my Hindi isn't the best, but it's been improving pretty quickly, so I hoped I'd be OK -- how much of the dialogue do you have to directly understand in a masala film anyway? -- and stayed in my seat. I was OK up until intermission.

After intermission, I either got tired, things got more confusing or they started talking faster because I reached the limits of my comprehension. By the ending, I had no idea what was happening. I'm both proud of myself for sitting through it and angry at myself for not being at the level of Hindi comprehension where I'm no longer quite so dependent on subtitles.

Let's just say I'm definitely going to have to watch Bodyguard once a subtitles-equipped DVD is available. I felt left out as jokes whizzed over my head. (A multilingual professor of mine once said true comprehension and mastery of a language is achieved when you can understand a language's jokes because of the plays on words involved. I'm obviously nowhere near that level with Hindi yet.)

But these things I can say:

I'm convinced that Sallu is the master of masala. Y'all may have noticed (or maybe not) that I have a seriously swinging love-hate relationship with this particular Khan. Mostly, it's his badfanny, show-offy attitude. If he gives it up and just has fun, I love Sallu. This had lots of him kicking butt and taking names, but I don't think I ever had that moment where he came off as so arrogant I wanted to punch him in the face.

Kareena Kapoor, as you may also have noticed, also has the tendency to get on my nerves sometimes. But then other times, when you give her some depth and some spunk, she amazes me (see 3 Idiots, Jab We Met, maybe even 36 China Town). This was one of those times. I also wanted to steal her wardrobe for about 90 percent of the film.

Divya didn't do much studying for her college.

I couldn't understand most of Tsunami Singh's jokes due to the whole language barrier, but his shirts were hilarious.

The music was not great, but the dance numbers were. I think I've mentioned before that I hate when Sallu does his bump-on-a-log "I'm barely going to move and call it dancing" thing, but he actually moved, so I was happy.

So basically, Sallu, if you want to come be my bodyguard, I'd be OK with that. :)