Favorites of 2013: Movies

Some years trying to think of movies to include on my favorites list is a bit of a struggle. Not this year; in fact, I'm leaving some excellent films off the list just to keep it a manageable length. Here are my favorite (non-Indian) movies first watched in 2013:

Classic Hollywood

If in our Classic Bollywood viewing 2013 was the year of Rajesh Khanna, in our Classic Hollywood viewing it was the year of Myrna Loy. We started with the brilliant Libeled Lady (1936). When they say "They don't make 'em like that anymore," this is the kind of movie they're talking about: a witty, sophisticated comedy delivered with sparkling timing by a quartet of glamorous stars (Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy, William Powell and a radiant Loy). Tracy plays a newspaper editor who's being sued for libel by Loy; to trap her in a compromising situation, he asks Powell to romance her. But for there to be a scandal, Powell needs to be married—and Tracy suggests his own long-suffering fiancée Harlow for the job. But as in comic opera, the convoluted plot is almost beside the point.

Myrna Loy, Asta, and William Powell in After the Thin Man

After seeing Libeled Lady, we decided that we had to rewatch all of the Powell-Loy Thin Man films just so we could continue to enjoy their affectionate onscreen chemistry. (After the Thin Man (1936) is not only the most cleverly-titled sequel ever, it gets my vote as the best film in the series.) And even that wasn't enough: we also watched some of Loy's earlier and later films, including Vanity Fair (1932)—Becky Sharp was one of her last femme fatale roles—and the decades-ahead-of-its-time The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). That film follows three World War II veterans (played by Fredric March, Dana Andrews and actual veteran Harold Russell) returning to civilian life, and their struggles with post-traumatic stress, disability, self-medication, and societal indifference. And, yes, Myrna Loy is as radiant as ever.

Independent

A micro-budget independent film, Today's Special (2009) was far and away the best recent American movie we saw in 2013. The cast includes Naseeruddin Shah, Madhur Jaffrey, Harish Patel, and writer Aasif Mandvi, who is brilliant at portraying wide-eyed disbelief as catastrophe piles on catastrophe. Mandvi plays Samir, a chef who reluctantly agrees to give up his dreams of moving to France in order to take over his family's struggling Indian restaurant in Queens. But Samir has never cooked Indian food before, and quickly discovers that he's in way over his head—until a loquacious cab driver (Shah) comes to the rescue. As I wrote in my post on Today's Special, Mandvi's film "shows that it's not the budget of a movie that counts, but the imagination of its creators."

Foreign

We saw some wonderful films from outside the U.S. this year, but three stood out as favorites:

Valentin (2002), an Argentinian film, is set in 1969, just a few years before the country was plunged into social upheaval, a military coup and the Dirty War. Valentin (the wonderful Rodrigo Noya) is a precocious 8-year-old who tries to make sense of a confusing adult world. The extended scene where Valentin spends the day with his neglectful divorced dad's new girlfriend (Julieta Cardinali), and we see her dawning awareness that she faces a critical moment of decision, is heartbreaking. And the interview with writer-director Alejandro Agresti included as an extra on the DVD, shot in a poorly lit, noisy cafe in the middle of the night, is essential viewing as he reveals the elements of the film that were drawn from his own story.

No (2012), based on a play by Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta (of Il Postino fame) is about the 1988 plebiscite on dictator Augusto Pinochet's continued rule. Pinochet had declared himself President in 1973 after violently seizing power in the CIA-backed overthrow of the democratically-elected Salvador Allende. The film follows René (Gael García Bernal), a designer of slick ad campaigns, as he tries to convince the earnest, angry opponents of Pinochet to use humor, suggestion and symbolism to win the hearts and minds of voters. We want the "No" campaign to win, but at the same time we realize that René represents the triumph of image over substance in political discourse. With its urgency and immediacy, No gives at least a hint of what it must have been like as a democratic movement struggled to emerge in Chile after 16 years of brutal suppression.

My Mother's Castle (1990) is the sequel to My Father's Glory. Both movies are based on Marcel Pagnol's memoirs of growing up in the forbidding but beautiful landscape of Provence in the years before World War I. Every image is suffused with the glow of nostalgia and the warmth of remembered family closeness.

