Filmi Geek

Outlook Roundup

In case you missed them, here are my last few columns at Outlook.

• Quirky Parsis and Drunk Christians - despite the title that my editor gave this piece, it is actually about movies that go beyond these stereotypes when depicting minority communities.

• Enviably Evil - on the luscious and devilish roles of Nadira.

• From Aurat to Mother India - how Mehboob Khan remade his own 1940 movie from a simple agrarian tale into an allegorical epic

• Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered - remembering Meena Kumari on her death anniversary

 

 

Mere Apne (1971)

मेरे अपने

Dir. Gulzar

An old widow moves from her village to the city, is baffled by the coarseness and amorality that she encounters there, and finds her place as a surrogate grandmother to a clutch of antagonistic ruffians, bringing tenderness and compassion back into their jaded lives. Summarized in this way, Mere Apne sounds cloying and even simple-minded. Add in one bit piece of information - that Mere Apne is a Gulzar film - and you know you can expect more. Mere Apne, Gulzar's first as writer/director, is a remarkably rich story, knitting together several thematic strains with deeply moving delicacy.

Anandi (Meena Kumari) is taken to the (unnamed) city by Arun (Ramesh Deo), who claims to be a relative of hers; he insists that he could never leave an aunt of his alone when he has the means to care for her.  What Arun and his wife Lata are really after is cheap child care to support their lively middle-class lifestyle. Anandi slowly becomes aware that she has been duped - the final straw is when another man approaches her with the same story that Arun had used, word for word, hoping to bring her into his home - but not before she has been thoroughly shocked by the coarseness and crassness of the city and its inhabitants.

This shock veers too far toward cliché - indeed, Beth calls her a "truth-wielding bumpkin", and she's not wrong. There is overkill, such as when Anandi, seeing Lata in smart trousers on her way to the office, asks with alarm why she is wearing her husband's clothes. But there is nevertheless trenchant comment in the way Anandi is by turns neglected and then exploited by her younger relatives, who only think of her languishing alone in her village when they need something from her. Arun and Lata are obsessed with convenience and comforts like restaurant dinners, but they refuse to extend their good fortune so far as to allow Anandi to share a mouthful of food with a street waif. 

But the meaningful contrast here is not between city and village values, or traditional and modern values. Rather it is between narrow views of community and family and broad ones. Anandi is shocked by Lata's modernity but I don't think the film's point is to condemn that modernity itself; rather, it's to condemn the coarseness, the erosion of compassion, that seems to have come along with it. Anandi finds that lost sense of community among two warring factions of disaffected young men. Led on one side by Shyam (Vinod Khanna, young, buff, and hopelessly appealing) and on the other by Chaino (Shatrugan Sinha, less young and buff, but as delightfully morally complex as any Shotgun character), these boys have given up on finding any kind of employment, much less slick office jobs like Arun and Lata.  They cannot finish school because local political machinations keep causing their college to close. Instead, the young men have signed on as thugs for opposing politicians, and the two groups clash in that capacity, with a measure of proxy for a personal dispute between Shyam and Chaino. These boys join Anandi, along with her little street waif and his disabled sister, in a kind of impromptu family; her expression when Shyam addresses her as "Nanima" for the first time is one of the film's most affecting moments. Where Arun and Lata abuse even those they claim relation to, these disenfranchised folks make connections with strangers.

Where Meena Kumari is ill and muted - Mere Apne is one of her very last movies - and playing someone twice her age and even more muted, the young men bring the film its vitality, and in its best moments, their straining against the system that holds them back lends vivid energy. This is not seen as much in Shatrughan Sinha sneering with a switchblade or a gun as it in the song performed by Shyam's gang, "Haal Chaal Thik Thak Hai," which seems jarringly out of place until you realize that the lyrics are thoroughly sarcastic. Shyam's gang includes an extremely young Danny Denzongpa, whose character Sanju always has a puppet perched on his hand.  The puppet represents Sanju's creativity, and also expresses uncomfortable truths with inappropriate bluntness. (Sanju also always has a satchel slung over his shoulder; later in the film, this innocent-looking prop is filled with homemade bombs that he tosses in political riots.) When the puppet is destroyed, it represents an end to Sanju's aspirations, and he is anguished by its loss.

