Twenty-five years after Dil Chahta Hai, Farhan Akhtar has revealed the parts of the film he feels he would write differently today - and one of them challenges a convention that audiences may not have questioned at the time.
Asked by Anupama Chopra what he would change in the film, Farhan said he would revisit the way Akash and Preity’s relationship is resolved, particularly the wedding sequence. “Actually now, after enough time has passed for me to think about it, I think the one thing that I would change, or maybe two actually, that I would do differently,” he said.
“I would probably resolve the Akash and Preity relationship slightly differently from how I did,” he admitted. While he still believes the sequence works, Farhan now feels he pushed the emotion too far. “The drama of that moment, it's effective of course in the film, but I feel maybe the drama was a little bit overplayed in the way I constructed it.”
The problem, he explained, is that the scene feels tonally different from the rest of Dil Chahta Hai. “It's completely my (feeling), as a director, you know, I feel I constructed it a little bit away from the drama of the rest of the film,” Farhan said. “So for me, it stands out a little bit different.”
His solution today would be to dial it down. “The wedding scene… maybe I would do that a little bit differently in terms of not pitching it so high on drama like the way it was,” he said.
But Farhan’s second change is even more interesting. Looking back at Sid’s arc, he now wonders whether the film needed to suggest that romantic love was the thing that would complete him. “I don't know if I would have left Sid alone at the end,” he said. Yet he immediately questioned the convention behind that thought: “He was happy regardless.”
For Farhan, Sid did not necessarily need a woman appearing at the end to suggest that his life was finally complete. “Maybe he didn't need to see one girl at the end and think that there's, you know, maybe there's some one pot of gold at this end of this rainbow for him,” he said.
It is an interesting way to look back at a film 25 years later. Whether, with the perspective of time, Farhan would still make the same creative choices.
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