Filmi Geek

The Dirty Picture (2011)

Dir. Milan Luthria

Let me get this out of the way: it is not easy for me to be objective and intellectual about this movie. The "frankly lesbian perspective" that earned me a mention in a recent Outlook India article also has me fairly smitten with Vidya Balan, and whatever else The Dirty Picture gets right or wrong, it offers a whole heck of a lot for anyone in that stricken condition. 

Reshma (Vidya Balan) flees from the stifling prospect of life as a village wife to the big city of Madras, carrying nothing but a tin of sugar and her dream of becoming a film star.  She wins her first job through her willingness to dance a raunchy number that no other dancer will take on.  Her steamy performance earns her the notice of Selva Ganesh (Rajesh Sharma), a producer who anglicizes her name to "Silk" and casts her in an item opposite her hero, an aging A-list star named Suryakant (Naseeruddin Shah).  Silk wins Suryakant's support more by her willingness to sleep with him than anything she does on screen.  But the public is captivated by Silk's sizzling sensuality, and soon she is ascendant as a huge star in her own right.  Not everyone is equally impressed, though. A director with artistic aspirations, Abraham (Emraan Hashmi), is disgusted by Silk and everything she represents about the industry's taste for banal and cheap entertainment.  Naila (Anju Mahendru), an older writer who makes her living tearing stars apart in the gossip rags, aims her pen squarely at Silk.  Even Suryakant himself becomes threatened by Silk's volatility and success.  And Suryakant's younger brother, Ramakant (Tusshar Kapoor), is torn between his own fascination with Silk, and his desire to break into screenwriting, which drives his dangerously sycophantic loyalty to his brother. 

I watched this movie in continuous dialogue with myself.  Feminist, analytical, serious Carla pondered the difficult question whether a movie could offer commentary on the exploitation of female sexuality without being exploitative itself.  Lesbian horn-dog Carla was just having too much fun - and was too busy wiping drool off her chin - to give much thought to anything.

Feminist, analytical, serious Carla (FASC):  The Dirty Picture has a very fine line to walk.  Everyone knows that the cardinal rule of moviemaking is "show it, don't tell it."  If The Dirty Picture wants us to understand that Silk is lascivious and uninhibited, that she takes her performances beyond the bounds of good taste, the movie has no choice but to show Silk doing just that.  And so, there is a justification for letting the camera linger on Vidya Balan's cleavage, or caress her throat as she throws her head back in simulated climax -

Lesbian horn-dog Carla (LHDC):  You're talking about that scene in the red negligée, with the rose, right?  That was flat hot.  I mean, the bow-chick-a-wow-wow music is beyond cheesy - but what can I say?  Everything Vidya does, just plain works on me. 

FASC (casting the side-eye at her alter ego):  As I was saying, it is arguably the right way to make this movie - rather than just telling the viewer that Silk is screen-meltingly sensual, do everything you can to make the viewer feel just what  audiences of Silk's movies would have felt.

LHDC: Well, in that case I think it was very effective.  Although, I might have to watch it three or four more times, just to be completely sure.  Here, let me cue up that negligée scene again ...

FASC: ... right.  The trouble is that once the movie goes down that road, it is inevitably using the appeal of that sexuality to sell itself.  And so the movie's criticism of that kind of exploitation runs the risk of ringing hollow at points.  Leaving that internal contradiction aside, though, The Dirty Picture does a largely adequate job of pointing up the hypocrisy of an industry that worships male stars far beyond their worth, but chews up and spits out girls like Silk.

LHDC:  If I got hold of a girl like Silk, I might well devour her, but I wouldn't chew her up or spit her out...

FASC: Ha, ha, funny.  At any rate, the movie's efforts as highlighting the industry's double standards are well-rendered, if a bit literal and ham-fisted.  (It should be noted that while the movie is nominally about the Madras movie industry, the implicit commentary applies just as well to Bombay.)  For example, there is a Suryakant shooting in which he plays a college student while a woman half his age plays his mother - a woman, we are told, who had played his heroine the previous year.  The audience gets to nod knowingly at this "it's funny because it's true" jab at the movie industry - but that's all there is.  We all know this industry practice well, and The Dirty Picture's commentary on it doesn't really add any new insight.  Suryakant is a bit of a buffoon, but he is treated as a God, sucked up to by nearly everyone from his brother on up to the apparently powerful producer Selva Ganesh - but it isn't clear why he wields such power.  It might just be that money talks, and Suryakant wields power as long as he puts butts in seats - but even so, the script muddies that message, strongly suggesting that over-the-hill Suryakant can't fill theaters without Silk's skinshow.

