A Brave Bollywood Romance

In a scene from the film Mirzya, Suchitra and Adil burst into laughter having realised that they have finally escaped the clutches of the world which is out to take away from them their love. Later they are captured and killed but that laughter echoed through the film for me. It was no ordinary laughter. It was a laughter of revolt. A revolt agains the diktats of the world. A diktat which had drawn between them an unsurpassable wall of rich and poor, a stable boy and a princess. But the two didn't care. Their love had drawn them magnetically to each other. A love which began in births before the one they were living. 

It was an obsession, this love of theirs. The kind of love that makes a 14 year old Monish shoot down a teacher who had punished his love with a cane. The kind of love that would make Adil hide his true identity from Suchitra lest she should fall in love with him again and break off her marriage with the Prince. But it is indeed difficult, nay impossible, to hide the identification of a relationship so strong as this. It doesn't take long for Suchitra to find out that the stable boy named Adil is the same young Monish whom she had loved once upon a time. The same Monish who had gone to prison for killing the teacher who had hurt her in the eighth standard.
Mirzya is a great love story. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra has nothing to prove. He has already delivered masterpieces such as Rang De Basanti and Bhaag Milkha Bhaag. What makes Mirzya special is the fact that it is fresh like the daffodil. Debutant actors Harshvardhan Kapoor and Saiyami Kher have been simply fabulous. The fact that the story is written by Gulzar should explain the intricate finesse of the dialogues in the film. My favorite one from the film is:
"Hota hai, aksar hota hai
Ishq mein aksar hota hai
Chot kahi par lagti hai
Jakar zakham kahi par hota hai"
Another impressive accomplishment of the film is making the Shakespearean tragedy meet the Punjabi folklore of Mirza Sahiban. The film was a Shakespearean Tragedy. The lovers die at the end. There are several allusions to Romeo and Juliet too. Besides this, there is a constant going back and forth in this two-tiered narrative but in the able hands of Mehra, the same has been judiciously 
executed. 



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