Documentaries

Perhaps because my partner worked in theater and dance for many years, we love performing arts documentaries. We saw several excellent ones in 2013:

Pina (2011) is Wim Wender's meditation on Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal. The choreographer herself, who died during the filming, is largely absent; instead, we watch her extraordinary, generation-spanning company of dancers performing her works, which unfold with the logic of dreams.

Two excellent films follow the complex process of staging opera. In Pelléas et Mélisande: Le Chant des Aveugles (Song of the Blind, 2008) we watch stage director Olivier Py and conductor Marc Minkowski working with a group of French and Russian performers on Debussy's mesmerizing score. This fluid documentary exemplifies director Philippe Béziat's axiom that "Film is the continuation of music by other means." Becoming Traviata (2012) follows rehearsals for Verdi's opera La Traviata at the Aix-en-Provence festival. The cast features the extraordinary Natalie Dessay as Violetta. At the end of the opera, Violetta collapses, and the final images of the film are of Dessay falling to the stage over and over, trying to find a physical expression of the emotional truth of the moment.

Every Little Step (2008) focusses on the 2006 Broadway revival of A Chorus Line. Just as in the musical, we meet the auditioning actors and learn about their lives, hopes and fears. Structuring the film as a reflection of the show that it's about is a clever device. To make it all even more meta, we also get interviews with the original cast in the present day, some grainy footage of their 1970s performances, and excerpts from tapes of the famous rap sessions held by Michael Bennett as he was developing the show. Before seeing the film I wasn't the biggest fan of A Chorus Line, but I found Every Little Step irresistible.

Finally, actress-filmmaker Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell (2012) is a compelling film about the solution to a longstanding family mystery. When Sarah reaches adolescence, her siblings tell her that there are rumors that Sarah's dad might not be her biological father. After a decade of uncertainty, Sarah sets out to find the truth—only to discover that there are as many stories about her parents' complicated marriage as there are witnesses.

Next time: Favorites of 2013: Books

Last time: Favorites of 2013: Contemporary Bollywood

Favorites of 2013: Contemporary Bollywood

My viewing of current Bollywood movies tends to lag about six months behind their release dates. It's strange to me that no San Francisco cinema has yet realized that it should be showing first-run Bollywood films. I could travel to smarter theaters in Emeryville, Fremont or Santa Clara, but I can't quite bring myself to turn watching a movie into a five- or six-hour commitment. I'm not a fan of streaming, so I still wait for the DVD release (although eventually, of course, DVDs will be going away). But the availability of new Bollywood movies on DVD rental services like Netflix is spotty, to say the least.

So I haven't yet seen Chennai Express, Shuddh Desi Romance, Phata Poster Nikla Hero, Ram-Leela, R...Rajkumar, Krrish 3 or, of course, Dhoom 3 (although in the cases of the last two, it sure feels like I've seen them already). My favorite contemporary Bollywood films are necessarily chosen from those released from late last year through the first half of this year. And they are:

Sridevi in English Vinglish

English Vinglish
Shashi (Sridevi), an Indian housewife and mother, begins to feel excluded and taken for granted by her family, the rest of whom slip easily between Hindi and English. On a trip to New York to help with the wedding of her niece, feeling overwhelmed and isolated, Shashi decides to take a crash course in English. Her choice has unexpected consequences for those around her, her family, and especially for Shashi herself.

English Vinglish (2012) was Sridevi's first Hindi film after a hiatus of nearly a decade. In my original post on English Vinglish, I wrote that it "is a nicely observed and thoughtful film on issues of language, cultural identity, and family dynamics...And I hope it's only the first of many well-written, nuanced roles for Sridevi on her return."

It also has an improbably catchy title tune; somehow that "Hah!" perfectly captures Shashi's joy in her small triumphs as she begins to broaden her linguistic (and emotional) horizons:

Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani
A smart, tomboyish but shy girl falls secretly in love with a popular, extroverted boy. She never lets him know, but eight years later she's blossomed into a beauty—and is suddenly reunited with her old crush...

Ranbir and Deepika in YJHD

Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani (These Young People Are Crazy, 2013) is largely a mashup of elements from two earlier Karan Johar films, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something's Happening, 1998) and Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow May Never Come, 2003). So it doesn't win any points for originality. What it does have, though, as those earlier films did in Kajol and Preity Zinta, is a compellingly sympathetic heroine. As I wrote in my original post on YJHD, "Deepika, cast against type, gives an utterly believable and highly affecting performance as Naina." As the unobservant object of her affections, Ranbir Kapoor is also in good form, but it's Deepika's Naina that we come to care about.

