Filmi Geek

Chupke chupke (1975)

चुपके चुपके

I always enjoy coming across an Indian comedy that doesn't rely on the slapstick and shouting that tends to characterize the genre and that isn't really to my taste.  Chupke chupke ("secretly") is a funny, cute comedy that works because of a wacky script, the natural direction of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, and, most of all, because of the engaging and adorable charm of its leads.

Parimal (Dharmendra) and Sulekha (Sharmila Tagore) meet on a hill station holiday in which Parimal, a professor of botany, impersonates hill station's caretaker in order to give the real caretaker a few days off.  Parimal and Sulekha fall in love and marry - they are joyful and playful in marriage, but Parimal finds himself half-pretend jealous of Sulekha's brother-in-law Raghav (Om Prakash), whom she idolizes.  So Parimal hatches a scheme - with Sulekha's full cooperation - to play a practical joke on Raghav, whom he hasn't yet met.  He poses as a driver and gets himself hired to work in Raghav's household.  Then Sulekha comes for an extended visit - ostensibly while her husband is away on business - and together they fool Raghav into thinking that they are having an illicit affair.  Parimal has a couple of friends who are in on the joke - Prashant (Asrani), a Bombay businessman, and his colleague Sukumar (Amitabh Bachchan), a professor of English.  Wacky hijinks ensue -  Sukumar turns up impersonating the real Parimal, and falls in love with Prashant's sister Vasudha (Jaya Bhaduri).  It's a massive prank for the ages.      

It's a totally stupid plot, and that's part of what makes it so funny - the other part is the utter good-enough-to-eat cuteness of the characters.  Dharmendra and Sharmila, as Parimal and Sulekha, have a delightful tenderness and mischief that just bursts out of the screen every time they give one another a naughty look. It's clear that they have fun with the pretense - as Darshana keenly observed on BollyWHAT, all the indiscreet sneaking around turns them on, so making their hosts think they are having a reckless and improper affair is easy.  Parimal sneaks into Sulekha's bedroom nightly, once "accidentally" leaving his monogrammed hanky outside her door where Raghav will find it.  And they gallivant openly in front of their hosts' five-year-old daughter, knowing that the little girl will tattle on them.  The film is full of cute moments like that - the best of them is the song "Ab ke sajna sawaan mein," in which Sulekha sings a passionate song of longing to Parimal while Raghav looks on, vibrating as though he is about to pop a gasket.

Amitabh is also wonderful as the nerdy, shy intellectual Sukumar.  I love Amitabh's trademark angry young man persona, but even more than that I love his early roles where he gets to really show his range in a role that is different.  Chupke chupke is one such -  Sukumar is bumbling and bookish and not at all comfortable with the charade he's taking part in (unlike Parimal and Sulekha, who lie through their teeth with natural ease), and he's simply adorable.

Adding to the comic absurdity of the whole situation, Raghav wants a driver who speaks perfect shuddh Hindi (why is not entirely clear - perhaps to protect his young daughter from the rough tapori spoken by the laborers available to him in Bombay) and the erudite Parimal, in his charade, is more than happy to oblige, offering language so pure and high-tone that others in the household can't always understand him - he takes Raghav's desire for pure language and throws it back in his face, with hysterical results.  Obviously, to appreciate fully this set of running jokes, some knowledge of Hindi is helpful.  But even without, if the basic idea is grasped - that there are different registers of Hindi, some perceived to be coarser and others more refined - then the humor is clear enough, and the subtitles on the edition I had (Bollywood Video) do work hard to make the concept clear, translating Parimal's high-register Hindi into overbearingly purple English.

[Addendum:  When I wrote this review in 2007, it concluded with a paragraph picking on some supposed flaws in the songs and the pacing.  I've cut that paragraph, as I was clearly not in my senses when I wrote it.  Chupke chupke has only gotten better with repeat viewings and now stands as one of my all-time favorites, a movie I could watch any day, even if I just watched it yesterday.  I don't know what I was thinking back then.]

Yuva (2004)

युवा

Mani Ratnam's Yuva ("Youth") might have set out to be a gritty, empowering call to arms, or a tribute to the power of young people to perturb the status quo.   Unfortunately, the film misses the mark in several respects, and ends up a dissatisfying jumble of half-wrought themes. 

As the film opens, the lives of three young men intersect on Calcutta's Hooghly Bridge.  Michael (Ajay Devgan) has just given a motorbike ride to Arjun (Vivek Oberoi), who is apparently chasing a girl.  Lallan (Abhishek Bachchan), in a small car, pulls up alongside Michael and pumps three bullets into him.  Arjun watches in horror as Michael skids out and flies over the guard rail into the river below.

