Dil Chahta Hai

An Indian film set in Mumbai, Goa and Sydney. Three friends are finishing university. Akash takes nothing seriously. He does not believe in love and mocks everything. Sameer is sentimental. He falls in love constantly and is wrong every time. Siddharth is a painter. Quiet, thoughtful, and unlike the other two. After graduation they go to Goa. From there the film runs three lines together. Siddharth meets a woman. Tara is much older, divorced, and she drinks. A closeness forms between them. Akash will not have it. He makes a joke and it turns into a fight. The three break apart. Akash is sent to Sydney. For his father's business. He runs into Shalini there. They had met before. She is engaged. A girl is being found for Sameer. He meets Pooja and neither of them wants it. Then they do. What the narrative is interested in is not love but friendship: its idea is that three people have known each other for years and at a certain point find that they do not. Tara's line is the heaviest. She falls ill. Siddharth is with her. At the end the three friends come together in a hospital. This film changed a shape in Indian cinema. An urban, English-speaking, complicated middle class had not been described this way before. The clothes, the settings and the way of speaking were much imitated in the years after. The songs are inside the narrative and are not staged as numbers. The music is by the Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy trio. This is Farhan Akhtar's first film. He was twenty-seven at the time. It started slowly at the box office and then grew. Aamir Khan, Saif Ali Khan, Akshaye Khanna, Preity Zinta, Sonali Kulkarni and Dimple Kapadia are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes Indian cinema of the 2000s and stories about friendship. Who it is not for: anyone looking at class; the narrative takes place entirely in a wealthy circle and never leaves it.