Oh, and having an item by the fabulous Madhuri Dixit doesn't hurt, either:

Kandukondain Kandukondain
Speaking of compellingly sympathetic heroines, Kandukondain Kandukondain (I Have Found It, 2000) has two: Sowmya (Tabu) and Meenu (Aishwarya Rai). This film doesn't quite qualify for my Contemporary Bollywood Favorites list even under my extremely lax and entirely self-imposed rules: it wasn't released recently, it's not a Bollywood film, and I didn't watch it for the first time this year. I can't resist giving this wonderful Tamil adaptation of Sense & Sensibility another plug, though. As I wrote in Bollywood Rewatch 3, Rajiv Menon's film "manages to be surprisingly faithful to its source while believably updating the story to the present." And if there's no scene in Austen's novel where Marianne Dashwood dances in front of a giant stylized peacock, there should be:

Next time: Favorites of 2013: Movies

Last time: Favorites of 2013: Classic Bollywood

Favorites of 2013: Classic Bollywood

It's time once again for my roundup of movies, television shows, books, and music first encountered (although not necessarily first released) over the past year. In our classic Bollywood viewing 2013 was the year of Rajesh Khanna.

Rajesh Khanna and Mumtaz in Aap Ki Kasam (Your Promise, 1974)

Rajesh Khanna and Mumtaz: Prem Kahani

Somehow after Bollywood viewing that's spanned 10 years and nearly 300 films we had never managed to see any of Mumtaz's movies before. I regret that we didn't discover her sooner—she and Rajesh are wonderful together. Their chemistry is utterly delightful to watch, as in Laxmikant-Pyarelal's title song for Prem Kahani (Love Story, 1975):

But the course of true love doesn't run smooth. In the days of the Quit India movement, wounded freedom fighter Rajesh (Rajesh) seeks refuge from a police manhunt with his childhood friend Dheeraj (Shashi Kapoor). Two inconvenient problems which Rajesh has overlooked: Dheeraj is himself a police inspector, and he's celebrating his wedding night with his new bride Kamini (Mumtaz)—the woman Rajesh loves, but rejected so that his martyrdom wouldn't burden her with widowhood. The stage is set for conflicting loyalties, parallels to Puccini's Turandot, and barely suppressed emotions surging unbidden to the surface.

I wrote in my original post on Prem Kahani that "Kamini is an incredibly compelling character: smart, courageous and complicated. And Mumtaz is wonderful in the role. In a film packed with male stars, she more than holds her own, and makes Kamini the focus of our sympathies." Mumtaz is not only adorably vivacious and playful, she can convey profound depths of feeling, as in "Phool aahista phenko" (Gently pluck the rose):

As Memsaab wrote in her wonderful review of Prem Kahani: "This is Hindi cinema at its finest, honestly. So much communicated so beautifully in one simple song! How to explain it when someone says 'Oh, Bollywood—those are musicals, right?' Sigh."

Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore: Amar Prem

Mumtaz is not the only heroine who makes a superb jodi with Rajesh. Last year we also saw two of the movies in which he was paired with Sharmila Tagore, Aradhana (Adoration, 1969) and Amar Prem (Immortal Love, 1972). Both have great soundtracks; Aradhana's songs were composed by S.D. Burman and Amar Prem's by his son R.D. Burman. "Chingari koi bhadke" (A raging fire) is a beautifully melancholy example of R.D.'s art:

Anand (Rajesh) is trapped in an unhappy marriage, and seeks solace in the arms of the courtesan Pushpa (Sharmila). As in Prem Kahani, their love story does not have a conventionally happy ending, but that's one of the things that makes the film so emotionally affecting. As I wrote in my original post on Amar Prem, it "remains radical more than 40 years on for suggesting that true families are those formed by love."

Waheeda Rehman in Teesri Kasam

Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rehman: Teesri Kasam

We also explored some other classic movies this year. Teesri Kasam (The Third Vow, 1966) is a gorgeously photographed, wistful film featuring Raj Kapoor and Waheeda Rehman, and excellent songs composed by Shankar-Jaikishen (lyrics by Shailendra).