In three separate flashback sequences, Yuva shows us how each of the three reached that pivotal point on the bridge.  Lallan is an impetuous, violent small-time thug.  His young wife, Sashi (Rani Mukherjee), naively demands that he give up his life of crime, but instead he gets pulled into bigger schemes, working as a heavy and hired assassin for the corrupt politician Bhatacharya (Om Puri).  Michael is a college student with a bright future, who throws away a prestigious physics scholarship in favor of political leadership; he is the charismatic head of a group of student activists attempting to win seats in the local government in opposition to Bhatacharya's machine.  Arjun is a carefree playboy, angling for a visa to America and chasing girls, especially Mira (Kareena Kapoor), whom he meets at a nightclub.  Arjun has little interest in anything else until that fateful afternoon when his path crosses Michael's and Lallan's.

This is a promising enough set-up, but ultimately Yuva is too cursory and totemic to be genuinely engaging.  Bhatacharya is sinister and thuggish, but we are never really shown what that does to the daily lives of either the students or the villagers that Michael mobilizes, leaving Michael's crusade abstract and unmotivated.  Michael himself is dreadfully dull; he is the smartest, the strongest, the most unwavering in his commitment, the most charismatic - he is a superman, the kind of character who can survive three point-blank gunshots and a tumble off a bridge and still emerge fearless and without a shred of doubt.  Michael's arc lacked any movement at all; he starts out perfect, and ends up perfect as well.  The fact that Ajay Devgan is too old for the role only contributes to the problem - he is too polished, to adult and too confident; a younger actor might have been able to present Michael's unwavering perfection as something more like a protective facade of youthful cockiness masking real insecurity, but Devgan just plays it straight.  Then, on the flip side from Michael is the unredeemable Lallan; Yuva attempts to give his story some shape, but he's just such a horrible sociopath that it's difficult to develop any sympathy for him.  Still, the downward spiral of Lallan and Sashi's marriage offers the film's most engaging and human, if painful and depressing, sequences.

Perhaps the most irritating weakness in Yuva is that there is no meaningful place for young women in the revolution it portrays.  If this isn't already apparent from the roles of the three love interests in the story, it is made absurdly clear in the title song, whose picturization portrays Michael marching determinedly at the head of a column of hundreds of his followers - and, apart from Michael's girlfriend loyally at his side, there is hardly a female face in sight.  Throughout the film the arcs of the three women are unsatisfyingly secondary to the stories of the men.  Even Sashi, the most developed of the three, is helpless; when it comes to the course of Lallan's unredeemable life, she may as well not exist, as she exerts no influence whatsoever.  Michael's girlfriend Radhika (Esha Deol) apparently has some part to play in Michael's plan, but the film doesn't really expound on it, instead giving us little more than her fawning devotion to the flawless superman.  Mira is even more marginal; she finally admits her attraction to Arjun once he demonstrates commitment to a meaningful cause, but she herself does not participate in it.  The future, apparently, is for the boys to shape, and for the girls to reject or admire.

Perhaps Yuva's shortcomings are all attributable to a single underlying weakness - the film cannot decide whether to deliver its message in a gritty, realistic package or in one adorned with mainstream Bollywood frills.  The film draws on a number of standard Bollywood tropes - the indestructible super-hero, the heroic struggle for a cause that is vaguely specified at best, the unredeemable villains, and even a laughably dishoom-dishoom climactic hand-to-hand fight scene.  But it mixes these with stark, dark cinematography and an arty narrative style.  The result is that it's not always clear what gear one should watch in, and that makes it difficult to engage. 

36 Chowringhee Lane (1981)

Taken at face value, this quiet film by Aparna Sen is a melancholy tale about a lonely woman facing her twilight years.  It has a clear allegorical reading, however, that is a forceful commentary on the role of the British in post-Independence India.

Violet Stoneham (Jennifer Kendal) is a mousy, quiet Anglo-Indian woman.  Living in 1970s Calcutta, she teaches Shakespeare to inattentive little girls, occasionally visits her senile brother (Geoffrey Kendal) in a nearby nursing home, and returns home to her tiny flat and the company of her cat, Sir Toby.  One day Violet encounters one of her former students, Nandita (Debashree Roy) and Nandita's boyfriend Samaresh (Dhritiman Chatterjee).  Eager to reminisce - and starved for companionship - Violet invites the young couple to her home for tea, and they politely, if reluctantly, agree.  In Violet's flat, Samaresh smells opportunity - the flat would offer a perfect, discreet hideaway for afternoon trysts with Nandita.  Nandita explains to Violet that while Samaresh is a writer, he finds it difficult to concentrate on poetry in his family's crowded home, and Violet is delighted to offer him the use of her flat.  Nandita and Samaresh frolic there every day, taking care to be dressed and presentable when Violet returns from school.  Often they serve Violet her tea or take her out for walks in the city, and their daily company cheers and energizes her.   It seems a very genuine and tender friendship, but Samaresh and Nandita see it quite differently from Violet.

