“I don’t want to sound like a big fan,” said Giona A. Nazzaro, the Locarno festival’s artistic director, coyly, “but Shah Rukh Khan is the poster boy for cinema. Power. No cynicism, no manipulation. Just the fundamental belief that you can tell a story through your characters and get to a very deep component of emotion.
To be fair, Nazzaro is a fan of Khan. Discussing the Bollywood superstar – winner of Locarno’s 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award and Ascona-Locarno Tourist Board’s Pardo alla Carriera Tourism Award – he compared Khan to “Marcelo the popular glamor of working-class heroes like Marcello Mastroianni,” as well as “the elegance, the arrogance.” Grace, someone like Alain Delon… In Shah Rukh Khan, I can see the trajectory from Rudolph Valentino to Tom Cruise, and it’s all in one person. And the guy doesn’t even seem to break a sweat while doing it.
Khan will receive the Locarno Lifetime Achievement Award on August 10 and will participate in a Q&A session at the festival on August 11.
As part of the tribute, Locarno will screen works by Sanjay Leela Bhansali DevdasThe 2002 drama stars Khan as a wealthy law graduate who returns from London to marry his childhood friend Parvati (played by Aishwarya Rai). However, when his family rejects their marriage, he turns to alcohol and seeks refuge in an ardent prostitute (Madhuri Dixit).
Shah Rukh Khan and Madhuri Dixit Devdas.
Eros International
Nazzaro noted that Locarno could have picked just about any movie from Khan’s decades-long career to showcase his big-screen presence.
“I have only seen some of his films in India because there were no subtitled versions and they were completely understandable to everyone without dialogue,” Nazzaro said. “I mean you saw the trajectory of the hero, [the] The basic belief is that if you are a working person, if you are a decent person, you can be a hero. He embodies that. He is a devout Muslim and has never made a film that was inconsistent with his beliefs.
Nazzaro said that while building a global career, Khan remained completely true to himself and the tradition of Indian cinema.
“In Khan, you see really unmistakable elements of Indian cinema, music, dance and song, and then you get an amazing sense of how to take all these mythological narrative elements and put them into a modern context,” Nazzaro said. Understanding, using modern technology to reach the pinnacle of what I would call an almost pre-modern understanding of the power of cinema…I don’t want to be poetic, but [in Western cinema] We need modernism to understand the structure of our narratives. We then need to use postmodernism to question this. Now we have post-postmodernism. We can’t seem to find the last bit of innocence in the joy of narrative. Shah Rukh Khan is here and with just one slow motion you can see this man can move mountains.
