Darr (1993)

Darr means “fear”, and the tagline is “A violent love story”, just so you know what you’re getting into. It’s not a love story at all. It’s beyond those stories of all-consuming love like Dil Se all the way past Raanjhana and into some heavy-duty crazy. So naturally I enjoyed it.

 Shahrukh Khan plays Rahul, an unbalanced young man dangerously obsessed with Kiran (Juhi Chawla).

Kiran is as beautiful and carefree as Juhi usually is. As she gets ready to leave college, she’s serenaded by an unseen singer. She assumes it’s her fiance, Sunil (Sunny Deol*), but as she searches the campus and the gardens, the mysterious voice stays hidden. It’s not Sunil, it’s Rahul, and as the movie goes on, the refrain “tu haan kar/yah naa kar/tu hai meri Kiran” (Whether you say yes or no, you’re mine) becomes more and more disturbing because we will find out that is exactly what he means. Nothing Kiran can do will stop him.

*My favorite part of the wikipedia entry on this movie: “Chopra offered Sunny Deol the choice between playing the role of Rahul and Sunil. Deol chose the latter, believing it would be an asset to his career. However, this did not happen.”

When Kiran moves back home, Rahul starts stalking her in earnest. He never lets her see him, but ambushes her in the dark and calls her on the phone, always knowing exactly what she’s doing, and like in the first song, always one step ahead of her. Kiran becomes more and more afraid as this escalates, because nothing they try seems to help. He threatens Sunil in messages written in his own blood and finally vandalizes Sunil and Kiran’s apartment after their wedding.

Darr is interesting not because Shahrukh plays a crazy stalker, it’s that Rahul is a crazy stalker doing exactly what Shahrukh does in every single other 90s romance. See Yash Chopra’s other movies: In Dil To Pagal Hai, Shahrukh is convinced that Madhuri’s character is the only one for his vanity project, and despite her objections publicly harasses her until she agrees. Plus… Chandni:

This is supposed to be romantic.

But this is creepy and psycho.

So as Rahul, the brother of Sunil’s commanding officer, he befriends Kiran’s family and is able to tease out the information that the couple has escaped on a vacation to Switzerland, where he follows them until the climax of the movie.

Shahrukh’s performance is absolutely brilliant, and it makes me wonder what sort of roles he might have done if he’d not been so quickly typecast into “Raj, naam to suna hoga”. And because this is Shahrukh, his charisma makes him all the creepier. I even found myself smiling as he imagines dancing with Kiran, until I was thrust back into his obsessive, destructive reality.

I like to think that I draw the line between disturbing stalker and hopeless romantic in a rather different place than Bollywood films often do. And of course, the key difference by which I can enjoy the romance in, say, DDLJ and be disturbed by Darr, is that us in the audience is given the knowledge that the pursued woman is interested in the hero, and does welcome his advances. (Or at least we know that she will, later in the movie. Is that better? I’m not sure what point I’m trying to make here, really.) So when you have a hero whose character is impeccable, whose love is pure, then a lot of creepiness is excused. It’s not the strength of the woman’s objection or consent that actually matters, it’s whether the hero “deserves” her.