I would never not immediately jump at the opportunity to discuss what is perhaps my favourite film of all time, 2010’s Aisha, which is the Hindi-language adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel, Emma. It is, in my opinion, the perfect romantic-comedy and as I read what Northrop Frye had to write about the mythical resolution that defines the genre, it was evident why this film has persisted in my consciousness since I was a young boy. He describes this feeling of divine catharsis, “which pervades the comedies of Shakespeare”, as “not to be ascribed to a personal attitude of his own, but to his impersonal concentration on the laws of the comic form”. That is to say, it is essential to the films of remarriage to end in the union of the heterosexual pair, but also in the sublimation of a carnival society—what he believes exists in the Greek tradition of Saturnalia—where the woes of the banal world are replaced by a transient utopia, wherein every character is granted their wish for a happy ending.
The above clip arrives as the conclusion to Aisha’s runtime, and acts as a meticulously choreographed sequence that resolves all the rife, romantic tension of the preceding hours within its self-contained world of song-and-dance. Even the characters who we didn’t particularly like, within its motley cast of suitors and maidens, join in this revelry—what Frye describes as comedy’s natural tendency to “include as many as possible in its final festival”. There is no villain in the romantic comedy, for its fixation is the lack of self-knowledge that plagues the human condition.
Watch from 3:00 to 3:30 to see this moment of revelation unfold, as the film’s female protagonist finally admits to herself what we, the audience, have known since the film begun. “I love Arjun”. The audience bursts into applause. It’s sublime. However, as I discuss Aisha (2010), I must acknowledge the aristocratic class of the characters it represents, particularly when you liken them to India’s everyman. Cavell confesses, “This is why our films must, on the whole, take settings of unmistakable wealth; the people in them have the leisure to talk about human happiness, hence the time to deprive themselves of it unnecessarily”, and it resounds in this socio-economic context of this film, which, set in the suburbs of South Delhi, revolve around a verbal universe that transcends the material crisis of the economy around it. It is no wonder to me that Aisha (2010) was released in the aftermath of the Great Recession, with its emphasis on high fashion and the aspirational lifestyles of the rich and wealthy.