Director: Yash Chopra

Legendary film director Yash Chopra reinvented, for the upcoming 21st century, his trademark style that he calls the aesthetic of 'glamorous realism' and created a whole new 'look' for Bollywood film design and the female surface with his super-hit film "Dil To Pagal Hai". The reverberations of this film have made their way into the 'look' and style of the majority of Bollywood's modern urban romances made today. The updated glamorous realism replaced the baroque opulence of the sumptuous past with a new streamlined sensibility based on primary colors, a sporty lifestyle, and chic simple elegant lines. The new Yash Chopra 'woman' in the updated version was still the dichotomy of independent yet tradition bound heroine, however she was now embodied with a new sensuously liberated surface that reflected healthy changes in feminist attitude and cultural flux taking place in Indian society. The film is refreshing and sexy, very often 'seen' from a female point of view, as opposed to being 'watched' or 'gazed' at by the camera from a voyeuristic 'male' perspective. Karisma Kapoor was a revelation in "Dil To Pagal Hai" and the film finally brought her the superstar status she had been working to achieve for nearly a decade.

Another of the truly important aspects of "Dil To Pagal Hai" is the role of friendship in the male/female relationship as opposed to the idea of love as a purely sexually driven motive for the male/female encounter. Rachel Dwyer in her book "Yash Chopra" sites the importance of the role of friendship in late 1980s and 1990s Hindi cinema. "..Far more important ws the rise of the theme of love as friendship, in which the boy and the girl become friends, falling in love only after their friendship deepends... as films saw friendship replacing the theme of love as passion, an aesthetic found in the formerly dormant Urdu love lyric (ghazal)..." [ Rachel Dwyer, Yash Chopra]. http://racheldwyer.com/

"Dil To Pagal Hai" was a super-hit film and won the ÊFilmfare Award for Best Feature Film along with 16 other film festival awards in India. The film starred Karisma Kapoor, Shahrukh Khan, and Madhuri Dixit.