The movie's reflection of the symbiotic relationship between stars and the reporters who get famous by dragging stars through the mud is rendered with a little more subtlety.  Naila understands this relationship completely, and holds Silk in much higher regard than Silk, barreling through her own arc at runaway speed, understands.  Indeed, Naila is the movie's closest thing to a feminist voice; she views Silk's courage with admiration, and watches her decline with sadness and a true understanding of its inevitability.

LHDC:  You haven't mentioned that song yet ... 

FASC:  Everyone has already seen the song.

LHDC:  But it's awesome!   It's fun, it makes me want to run off and watch old Southern movies.  And it makes me want to be Naseeruddin Shah.  Oh wow ... Vidya is completely yummy in it ...

 

FASC (with an exasperated sigh):  Yes, yes, it's a very good song.  It captures Silk's rise to stardom in a fun montage of costumes and sets, interspersed with delightfully-styled fictional movie posters and scenes of her affair with Suryakant as it heats up.  It's also a nice little microcosm of the dilmma that The Dirty Picture faces of illustrating the expoitation of Silk without simultaneously exploiting Vidya Balan. 

And the best way for The Dirty Picture to redeem itself for being a little exploitative would be to give us a clear, compelling picture of Silk's inner life.  But this is where The Dirty Picture falls a little short.  At times it isn't clear what drives Silk and her peculiar mix of strength and desperation.  This is through no fault of Vidya Balan, who does everything she can to add dimensionality to this weakest aspect of the script, and gives a flawless performance.

LHDC: Flawless is the right word for Vidya.  How about that bathtub scene?  And that smile, wow.  And how about the smoldering looks she gives in that lovely "Ishq sufiana" song?

FASC (rolling eyes):  Not now!  As I was saying, Vidya clearly has a coherent mental model of her character, and does as well as an actor can do at conveying that model to the audience, given that the script paints her inconsistently and a little mysteriously.  For example, for much of the movie, Silk is willfully oblivious to insults hurled at her by the press, until a comparison to the mythological Draupadi - a jab at her for apparently having affairs with both of the brothers Suryakant and Ramakant - causes an abrupt about-face, an explosion of rage in which she burns years worth of magazines and clippings.  Has Silk been secretly sensitive to the invective all along, or has something about the Draupadi taunt in particular gotten to her in a way that the rest of the trash-talking did not?  The script doesn't make this clear - but I think Vidya has a theory of Silk that she wants to make the audience understand. 

LHDC:  It is a theory that includes much chest-heaving and lip-licking, and clearly requires a great deal of careful study.

FASC (clearing throat loudly):  And Vidya does a marvelous job with Silk's slide, in the second half of the film, into exhaustion and despair.  The script is a little heavy-handed, but Vidya shows impressive range as she navigates Silk's almost bipolar swings from panicky impulsiveness (stopping traffic by dancing on the hood of a car to disrupt Naila's star-studded party) to lonely melancholy (drinking herself into a stupor alone in her enormous bungalow).  Some of Vidya's finest scenes are Silk's least glamorous - such as late in the movie, as Silk sits on the floor of her living room with Abraham, bloated and without makeup, browsing through the photographic remnants of the best days of her career.

Another heavy-handed scene that is elevated by Vidya's performance is the staging of the song "Honeymoon ki raat,"(*) in which Silk faces down a young, naive rival (Arya Banerjee) for her position as the sexiest star of Madras movies.  Silk trips the younger girl and strikes a triumphant pose.  But rather than cheering for her, the onlookers are somewhere between horrified, amused, and embarrassed for her.  The expression on Silk's face as awareness dawns is a marvelously complex mixture of fear, desperation, rage.

So, whatever The Dirty Picture's warts - and it does have some - Vidya Balan deserves all the praise she received for her rendering of Silk.  The strength of her performance brings Silk to life with depth and (as much as she can) coherence.  Vidya Balan, more than anything else, makes The Dirty Picture worth watching. 

LHDC:  Now that, I can agree with.  Let's go watch it again. 

FASC (facepalm).