Hiraman (Raj), a bullock-cart driver, is hired to transport the nautanki dancer Hirabai (Waheeda) to her next performances at a village fair. Over the hours they spend together on the lengthy journey they form a deep attachment. Hiraman awakens emotions in Hirabai that for many years have remained buried, as we're shown in the lovely, sad "Sajanwa Bairi Ho Gaye Hamar" (My beloved has become my enemy):

Hirabai recognizes, though, that no matter how much she cares for Hiraman (and he for her), they inhabit different worlds. As I wrote in my original post on Teesri Kasam, "Sometimes, no matter how much we might wish otherwise, love can't conquer all....Teesri Kasam is a minor-key masterpiece that rewards multiple viewings."

Next time: Favorites of 2013: Contemporary Bollywood

Suggested reading: Sex and death

Louise Brooks as Lulu in Pandora's Box (1929)

Another in the occasional series of my favorite recent articles, posts, etc. from around the web:

1. Is the marriage plot still possible?

It can seem as though contemporary mores have killed the time-honored marriage plot. In the post "Who cares if Tanu Weds Manu?: The new Bollywood romantic comedy," I wrote: "So in a modern world where everyone can choose (and change) their romantic and sexual partners at will, where class and caste barriers are diminished and the concept of social disgrace seems quaint (at least, once you've graduated from high school), is the romantic comedy still possible?"

Adelle Waldman thinks so ("Why the Marriage Plot Need Never Get Old," New Yorker, Nov. 14, 2013). Not because we resemble the heroes and heroines of the great 19th-century novels, but because they resemble us:

"The issue turns on where we think the narrative power of those older novels originates—whether it’s attributable to the social constraints on their characters (as well as the satisfying decisiveness of their fates—the suicides on the one hand or marriages that last “forever” on the other), or if, instead, these novels are, like so many contemporary novels, primarily dependent on psychological and internal drama.

"I think that, if we look closely, we find that much of their strength derives from the internal and the timeless—from conflicts rooted in the perversity of human nature and the persistent difficulties of social life."

2. The revenge of Lulu

Would Emma have avoided marrying Charles Bovary if she'd known he was #ObsessedWithMom? Would Elizabeth Bennet have been more on her guard if she had learned that the #TallDarkAndHandsome Wickham had a #WanderingEye?  Deborah Schoenman writes about Lulu, a social networking app where women can rate the men they date ("What’s He Really Like? Check the Lulu App," New York Times, Nov. 20, 2013):

"Last summer, Neel Shah, a comedy writer, was at a bar in Los Angeles on a date with a woman who pulled up his profile. 'She started reading me these negative hashtags and I was like, "Uh, this is awkward,"' said Mr. Shah, 30, whose profile has been viewed 448 times and 'favorite' eight times for an average score of 6.7 [out of 10]. His hashtags include #TallDarkAndHandsome and #CleansUpGood, along with the less flattering #TemperTantrums and #WanderingEye."

Lulu sounds a lot like RateMe Plus, a formerly fictional feature of the near future in Gary Shteyngart's novel Super Sad True Love Story (2010). As Shteyngart describes RateMe Plus, it's an app that allows others to instantly rank you in categories such as "Fuckability" and "Male Hotness." The main character of Super Sad True Love Story, Lenny, "naturally had a lot of problems with his Fuckability—entering a bar in newly chic Staten Island (one prediction that has not yet come true), he is immediately and publicly ranked as the fortieth-ugliest man out of the forty men present." (See "Suggested reading: Google Glass.")

Lulu, of course, was the anti-heroine of Franz Wedekind's plays Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora's Box (1904), which became the basis of both G.W. Pabst's film Pandora's Box (1929) and Alban Berg's opera Lulu (1937). In the plays, film and opera, Lulu is outcast, condemned, and ultimately murdered for daring to adopt behaviors—having sex purely for pleasure, and using her partner's desires for her own ends—that men have always been able to take for granted. Is the way that Lulu (the app) enables women to assume the formerly male prerogative of publicly rating and shaming (or praising) their sex partners the ultimate revenge of Lulu (the character)?