  

Also among the boys are some actors one normally associates with comic roles, Paintal in Shyam's gang and Asrani in Chaino's. They are not here for comic relief, though; instead, Gulzar archly gives the comic roles to Mehmood and Asit Sen as the rival political leaders fighting a bitter election campaign. Their buffoonery points up the stupidity of the system in which greed takes advantages of incompetence to squander the potential of the once eager, now disillusioned young men who populate this film. 

And so Mere Apne is a rich film taking on many social evils – the double-­edged sword of neglect and exploitation of old people, the erosion of traditional values, the waste laid to the younger generation by the corruption and violence of politics. Though Anandi begins the film as a stereotypical village bumpkin, she comes to represent a uniting principle that can set the country back on a prosperous path, provided it is not left to decay. And when Anandi is struck down senselessly, it is more than just an individual's tragedy. It is a representative tragedy that reflects an entire generation's sense of hopelessness. 

  

Julie (1975)

Dir. K.S. Sethumadhavan

Stories about minority communities can be engaging, especially when told with delicacy.  Older movies like Pestonjee, about the grim, lonely side of life in a Parsi community, or the much lighter Baton Baton Mein's peek into a pair of Christian families, have a memorable charm and sympathy. More recently, Homi Adajania turned a darkly satirical lens on Parsis in Being Cyrus and Goan Christians in Finding Fanny.  The 1970s hit Julie focuses on another minority community, the Anglo-Indian, and while it portrays some of their particular concerns, the drama of its titular character and the film's ultimate message are both more patently universal. 

The most interesting character in Julie is Julie's mother, Margaret (Nadira), the stern matriarch of the teenage girl's family.  Like many a Nadira character, Margaret is snappish, quick to anger, and paralyzingly conscious of her image and the regard of others.  But there are nuances to this presentation that make Margaret less cartoonish than she might be.  When she boasts to family friend about her English father, or her son in Delhi who sends home the finest imported goods, one might roll one's eyes.  But the discomfort with which she changes the subject when the friend asks about her mother is both pathetic and sympathetic, and lends complexity to Margaret's contempt for India and Indianness, and her obsession with things foreign.  Margaret feels rejected and abused by a thankless Indian society; her bitterness and the constant westward cast of her gaze are put in that perspective. 

Too, Margaret bears responsibility for her several children (including a tween daughter played by Sridevi as a child artiste), while contending with a less than responsible husband, Morris (Om Prakash, as broadly comic and reliably goofy as ever).  Morris embodies the filmi stereotype of Christian as good-natured drunk.  (Margaret, too, drinks quite a lot, though it seems with less abandon than Morris.  In a disturbing family dinner scene, Margaret and Morris both pressure young Julie to take a drink for herself, which she eventually does to please them, despite her own protestations.) As a railroad engineer, Morris is often away from home, and while is it to Margaret's endless frustration that he tends to squander his earnings, he spends on attempts to please his family at least as much as he spends on whiskey.  Morris perceives Margaret's desire for a finer life, believes she deserves it, and wants to deliver it to her; he blows the family's savings on the down payment on a car - foreign, of course, as Margaret would have it no other way. And so there is a great deal of affection in this family, not just between Morris and the children on whom he dotes (especially Julie), but even, in a complex way, between Morris and Margaret, despite her nagging disapproval.  The film presents this dynamic sensitively, allowing for nuance in personal relationships. The marriage of Margaret and Morris is neither a smooth ride in which love conquers all, nor a withered husk in which no tenderness remains.  The natural complexity lends some dimension to the stereotypes that Morris and Margaret instantiate.

"Get the bottle, man!" That is Sridevi, on the right, and she doesn't look very happy about it.

