Sealed with a Kiss

In the final sequence of Danny Boyle's 2008 film, Slumdog Millionaire, Jamal and Latika's lips freeze in a brief on-screen kiss. Almost immediately, Boyle goes to credits intercut with a Bollywood-style song and dance number that enacts how this kiss feels to the long-suffering, long-sepa rated sweethearts. This couple is twice constituted—first through a kiss and then in the performance register of the romantic duet. By formally separating the kiss from the song, Boyle evokes the uneasy relationship between these modes of affection in popular Hindi cinema. By locating the kiss in the film proper but consigning the song to the credits, this Bolly wood-inspired global blockbuster revises the aesthetic codes of Hindi cinema where the song sequence rather than the kiss has historically functioned as an engine of couple formation. I begin this article with Boyle's film, for it captures fundamental shifts that are ongoing in popular Hindi cinema whereby the kiss, banished from the screen since the 1930s, is making a reappearance, while the song sequence that has long served as the primary expressive device for constituting the romantic couple is be ing sidelined. At this moment of change, it is worth investigating why the song sequence rather than the kiss emerged as an engine of couple forma tion in Hindi cinema and what this aesthetic preference can tell us about the symbolic value of conjugality for a commercial cinema trying to nego tiate its relation to modernity and nationalism. I will explore these ques

Aesthetics · Art · Hindi · KISS (TNC) · Linguistics · Literature · Movie theater · Romance · Cinema and Media Studies · Computer Science · History · Philosophy · South Asian Cinema and Culture · South Asian Studies and Diaspora

• Of Kisses and Ellipses

  Linda Williams•Critical Inquiry•2006

  Add to list