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They could have fooled us with the previews. LOL!
Jokes aside Dostana in some ways reveals the obscene truth about all those earlier masala films with their great friendships! And hence the title is also appropriate. In those older films the real pair was always the set of male heroes who would willingly sacrifice the woman for each other. The real ‘relationship’ that had to be preserved at all costs was therefore not the heterosexual one.

The ‘friendship’ that was privileged in these films was always ‘male’. Hence the homoerotic was always in full force. Of course as Derrida would argue notions of ‘friendship’ have even in the West always been thought of along gendered lines. It is not clear whether ‘friendship’ is ‘female’ at all. In contemporary Hollywood of course ‘female friendship’ always comes with an admixture of the ‘lesbian’. In any case those older Bombay films reflected certain cultural realities. Leaving this aside there is always a bit of the homoerotic impulse in the male viewer (this is not the only erotic economy involved in cinema and cinematic audiences). Over-investment in male stars and so forth (the same aspect comes forth in the adulation with which male sports stars are greeted).

Over the last two decades we have though the heterosexual friendship from KKHH to the current Yuvvraaj (check out the ‘dost’ song and Gulzar’s related interview). This ‘reaction’ goes too far in the other direction. While make-male friendship stands banished in this world (even if the ‘exchange’ often remains the same — Kajol oscillates between Salman and SRK right at the ‘mandap’, Ash is passed around between Akshay and Anil Kapoor in Taal, Ash again between Salman and Devgan, the latter absurdly willing to play this game even after marriage! The examples could be multiplied) the true ‘heterosexual’ dynamic in its erotic dimensions is also wished away. SRK and Kajol, the emblematic pair of this period are really very ‘clinical’ in this sense. More Archie/Betty pals than anything else. This represents the triumph of a bourgeois ethos where male/female sexuality is constantly ‘blocked off’. A twist is added to the proceedings in the SRK films of course because SRK was always really romancing the mother-in-law far more than the lover! Earlier masala cinema always represented the mother as ‘Mother India’. The most stable site of the Indian value system. But this mother was always neatly separated from the lover. They often belonged to totally different worlds indicating a very traditional male ‘epic’/non-bourgeois ethos (even if it wasn’t simply this). In the 90s cinema the two figures very much operated in the same space. Very direct competition! SRK in DDLJ can be seen ‘wooing’ the mother figures of that world in the second half where in the first half he’s ‘making love’ (in the older pre-twentieth century sense of the term) to the heroine. The balance always tilted in the ‘mother-in-law’s’ favor which is why the heterosexual dynamic was blocked off for yet another reason!