As for Julie herself (Laxmi, the same actor who starred in the Malayalam film of which Julie is a near scene-for-scene remake), like too many young women, Julie is surrounded by males who manhandle and objectify her to varying degrees.  A local shopkeeper paws at her while she picks up groceries for Margaret; because this man is played by Rajendranath I have the disturbing feeling these scenes are meant to play for comedy, but there is nothing at all funny about them.  The family friend, Mr. Misra, leers repulsively at Julie in the he beginning of the film and, toward the end, attempts to buy sex from her when she asks him for a job at his firm.  A boy in Julie's own Anglo-Indian community, Richard (Jalal Agha), gives her rides to school on his motorcycle, and clearly feels that this grants him possession, though Julie equally clearly rejects him as anything other than a friend.  Even the young man Julie likes, Shashi (Vikram) leers at her bare legs - those Christian girls dress so much more immodestly than their Hindu peers - and eventually seduces her into his bed (though in fairness to Shashi, despite Julie's initial hesitation, the sex appears joyfully consensual).

  

Julie remains demurely wrapped in a blanket, but a clear shot of the girlie magazines lying open on Shashi's bed leaves nothing to the imagination. 

The troubles that Julie endures - falling in love with a boy from outside her community, the disapproval of both her overbearing mother and his, a pregnancy that must be concealed lest her entire family be irreparably tarnished - are hardly unique to the Anglo-Indian experience.  Indeed many an Indian film has shown young women of many religions and social classes suffering in this way. And perhaps this very universality is the message of Julie. Margaret hates and resents mainstream Indians, believing that they have marginalized and stigmatized her community. And Shashi's mother (Achala Sachdev) is comically paranoid of Christians; Shashi and his father, Bhattacharya (Utpal Dutt at his most avuncular), openly mock her contemptuous distrust of Julie and her family.  The resolution of this inter-community tension is embodied in the child of Julie and Shashi's mixed and supposedly shameful union. In the end, it is Bhattacharya's voice of reason persuading both bitter, suspicious mothers that love is big enough to bridge differences between religions and communities. It's hard to imagine a more ecumenical conclusion than that.

Jugnu (1973)

जुगनू

Dir. Pramod Chakravorty

Jugnu is a super-satisfying masala film built around a title character who is part Batman, part Robin Hood. Batman, because Ashok Roy (Dharmendra) is a wealthy, respected member of his community who moonlights as a disguise-wearing do-gooder. And Robin Hood, because the good that Ashok's alter ego, Jugnu, does is robbing other rich people to finance the orphanage he runs for apparently hundreds of little boys (little orphaned girls are on their own, I guess). As Ashok, he is always nattily dressed, a man about town. When he transforms into Jugnu he might impersonate a sardar or a pathan, defraud a bunch of smugglers out of their booty or creep into a heavily guarded museum to pinch the jewel-encrusted treasures within.  Ashok Roy leads a very busy life.

And the movie about him is a ton of fun, about as satisfying masala as there is, seasoned with a few borrowings from the spy-movie and heist-movie genres.  In one sequence, Jugnu goes after a bejeweled fish sculpture, protected by the most high-tech security system that the movies can offer: the criss-cross cage of invisible beams that, when breached, trigger an alarm. In Jugnu, the beams become visible to anyone who dons a special viewer that looks suspiciously like a swim mask, and thanks to the film's budget the beams themselves look a whole lot more like neon tubes than ephemeral beams of infrared radiation.