At its face, 36 Chowringhee Lane is a very sympathetic tale.  Violet Stoneham is a lovable character, and her loneliness will resonate with anyone who has ever thought about getting older and being alone.  Her increasing isolation and marginalization is poignant.  And the tenderness that Nandita and Samaresh show her - at least while it appears sincere - and the warmth and joy in her response to it is touching. 

But the film seethes with symbols suggesting that its real message is a strong critique of the Anglo presence in India:  You are dated, you have outlived your usefulness; you aren't wanted or needed, so get lost.  The young couple uses her while it's convenient, but as soon as they have the opportunity to take off on their own, they do so.  The new principal at Violet's school - the school's first Indian principal, we are told - cuts back on her course load, assigning her a dreary grammar class while a new young teacher takes over the Shakespeare; even teaching quintessentially English subjects, Violet's English perspective is no longer needed.  Violet's visits to her brother are particularly unsubtle; a relic of the colonial era, he is now weak, helpless and disoriented, and Violet must repeatedly explain to him that the Raj is over, that India is independent. 

These two levels of meaning make 36 Chowringhee Lane a full meal, engaging, poignant, and thought-provoking.  The performances are smooth and natural - unlike some of Aparna Sen's later films (such as 15 Park Avenue and Mr. and Mrs. Iyer), in which her actors sometimes fumble stiffly with English dialogue.   The result is a satisfying film, and if it is a little bit sad for the increasingly irrelevant Violet Stoneham, it also portrays a confidence in the rising of an independent India.

Gunga Jumna (1961)

गंगा जमना

Some movies, I find, do not translate very well.  Gunga Jumna was a massive hit in India - but it left me somewhat cold. 

Ganga and Jumna are brothers living a hardscrabble village life.  Ganga spends his days working with his mother as a servant in the home of the zamindar's obnoxious family, while Jumna, a promising student, focuses on his schoolwork.  After their mother passes, Ganga pledges himself to supporting his younger brother as they grow to adulthood.  The adult Ganga (Dilip Kumar) is a spirited and hardworking fellow, unafraid to take on the zamindar when necessary, while his brother Jumna (Nasir Khan) is more measured and cautious.  Ganga sends Jumna to the city to study, and supports him with funds that he earns driving an oxcart and making deliveries for the zamindar.  But things get complicated when Ganga saves a local girl, Dhanno (Vyjayanthimala), from the zamindar's lecherous assault.  The zamindar (Anwar Hussain) gets his revenge by trumping up a robbery charge against Ganga, landing him in prison.  Upon his release, Ganga learns that his brother has become destitute, and attacks and robs the zamindar in a rage.  Soon Ganga finds himself an outlaw, and, with Dhanno at his side, he joins a gang of bandits camping out in the wilderness.  In the meantime, Jumna meets a fatherly police officer (Nasir Hussain) and becomes a police officer himself.  It isn't long before Jumna's professional wanderings take him back to the village of his birth, where he must square off against his outlaw brother, in a showdown between duty and family.

With its tale of brothers on opposite sides of the law, Gunga Jumna perhaps resonated with the house divided that was India in the years following independence and partition.  There's an allegory in the divergent personalities and approaches to life of the two brothers.  The social message is hinted by the brothers' names - they are named for the Ganges and Jamuna rivers, the mythological and geographical axes of India, the junction of which has a rich symbolism in Indian tradition and culture.  The suggestion may be that the nation's vitality springs from the juncture of the fiery passion of Ganga and the steady, duty-bound earnestness of Jumna. 

For me, though, the film's symbolic content was obscured by the fact that it was just a chore to watch. There were times when I was tempted to fast-forward through some excruciatingly slow, yet utterly predictable, sequences.  And the characterizations were too indelicate; Ganga is an unthinking idiot - he reacts to offense like a three-year-old, except that he's violent and anti-social - and Jumna is a feelingless android.  The result was that I didn't terribly care what happened to either of them, and couldn't get caught up in the allegory either.

Gunga Jumna does have its qualities.  There is enough substance to the story to make it compelling at times.  Dilip Kumar's performance is quite good, despite a lot of shouting - it is not his fault that his character is obnoxious.  Vyjayantimala's performance is outstanding - only during her emotional scenes did I feel any stirring within myself.  And the music is stellar.  A highlight in that department is a mujra by Helen - I've only ever seen her perform this kind of dance once before, and she's great at it. 

Helen:

(Gunga Jumna is available for download at Jaman.com.)