3. Bad sex, part 1

Bad writing about sex just makes you feel embarrassed for the writer, especially one whose literary pretensions are painfully obvious. Jonathan Franzen's first novel The Twenty-Seventh City has been reissued, and Parul Sehgal reviews it ("Jonathan Franzen’s First Novel Was Terrible (But It's Being Reissued Anyway)," Slate Book Review, Nov. 2013):

"In this novel, Franzen first glimpses his plot, that small fertile plot that will sustain three more books: the psychosexual dramas of the nuclear family; his horror of Midwestern complacency, hectoring mothers, militantly joyless fathers. We see, too, the missteps that will continue to dog him, especially the satirist’s blind spot for his own fallibilities, for his own Midwestern complacency, his propensity for hectoring and militant joylessness. For how completely he is a Jonathan Franzen character."

The villain of Franzen's novel is a sexually manipulative South Asian woman whose aim is to subvert a morally pure Anglo man who stands in the way of her corrupt (and profitable) real estate schemes—and terrorist plots. Alas, Sehgal writes, "I confess I’m making the book sound more entertaining than it is."

Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux as Adèle and Emma
in Blue Is The Warmest Color

4. Bad sex, part 2

Film critic Manohla Dargis has bravely opposed the (largely male) critical consensus that has anointed Blue Is The Warmest Color as a masterpiece about women's desire. In "Seeing You Seeing Me: The Trouble With ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color'" (New York Times, Oct. 25, 2013), she writes,

"I first saw 'Blue Is the Warmest Color' at Cannes, where I wrote 399 dissenting words on the movie and raised some of the issues I had with it...Primarily, I questioned [director Abdellatif] Kechiche’s representation of the female body. By keeping so close to Adèle, he seemed to be trying to convey her subjective experience, specifically with the hovering camerawork and frequent close-ups of her face. Yet, early on, this sense of the character’s interiority dissolves when the camera roves over her body even while she is sleeping. Is Adèle, I had wondered then, dreaming of her own hot body?"

In her original article, Dargis wrote that "the movie feels far more about Mr. Kechiche’s desires than anything else....'Men look at women,' the art critic John Berger observed in 1972. 'Women watch themselves being looked at.'* Plus ça change...."

For a contrary view, see Richard Brody's "The Problem With Sex Scenes That Are Too Good," New Yorker, Nov. 4, 2013. Brody has called Dargis' article "malevolent" ("Out Loud: Sex Onscreen," New Yorker, Nov. 18, 2013, 8:10 - 8:30).

Man Carrying Corpse on His Shoulders (detail). Luca Signorelli (ca. 1500)

5. Death, boredom, and smart phones

Do Italian Renaissance artist Luca Signorelli, the boring but strangely compelling contemporary novels of Karl Ove Knausgaard (My Struggle) and Tao Lin (Taipei), and Louis C.K. have anything in common? The wide-ranging intelligence of Zadie Smith discovers that they do: each is struggling to come to terms with the unfathomable—our own mortality ("Man vs. Corpse," New York Review of Books, Dec. 5, 2013):

"'You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there…. That’s being a person…. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty.'

"That’s the comedian Louis C.K., practicing his comedy-cum-art-cum-philosophy, reminding us that we’ll all one day become corpses. His aim, in that skit, was to rid us of our smart phones, or at least get us to use the damn things a little less ("You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your products, and then you die"), and it went viral, and many people smiled sadly at it and thought how correct it was and how everybody (except them) should really maybe switch off their smart phones, and spend more time with live people offline because everybody (except them) was really going to die one day, and be dead forever, and shouldn’t a person live—truly live, a real life—while they’re alive?"

---

* John Berger, Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972, p. 47.

Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani

The name Karan Johar in the credits of a film signals immediately that it will be glossy, formulaic and manipulative. I know this full well going in, and yet more often than not his movies still manage to sneak under my critical defenses.

It doesn't much matter whether he's listed as writer, director, or producer. The look, tone and content of most of the films he's involved with immediately announce them as a Karan Johar product, even if someone else is credited with the screenplay or direction.

That's certainly the case with the Johar-written Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow May Never Come, 2003), which was the first Bollywood film I ever saw, and which to this day remains one of my favorite movies. Nikil Advani directed KHNH, but as his post-KHNH career has demonstrated either he had an incredible case of beginner's luck or he was getting constant input and advice from Johar. (Advani was Johar's assistant director on Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something's Happening, 1998) and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Sometimes Joy, Sometimes Sorrow, 2001).)

