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A similar penchant for orderliness weaves its way into his more experimental film, Darr. Thematically orthodox, the film tried to dissect the darker and more devious aspects of love, albeit a love that grows into an all-consuming obsession. Here, in this extreme state of emotion, there seems to be no place for the rational mind. So that the protagonist Rahul (Shah Rukh Khan) lives on the precipice - always doing a tightrope walk between sanity and insanity. When the string will snap, no one really knows. For his obsessive love for Kiran (Juhi Chawla) fudges all distinctions between right and wrong. In this condition of emotional inebriation, where possession of the object of desire becomes the sole objective everything can be justified. Even murder. Hence, Rahul righteously tries to wipe out anyone who comes in the way of his possession of Kiran. This includes two policemen, his best friend and an attempt on the life of Kiran's husband too. And all along, this demented lover justifies his peccadilloes before an imagined presence of his long-dead mother in the confines of his macabre room.
Nevertheless, the unorthodoxy is confined till here only. Once the triangular tale of love has been laid down in all its demoniac shades, the director conscientiously returns to the old order. Not for a minute is the sanctity of the marriage imperilled, despite the intensity of the outsider's blow. In fact, the husband almost returns from the dead to save his beleaguered wife from the hands of her psychotic lover.
Thus, although part of the success of Darr lay in the novel characterisation of Rahul as the prototypal anti-hero, its box-office success lay in its steadfast adherence to accepted conjugal bonds. Rahul, with his energetic and frenzied ravings might have succeeded in imbuing heroic shades to his negativity. Nevertheless, in the final confrontation, it is positive goodness, embodied in the good, clean, normal hero that walks away victoriously.
The only film in which Yash Chopra dared to digress from the traditional path was Lamhe. Here for the first time popular Hindi cinema witnesses the consummation of a totally unconventional relationship between Pooja (Sridevi) who falls in love with Viren (Anil Kapoor), a man who loved her mother, Pallavi. Viren was not only the father-figure in her orphaned life, he was the man who could have been her father too, if her mother had reciprocated his ardour. But for Pooja, bred on Viren's intermittent visits to his ancestral property in Rajasthan, there was no distinction between Prince Charming and this long-distance godfather. Hers was the love that knew no barriers. Neither spatial, temporal, nor of age. Even the knowledge of her beloved's repressed passion for her deceased mother did not act as a deterrent. For Viren, too, the initial shock of discovering an unconventional emotion was gradually replaced by self-analysis, introspection and self-discovery. Viren realised that despite the incongruity he loved Pooja too and the duo decided to banish the ghosts of the past and settle down to a state of domestic bliss.
Predictably the film did not do well at the box office, despite the novel theme and the prevalence of all the Chopra essentials: lilting music, scenic backdrops, flesh and blood characters, intense portrayals and an emphasis on matters of the heart. The failure of the film was a clear pointer to the conventional tastes of the viewer who was not willing to experiment with tradition, established morality, old-fashioned ethics and behavioural codes. Father-figures in the Indian familial hierarchy could never become lovers. Hence the sceptical viewer's disapproval of a film like Lamhe.
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