(*) I have to note that my recent experience watching Broadway shows has made me more sensitive to the laziness of most Hindi song productions that don't bother to give different voices to lines picturized on different actors.  Surely by the time "Honeymoon ki raat" was recorded, the dance-off picturization had already been decided.  Was it really not possible to budget a second singer for Arya Banerjee's lines?  The song would have been much stronger that way.  You can apply a charitable interpretation - using the same voice highlights the fungibility of item girls, etc. - but that feels like a stretch.  It's lazy, plain and simple, and in such an otherwise carefully-crafted production, there isn't really much excuse for it. 

Chhoti si baat (1975)

छोटी सी बात

Dir. Basu Chatterjee

Don't ever let anyone tell you, as one of my guides in India claimed, that all Hindi movies are the same.  We know better.  They are not all bombast and melodrama, improbable dance numbers and dishum-dishum.  Not that there's anything wrong with that!  But there has long been a place in Hindi cinema for sweet stories adorably and delicately told.  Taking pride of place alongside charming gems like Chashme buddoor and Katha is Basu Chatterjee's lovable, scrumptious, and hilarious Chhoti si baat ("a little thing"), truly one of the cutest, most delightful Hindi movies I have ever had the pleasure to see.

Arun (Amol Palekar) is a mild, bashful accountant with an all-consuming crush on Prabha (Vidya Sinha), a woman who works in a nearby office building and takes the same bus as Arun to work.   Arun can't bring himself to speak to Prabha, but his adoring gaze on the bus - and his habit of following her all the way home - tips his feelings to Prabha.  She indulges him, and even seems rather to like him - but she can't resist teasing him a little, too.  Soon, though, a rival arrives on a shiny yellow scooter and forces Arun's  hand - the breezy, confident Nagesh (Asrani), a lawyer in Prabha's office who takes an obvious shine to her and leaves Arun in the dust.  Desperate, Arun turns to a famous fixer, retired Colonel Julius Nagendranath Wilfred Singh (Ashok Kumar), who dishes out advice to everyone from lovelorn office workers to superstars like Amitabh Bachchan.  The Colonel takes a fatherly interest in Arun's case, and gives him a month-long crash course in suavity and confidence.  But it remains to be seen whether following the Colonel's sometimes questionable guidance will do the job to help Arun turn the tables on Nagesh, and win him Prabha.

If I weren't already firmly on the Amol Palekar train after Golmaal, Chhoti si baat would certainly have done the trick.   The guy is flat adorable.  From his first appearance minutes into the movie, with his sweet anxious demeanor and nervous smile, I was grinning like a dope and didn't stop until long after it was over.  He renders Arun's docile sweetness just perfectly, and is a complete delight to watch - and to root for - as he stumbles through his courtship of Prabha.  Palekar brings a charming physicality to this role, adjusting his posture and mannerisms almost continuously as his confidence grows and wanes and grows again.  And Arun's Walter-Mittyish fantasies add to his charm and make him thoroughly relatable to a daydreamer like me.  In one fantastic sequence Arun, in a cinema hall, watches a song featuring Dharmendra and Hema Malini.  He squirms jealously in his seat as Hema morphs into Prabha in Dharmendra's arms - and then relaxes into a contented smile as the image of Arun takes Dharmendra's place.

 

Vidya Sinha brings her share of adorable to the show, too - Prabha sports a magnificent smile (not to mention a vast collection of fabulous sarees), and it's not difficult to see how Arun could be utterly besotted by her.  Especially charming are the scenes where she recounts Arun's fumbling attempts at stalking and courtship to her coworker (Nandita Thakur), who cracks slightly racy jokes as the clearly smitten Prabha blushes.  Indeed, most wonderfully portrayed is that Prabha actually likes Arun, right from the very beginning, and is fairly unwavering in that - Nagesh's smooth talk and slick scooter may seem a threat to Arun, but the audience is in on the secret that as far as Prabha is concerned, it's Arun all the way.

The best treat of all, though, is Ashok Kumar, who is simply hilarious as the avuncular Colonel Julius Nagendranath Wilfred Singh (I never tire of that name, and neither does the movie).  I chronicled my ever-growing appreciation for Ashok Kumar when I recently wrote about Ek saal - it's hard to imagine a more different role from that of the Colonel, but here he is just a riot.  He spews an endless stream of advice that is somewhere between platitudes and complete nonsense, and then chides Arun for answering "yes" when the Colonel asks "samjhe?"  "Khak samjhe!" the Colonel spits, "main khud nahin samjha maine kya kaha!" ("Like hell you understand! I myself don't even understand what I said.")  And as humorously and broadly-drawn as he is, the tenderness with which the Colonel realizes, toward the end of the film, that he might have steered Arun wrong is genuinely touching.

