Giving a three-hour epic from my childhood a watch: Devdas (2002). It really is a masterpiece, cinematically, even if it occasionally snags on its own melodrama.

Growing up with Bollywood films my whole life I’m only now able to verbalize my biggest frustration with them, which is that all of the social pressures and customs that clearly are the source of the characters’ problems go completely unexamined, serving only as backdrop.

Devdas and Paro are destined to be together, but are torn apart by divisions of class, ethnic animus, and the stigmatization of a sex worker-adjacent family tradition in entertainment. These are clear in the film but the ultimate tragedy is framed as Devdas’ resultant alcoholism.

The emphasis on the personal failures of a person rather than the structural causes bled over into real life for over a hundred years, decried in part as “Devdas syndrome.” https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.tribuneindia.com/news/archive/comment/why-this-enduring-obsession-with-devdas-83116

Despite this, the acting is INCREDIBLE; the actors really come through delivering some of the most overwroughtly poetic dialogue with believability. And the English subtitles do impressive justice to some difficult to translate wordplay. The choreography + costumes are stunning.

It really is wild that Bollywood gets this rep as cheesy low-budget low-production value musicals, when they’re made with better visuals and technical skill than American films even ten years after them.

Another thing I love about Bollywood is the protagonists are rarely one-note. In Bollywood, even heroes show flashes of darkness, greed, duplicity, selfishness, sometimes straight-up chauvinism or abusive tendencies — but never in the “anti-hero” archetype of American films.

Instead, they are simply allowed to exist as all things, good and bad, like a beloved and flawed relative. The central fault line through a person’s character is never shown with the kind of self-conscious pity that antihero movies do.

(I obviously don’t think that’s entirely good - sometimes characters SHOULD be held to account for problematic behaviors, especially the more dangerous ones, but my point is more that these flaws are emblematic in western films and simply incidental, and thus realistic, in BW.)

Anyway this dance number was the clear highlight of the movie for me:

No no wait it’s definitely this one!!