Once upon a time, there was a boy. He loved the movies. He loved how places — foreign, exotic, cold, warm, bleak, dark and vivid — looked in the movies. The world was his oyster, only on screen. Most of all, he loved how love felt like at these places in the movies. He wondered why love looked so distinct and exciting when strangers met in a faraway land. He wondered if this was his destiny.
He wondered, wishfully, if movies would soon define his “moment”; perhaps, he’d be invited to a prestigious film festival where he’d find her on a secluded beach, silhouetted by moonlight.
Then life happened. He met a girl in his city. He dismissed movies and its destinations as mere adolescent musings. They moved in together. He grew up a little. He was too invested in his own vanilla surroundings to visualise its magic-hour mysticism anymore.
One day, she broke his heart. And left. The boy felt lost. He wanted to leave everything and everyone behind. He made his first trip abroad.
He roamed the alien, benign hotel corridors like Bob Harris (Bill Murray, in Lost In Translation ). He felt ancient and weathered, as if he were in his twilight years. While he observed faces of different shapes in the lobby, he thought about the film. He was quite certain there was no Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) to be found. No Charlotte would notice him, or be unhappy with her own spouse, because he wasn’t old enough to be existential enough for a midlife crisis. He almost got mugged in a taxi, making him a paranoid outsider like poor Rani (Kangana Ranaut, from Queen ) in Paris.
He roamed the winding streets like Ray (Colin Farrell, from In Bruges ), a sardonic young hitman perpetually looking over his shoulder. He watched a local film shoot, not really on the lookout for a light-eyed drug-dealing crewmember as coy as Clémence Poésy.
He joined a guided walking tour and ignored a bespectacled Indian girl, because he didn’t quite feel as extroverted and alive as Kabir (Ranbir Kapoor, in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani ). He didn’t feel like eating, praying and loving his way across the globe.
He spoke to himself and ate lonely meals, feeling foolish to even consider the dramatic dichotomy of Ved’s (Ranbir, in Tamasha ) “condition”; did he have the audacity to become a different person? Did he have the courage to stop being himself? Even if he did, a Tara (Deepika Padukone) wouldn’t really buy into his sorry imitation. He’d go back eventually, too, and face the (lack of) music.
When he sat alone in a train, whizzing past blurry landscapes, he cursed Richard Linklater for making him hope. He looked at other glum, single ticketholders, wondering if they too would sue their favourite authors and filmmakers for fooling them into inhabiting one-sided dreams.
He cursed Imtiaz Ali for making him feel like a boy running away from pain, yet discreetly aching to bump into a manic pixie like Geet (Kareena Kapoor, in Jab We Met ) for an adventure. He cursed Aditya Chopra for giving Imtiaz Ali, and an entire generation, the train-romanticising idea to begin with. He cursed them all for making him expect an immortal union shaped by an air, a smell, soundless music and an environment novel for its unfamiliarity.
When he lunched bitterly at nondescript cafes, he felt like a cocky Akash (Aamir Khan, in Dil Chahta Hai ) psychologically humbled after Shalini’s (Preity Zinta) exit in distant Sydney. The place had suddenly acquired a sad identity of imagined connection, of quasi-belonging and fleeting romance. There was nothing more alluring, and tragic, than the unfeasibility of artful serendipity.
On his flight back, he thought about how these movie characters were escapists, like him. And how their hearts were vulnerable when someone found them. He raged silently about fake celluloid dreams and fickle women. He mentally ranted about how films were nothing but beautiful lies. How locales were nothing but glorified tourism videos.
He felt a concerned gaze. A girl. His co-passenger. She seemed to be listening, even though he wasn’t actually speaking. She mentioned that they might have stayed in the same hotel. He noticed her eyes. Were they laughing at him? Right then, he felt like Matt Damon’s losing Congressman character in The Adjustment Bureau , rehearsing his concession speech in a swanky restroom, only to be eavesdropped upon by an enigmatic lady. He had conceded to life here.
She wore glasses, and didn’t look as mysterious as Emily Blunt. There was no passionate kiss, but he couldn’t get over the lyrical symbolism of their meeting. Here they were, up in the air, between two time zones, existing in the lost hours of one land and the found minutes of another. They’d land half an hour before they took off. They were living in this flying machine on borrowed time, on an invisible clock. Perhaps a mellow Christopher Nolan was directing them.
As he spoke about his trip to his stranger, he remembered things differently: the hotel lobby had an oriental personality, not dissimilar to the one nursing Bob Harris. The corridors, where his destiny had played hide-and-seek, held the warmth of promises and close calls. She had been there all along. The streets were cobblestoned and misty like the ones Colin Farrell and Clémence Poésy traversed, arm in arm, away from a torrid past. The quaint little bridges were a poetic prelude to this airplane ride. Here, he was subconsciously essaying the role of a deluded storyteller, like Ved did in Corsica. He wasn’t faking it. Perhaps this was who he had always been.
He told her about how he loved Richard Linklater, secretly visiting all the spots from his most iconic film last week. She told him he was crazy. They chuckled about how they were probably scanning city maps only tables apart at nondescript cafes. He told her about the opera he had attended, his curiosity piqued by Dil Chahta Hai’s epiphanous scene. He spoke about how the weather had been cold, rainy and perfectly cinematic for train journeys. They showed each other photographs of their shared holiday. They were, incidentally, on the same walking tour. He even saw himself in one of her pictures as “the spaced-out Indian guy”, presumably pondering over his inability to invoke his inner Ranbir Kapoor.
Suddenly, he didn’t feel like he had spent his days alone anymore. He told her that movies had inspired him to travel alone. She told him she was an accidental loner; her friends didn’t get their visas. Now she felt like Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love , she quipped. More like Kangana Ranaut in Queen , he urged. He thought about how there’s nothing more alluring, and sexy, than the feasibility of artful serendipity.
From his window seat, they saw the moon. As he watched her awestruck face, flipping through fictional memories of cinema’s most intimate ‘chance’ encounters, he felt like he was at that film festival, and she was on that beach. He wondered now if it was such moments that led to the invention of movies, and not vice versa.
They were going home, back to their normal lives, back to their make-believe world. This was simply his moment. He had been seeking it because he had seen it happening to those who weren’t. He remembered it, even though it hadn’t happened to him. Freed from the shackles of time, they met just before sunrise and nodded off before sunset . It was just before midnight when they landed. They never met again.
The writer is a freelance film critic, writer and habitual solo traveller