 

After a jaunty song (of course) distracts the museum guard long enough for Jugnu to climb onto its roof, there is a bit lifted right out of my favorite heist movie, How To Steal A Million (which for all I know lifted it from somewhere else).  Jugnu uses a strong magnet's pull through a wall to manipulate a key off its hook and into its keyhole just like Peter O'Toole. Sadly, it isn't followed by setting off the alarm with a toy airplane or making out with Audrey Hepburn in a broom closet, but that's really not a strike against Jugnu.  Because who needs Audrey Hepburn when you have Hema Malini, who is as much of a badass in this film as ever?  When we (and Ashok) first meet her character, Seema, she is giving a sharp-shooting demonstration with a pair of pistols that charms Ashok right out of his snakeskin shoes. Later, she holds her own in a melee scene or two, something that Hema Malini does more and better than any heroine of her era.  She even gets to pilot a helicopter.  A HELICOPTER.  Seema is also a superior dancer - of course - providing the opportunity for just one of Jugnu's fantastic songs. Another one of those great songs comes when the jealous Ramesh (Prem Chopra), hoping to make a fool of Ashok, spikes a glass of soft drink that is naturally consumed by Seema instead.  The result is something magical: not merely a drunk song, and not merely a rain song, but a drunk-in-the-rain song.  Bada maza aaya, indeed.  

 

Ramesh's relationship to Ashok is a tangled masala microcosm in itself; after Ashok's grandfather (Nasir Hussain) becomes estranged from Ashok's father (Pran), he is defrauded into believing that Ramesh is his long-lost grandson, and raises the boy with all the love and privilege that should have been Ashok's. In the meantime, Ashok's mother is murdered and little-boy Ashok kills her murderer in revenge; this guy turns out later, of course, to be Seema's father. No masala element is spared in the construction of this magnificent narrative. 

And there is more, so much more.  Jugnu is an epitome of all the reasons we watch masala.  There's Dharmendra's cute patriotic song, performed with the help of a hundred adorable little boys and capped by "Jai Hind" written in fireworks.  The theme of patriotism is flogged rather hard throughout, in fact; Ashok's father was a freedom fighter, and though Ashok never knew him, Ashok himself frequently proclaims his loathing for traitors.  There's a comic sidekick as well, Mehmood, who gets his apotheosis while wearing a clown suit and evading a prowling tiger. There is even Ajit as the head bad guy, menacing about his stylish tricked-out lair with a steel lobster claw in place of a hand.  Jugnu just pulls out all the stops in the name of paisa vasool, and it doesn't disappoint - not for a minute.

 

 

Lahu ke do rang (1979)

लहू के दो रंग

Dir. Mahesh Bhatt

I chose this movie out of Shabana Azmi completism, but what I got turned out to be pretty satisfying masala in its own right. Its backstory is set forth with rare specificity in time; the film opens at the end of World War II, when Indian freedom fighters were operating in exiled cells in east Asia. In this “exotic” setting, a very appealing relationship forms between a delightfully angsty Vinod Khanna and Helen in an unusually non-dancing, non-vamp role.  

Fast forward to the present (as masala films do) and you're in pleasingly familiar masala territory: the martyred freedom fighter Vinod Khanna has left an illegitimate son (Danny Denzongpa) in Hong Kong with a distraught Helen, and a legitimate son (also Vinod Khanna) in Bombay with his grave and serious mother (Indrani Mukhejee, who is super-fabulous and intense in this role, and makes me wonder why she's never jumped into my consciousness before, despite the half-dozen or so films I've seen her in). The two young men are, of course, unknown to each other and, of course, on opposite sides of the law - Vinod a proud police inspector, Danny falling in with the smuggling ring that holds Shabana hostage.  

   
No one does man-pain quite like Vinod Khanna.

Highlights include Danny doing kung fu, a very sweet ballad picturized on Helen, and even a taste of filmi-paagal in the form of Shabana Azmi's character's mother, tortured and abused to madness by the villain, Kader Khan (accompanied in this standard-issue villainy ensemble by Ranjeet).  There's a pretty cute set of sequences where Danny falls in with a plucky orphan girl called Shabbo; together they engineer some minor cons and become fast friends.  Shabana Azmi is as wasted as she ever is in such masala fare, but she does get to wear some super pantsuits and tromp around Darjeeling looking pouty and fabulous. There's really nothing not to like here – an enjoyable bellyful of masala comfort food.