One reason I mention KHNH is because it established or continued tropes that Johar's films have frequently returned to since. Dostana (Friendship, 2008) and Student of the Year (2012) center on love triangles (as does his first film, KKHH), while Wake Up Sid (2009), I Hate Luv Storys (2010), and Ek Main aur Ek Tu (One Me and One You, 2012) feature opposites-attract main couples. All of the films focus on the struggles of their characters to find their paths in adult life in the decade following their graduation from college.

To this list of KHNH descendants add Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani (These Young People Are Crazy, 2013). Naina—Deepika Padukone in one of her best performances—is a shy, bespectacled medical student. On impulse she joins a Himalayan trek with a group of her former college friends including the free-spirited Aditi (Kalki Koehlin) and the troubled Avi (Aditya Roy Kapur).

Also along on the trip is the popular, extroverted Bunny (Ranbir Kapoor). He seems to possess everything that Naina feels she lacks: confidence, social ease, spontaneity, fearlessness, good looks. Of course, Naina falls hopelessly in love with him, although Bunny is unaware of her feelings, or perhaps dismisses them as just another crush. Fate intervenes, and the two are separated, seemingly forever.

Naina and Bunny are very reminiscent of KHNH's shy, bespectacled MBA student Naina (Preity Zinta) and the object of her secret love, the popular, extroverted Aman (Shah Rukh Khan). The two Nainas are even given the same nickname by their crushes, "chashmish" (please forgive any spelling error; it's translated as "specsy" in the subtitles of KHNH):

Naina (Deepika Padukone, YJHD)

Naina (Preity Zinta, KHNH)

Eight years later, at Aditi's ultra-lavish wedding, Naina and Bunny are unexpectedly reunited. And at this point there are strong echoes of another Karan Johar film. Like the heroine of KKHH, Anjali, Naina has apparently carried a smoldering torch for her clueless crush for eight years. But this time Bunny begins to see her with new eyes, and has a familiar question for her:

Bunny and Naina reunite after 8 years (YJHD)

Anjali (Kajol) and Rahul (Shah Rukh Khan) reunite after 8 years (KKHH)

But despite all the parallels, which writer/director Ayan Mukerji underscores with all the subtlety of hot pink highlighter, YJHD isn't a remake of either KKHH or KHNH—quite. Unilke KKHH's Anjali, the smart, accomplished and gorgeous Naina somehow doesn't have another man in her life. And unlike KHNH's Aman, Bunny doesn't have a life-threatening disease, he's got a relationship-threatening aversion to commitment.

There are many good things in YJHD. Deepika, cast against type, gives an utterly believable and highly affecting performance as Naina, and her chemistry with Ranbir seems very real. Ranbir, although his role plays more to type than cutting against it, also convinces as Bunny, a guy who is single-mindedly focused on his dreams of travel and adventure. And when Mukerji's script isn't cribbing from other movies (and sometimes when it is), it gives Deepika and Ranbir several heartbreaking scenes together.

It's also great to see some veterans given screen time, and making the most of it. Farooq Shaikh (of the classics Umrao Jaan (1981), Chashme Buddoor (1981) and Katha (1983), among many other films) plays Bunny's father, who, despite their conflicts, helps him realize his dreams. And although her "surprise" item number was highly publicized before the film's release, watching Madhuri Dixit dance is always a pleasure:

However, I want to talk a bit about the ending of the film, so If you haven't yet seen YJHD, be aware that spoilers follow.

Deepika gives such a moving performance as Naina that we want above all else at the end of the film to see her happy. And the film supplies us with what is intended to be a happy ending. But when Bunny gives up the dream job he's been working towards for eight years to be with Naina, my logical centers started to kick in. This seems like a surefire recipe for resentment and recriminations once the honeymoon has worn off. As Bunny himself realizes,

While it's unusual (and partly redresses an immense imbalance) to see the man making sacrifices for the couple, rather than (as is so often the case) the woman, I think Naina and Bunny will be facing some major issues in the not-too-distant future. Just to be perfectly clear, I would think the same thing if being with Bunny required Naina to give up her medical practice. I'm just not sure I see a way for this couple to be together and for both partners to be fulfilled.

Unless Bunny can somehow learn to take Naina's wisdom to heart. If Bunny ever goes looking for his heart's desire, he probably doesn't need to look any further than sharing a gorgeous sunset over Udaipur with Deepika Padukone: