Like most people who rely wholly on film critic consensus to dictate their movie-going experience, I was excited to see A Star Is Born based on all the glowing reviews it got and its Oscar buzz. There was also a part of me that was apprehensive about it topping Aashiqui 2, the 2012 Bollywood take on the 1937 original and my favorite incarnation of the undying story (sorry, Babs).
But upon seeing Bradley Cooper and Lady GaGa’s film, I can safely put my worries to rest.
The film starts out beautifully with intimate scenes involving Bradley Cooper and Lady GaGa’s characters falling in love and exposing their festering wounds to each other. These moments are powerfully open-hearted and for the first hour of the film, I was completely sold. Bradley Cooper’s turn as a singer-songwriter succumbing to his addictions is the definitive performance of the Hollywood actor’s career thus far. Similarly Lady GaGa, who completely sheds her gargantuan pop persona here, is a revelation as an everyday woman navigating through the terrains of fame and a feverish love.
Then the second hour of the film unfolds and everything turns to shit. Gone is the intimacy of the first hour and in its place is an atonal, rushed second hour that zigzags uncontrollably into oblivion. Events take place so rapidly that nothing registers or makes sense. I soon found myself not caring about the couple or their tumultuous relationship.
By comparison, Aashiqui 2 directed by Mohit Suri, is firmly cohesive in its tone, pacing and general mise-en-scène. It’s also somberly beautiful – every scene of the film from the opening shot to the last glows with a soft eldritch light as if to foreshadow the film’s tragic end. It’s one of the film’s many, many pulls.
“While Cooper and GaGa’s retelling is atonal and jarring, Aashiqui 2, the Bollywood remake of A Star Is Born, is firmly cohesive in its tone, pacing and general mise-en-scène.”
And yes, unlike the more emotionally resonant neo-realistic tone Cooper strives for in his remake, Aashiqui 2 has the tone of a housewife soap opera but its unabashed commitment to that look and feel is commendable and, at times, Suri elevates that look to exciting heights to the point where I felt I was watching a great Douglas Sirk melodrama.
Now let’s talk about a crucial aspect of both films – the songs. Lady GaGa is unarguably one of the greatest pop laureates of our time and the A Star Is Born soundtrack does contain a few standout tracks– lead single, Shallow is a bold stroke of a ballad– but even it, along with the film’s other more forgettable songs, will likely wither with time. What’s more, because many of these songs veer too closely to maudlin Adult Contemporary radio territory, their placement in a film with strong indie sensibilities is jarring.
Conversely, Aashiqui 2’s soundtrack, with its haunting, timeless ballads that combined elements of Seventies soft-rock and Sufi music, immediately became a modern-day classic to Bollywood’s global audience. Six years after the release of the film and its theme song, the gorgeously sparse, Tum Hi Ho is still being played at South Asian, Arab and African wedding receptions the world over (think of it as the My Heart Will Go On of the Bollywood world with none of the added schmaltz of that song).
This might all seem like a bitter diatribe against Cooper and GaGa’s film but, truthfully, where both remakes of A Star Is Born shine is the palpable chemistry between the principal actors – in, Aashiqui 2, the doomed lovers are played compellingly by Aditya Roy Kapur and Shraddha Kapoor. Both couples in their respective films make sense on screen but sadly, in Cooper and GaGa’s A Star Is Born, nothing else does.
