Week 8
Hello Everyone! In this week’s blog post, I will be discussing two movies I watched, Yeh Dillagi and Raja Hindustani. Both of these are the oldest movies on my list with Yeh Dillagi in 1994 and Raja Hindustani in 1996.
Yeh Dillagi is about Sapna (Kajol ), the daughter of a rich family’s chauffeur, who fantasizes about wealth and romance. When the family’s younger playboy son, Vikram, falls for her, his parents and his responsible, workaholic older brother Vijay vow to break the couple up. However, things quickly become complicated when Vijay finds himself developing feelings for Sapna as well. In this film, the main behaviors I noted down were cheating, false expectations, and changing identity. The younger brother, Vikram, is characterized as a playboy and has multiple scenes where he’s seen cheating on different girls and dating them simultaneously with little to no consequences. When he falls for Sapna, he expects her to like him back and continues to make advancements towards her despite knowing her reservations.
Raja Hindustani is about Raja, a taxi driver who falls in love with Aarti, a rich girl, and marries her against her parents’ wishes. Later, her stepmother tries to create differences between the couple to drive them apart and prevent them from seeing each other. In this movie, I observed codependency, controlling behaviors, changing identity, and intrarelationship toxicity. Both of the couples had moments where they controlled each other and limited the other person’s character in order to fit in more with their respective societies. Raja constantly felt excluded from Aarti’s high society and kept emotionally controlling her to give up her ways and her society because he felt excluded from it. The relationship had its faults, but a majority of the misunderstandings stemmed from the manipulation of the stepmother.