long uninterrupted wall of text about ‘aisha’
aka the B-town adaptation of Emma via Clueless.
Defiant self-nominee for the bonfire of the vanities? Yes. Aisha is not a film in the Johar-Chopra tradition of geo-social escapism. At first glimpse it might be easy to mistake it as an updated version of those movies, repatriating itself from the hermetic worlds of wealthy brown Hampstead or Manhattan to a (hermetic, wealthy, conspicuous, coconutty) cocoon in South Delhi. This is not an India that hasn’t caught up with the austerity trend: this is an India that has brazenly surpassed it.
In fact, this retrenching in the des makes a Bollywood fantasy world more identifiable, and so more immediately easy to resent. The interesting thing is how aware of this resentment the film is. The title track features the slacker-minstrel voice of Amit Trivedi singing, ‘Tum ho kamaal, tum bemisaal, tum la-jawaab ho Aisha / aisi haseen ho jisko choo lo usko haseen kar do,’ but the song that opens the film, Anushka Manchanda’s Lohanesque ‘By The Way,’ indicates the film’s self-awareness much more clearly: ‘Yeh hain apni adaa to kya karen / koi bura jo maane kya karen / hum se to hai khafaa ab sabhi.’ Those who love her think Aisha is the sort of beautiful girl who makes everything and everyone she touches beautiful; Aisha herself is less coy. This is her style, and damn right it’s better than yours. Is this an attempt to pre-empt and therefore mitigate charges of offensiveness from watching proles? Just a generous, aw-shucks send-up of posh little airheads? A faithful social document of a particular Delhi phenomenon? It’s hilarious to have done unto Bombay what Bombay usually does to other cities in Hindi films - shoot it like a fairground full of quaint glimpses into how the Other India really lives (but only for a short while, since the gorgeous sea-facing apartment is quick to make its appearance). In depicting this hyper-awareness of wealth, the film saves the appearances of that very wealth from being normalised*, unlike the JCho non-resident extravaganzas of decades past.
So Aisha is faithful to the letter of Austen’s recognition of money and class as definitive to female destiny: its just that Austen’s third important signifying factor, which is female character, never develops sufficiently to drive the narrative. Aisha the character is not really Emma; she’s more like Louisa Musgrove in Persuasion, who finds for a short window of time that she’s had the stupendously unearned fortune to make it to the head of the line where they’re giving out good husbands. So also Aisha’s technical faults combine to hamstring its impact considerably. Watching it is like reading an improperly bound book, in which the leaves come loose the more you turn pages: if the director had a hand in actually bringing the film from script to frame, it’s not immediately evident. The final product is all script (discernibly not-bad), design (largely and comfortably good) and acting (wildly inconsistent, from the excellent improvisation of Amrita Puri and the dependable Cyrus Sahukar and Ira Dubey to the visibly indifferent Abhay Deol and the diffident and wispy Sonam Kapoor). They say in that classic of modern cinema and Clueless’ illustrious inheritor, Mean Girls, “Don’t be fooled because she may seem like your typical selfish, back-stabbing, slut-faced ho-bag, ‘cos in reality, she’s so much more.” I’m like, you know, if only.
* - speaking of normalising, an extended PS on the fashion, which I just lumped in with the rest of the design as ‘largely and comfortably good.’ If this seems like damning with faint praise, unfortunately it is: as with most other things in big-budget cinema, it becomes impossible for fashion to retain its edge. While almost everything about Aisha is relentlessly pretty - although wtf was that lace and tartan frock, like a nightmare out of fin-de-siècle Vanity Fair? - it’s also a bit boring. It’s to Sonam Kapoor’s credit that she makes everything look good, but like with The Devil Wears Prada, in the end you want to say ‘Aw, angelcakes,’ and not ‘fuck yeah, high fashion!’ To say nothing of the effect of product-planted L’Oréal occupying the same couture cloister as Dior and Chanel. To quote Aisha (yes, really): how middle-class.
