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Nevertheless, despite its inability to whip up a favourable response at the box office, Lamhe remains a landmark film. Rarely has the woman in Indian cinema been depicted as an iconoclast who is willing to stand up against established mores. Pooja is one such woman. She not only loses her heart to the 'wrong' man but steadfastly clings to her feelings in the face of opposition and disbelief. Viren rebuffs her ardour as immature and sends her back home, bidding her to settle down with someone more compatible. Pooja bears the burden of rejection with unusual dignity without breaking down and becoming helpless; she nurtures her frayed ego and tries to rebuild her shattered existence. Without however curbing her natural instincts or desires. With nothing maudlin or weak to sully her fierce independence, Pooja becomes a perfect heir to Chandni, Chopra's protagonist in his endearing treatise on the woman of substance. Chandni (Sridevi) remains one of the most finely etched female characters of recent times. The prototypal woman in love, she is willing to lead a life of quiet contentment with her beloved, Rishi Kapoor, despite the overt scorn that his family harbours for her.
Coming from a comparatively poorer family, the suburban middle class, she is quite a misfit in the upper-class savoir faire of Kapoor's moneyed family. And the rich guys are in no mood to turn the Nelson's eye to the class divide. On the contrary, they lose no opportunity to humiliate the lowbrow 'commoner' and treat her as the unwanted pariah in their closed set-up.
Chandni is a bright and spirited soul. Full of an irrepressible joie de vivre, she suffers the barbs and condescension without losing her sense of joyousness. Easy-going and phlegmatic yes, but not without a powerful ego and an indomitable streak of independence. For as soon as she discovers a change in her lover's attitude - confined to a wheelchair after an accident - and spots the resentment, she walks out. Unmindful of the heartbreak, she sets out in search of new beginnings, when Kapoor too humiliates her. And once she has distanced herself from her past life and severed all old ties, she does not break down, turn inwards or slide into depression. She leaves the city of painful memories, takes up a new job, endears herself to her boss (Vinod Khanna) and begins to settle down comfortably in a new relationship. The past she hopes to reduce to a tender memory.
Undoubtedly, the antithesis of the damsel in distress image, Chandni strikes new ground with her independence and self-sufficiency. All this without losing out on her essential femininity.
So what are the high points of Chopra's oeuvre then? Eventually, the director emerges as a celluloid poet of love who weaves the magic with emotions alone. The usual bugbears of garish violence born out of an overpowering death-wish does not infect his cinema. His is the Keatsian world of moonlight, poetry, roses and music. A beautiful world peopled by beautiful characters, where the villain of the plot is largely destiny. His characters bear no semblance to the breed of Rambo and do not kowtow the cult of the biceps at all. Good, clean, people, belonging mostly to the upper middle class, they mirror the mores and luxuriant life-styles of the higher echelons. Story-wise, Chopra's narratives unfold in purple and pink - colours and themes that make him one of the last romantics in popular cinema of the last two decades.
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