Chandni

A romantic film set in India. Chandni is dancing at a wedding. Rohit sees her there. He is the son of a rich family. He pursues her insistently. She is not interested at first. Then she is. They are to marry. The family objects but Rohit will not listen. One day he goes paragliding. He will fly over her and drop flowers. He falls. He is paralysed from the waist down. From there the film is a story of pushing away. Rohit is sent to Europe for treatment. Chandni writes to him. No answer comes. He is not writing on purpose. He wants to set her free and does not tell her so. His family intervenes too. They blame her. Chandni moves to Bombay. She takes a job at a travel company. She meets Lalit there. He owns the company and is a widower. The two grow closer. Then Rohit recovers. And comes back. What the narrative is interested in is not love but timing: its idea is that what Rohit took for sacrifice was in fact abandonment, and that his return is also too late. The narrative allows all three of them to be right. Nobody is bad. Chandni's decision is left to the end. With this film Yash Chopra closed a period. Indian cinema in those years leaned on violence; the success of this production brought romance back. Sridevi is in one of her most remembered parts. The white costume recurs through the narrative and became a signature. The music is by the Shiv-Hari duo and the album was among the biggest sellers of its time. Sridevi, Rishi Kapoor, Vinod Khanna and Waheeda Rehman are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes late-1980s Indian cinema and romantic melodrama. Who it is not for: anyone looking for pace; the film is long and the middle stretches with songs.