Chhoti si baat offers some visual treats too, including a fun hillside trek through Khandala.  And, of course,  there are marvelous street scenes of Bombay that made me long for more time there, after my very abbreviated visit a few months ago.  These are crowned by this wonderful sparkly poster for an Amitabh and Saira Banu film that adorns the bus stop where Arun and Prabha meet:

Among Chhoti si baat's pleasures are a number of cameos, including a hilarious appearance by Rajendranath as a fake sadhu who pulls out a lemon out of his rear with a ridiculous "look what I did!" grin, bilks Arun out of a tidy sum, and steals his pen to boot.  I first saw Rajendranath in his riotously cute role in Tere ghar ke samne, and I laughed like a loon through his entire scene here.

What can I do besides gush?  Chhoti si baat is a thoroughly delightful film, one I'll watch over and over again, and one that is available in reasonable quality with subtitles on YouTube.  What are you waiting for? 

 

Ek saal (1957)

एक साल

Dir. Devendra Goel

Ashok Kumar and Madhubala make a very compelling screen couple - he dashing and serious, she ingenuous and fragile.  Amrita at IndieQuill adores this pair so much that she once wrote an entire post celebrating them.  There, she especially highlighted Ek saal ("one year"), and after thoroughly enjoying the jodi in Howrah Bridge, I came to this movie with high expectations.  And Ashok and Madhubala do not disappoint - but the movie's frustratingly paternalistic premise, plus a particularly grating comic side plot, interfere to make it something less than a favorite.

Usha (Madhubala) is a vibrant, lovely girl who delights in life - you would never know she has an inoperable brain tumor with a prognosis of just one year to live.  Usha herself does not even know - when her father receives the news from her doctor (Mehmood), he decides to keep her in the dark.  Suresh (Ashok Kumar) arrives, ostensibly to manage her father's land holdings, but really with some kind of con in mind, hoping to fleece the wealthy man for as much as he can take for himself and his business partner, a bitter woman named Rajni (Kuldip Kaur).  Usha quickly falls in love with the dashing Suresh, but he does not return her feelings - indeed, he scorns the very idea of love.  Even knowing this, her father - desperate to keep Usha happy and smiling in the final months of her life - offers Suresh an astonishing amount of money to pretend he loves her.  It is an offer that Suresh, who is always looking for an angle, cannot refuse.  But soon Usha melts even his hardened heart, and Suresh has to wonder if the con might become the truth.  The jealous Rajni wonders too, and sends a hapless private investigator, Pinto (Johnny Walker), to throw a monkey wrench into Suresh and Usha's  romance.

Although there is a lot to love about Ek saal, I find it hard to get past the patronizing way that the men in Usha's life control her access to information.  I can sometimes forgive a certain kind of sexism in older movies - one rather often has to, to enjoy them at all.  But the idea that a woman is too delicate a creature to deserve forthright information from her own doctor about her own prognosis is just too offensive for me to se aside, even for the sweetest of movies.  If Usha is naive, an ingenue, it's largely because Suresh and her father insist on keeping her that way.  One supposes that her innocence both pleases them, and keeps her docile and manipulable.  Who knows what kind of woman Usha could be if she were actually given control over her own destiny? The movie doesn't contemplate that, and that is very frustrating.  Usha's father's grief is poignant - he shudders with sadness every time the clock strikes, marking the passage of her time on earth - but it is also premature.  I have to think that if she knew she were dying, Usha would not tolerate her father's simpering, and would instead urge him to enjoy their time together to the fullest.

Meanwhile Rajni offers an interesting contrast to Usha's helplessness.  Rajni is an angry, malevolent force - she is in love with Suresh herself, but he rejects her as anything other than an associate in his shady business dealings.  Rajni's response to this rejection seems to say that if she can't have Suresh, she'll make sure he and everyone he cares about suffers just as much as she does.  She is a fascinating character - a heavyset woman, with her mouth set in a cruel scowl, she is both loathsome and thoroughly fabulous in her own way.

Though Suresh tries to keep her physically distant (trapped in Lucknow while he cavorts with Usha from Bombay to Mussoorie), Rajni takes matters into her own hands, first engaging Pinto and finally confronting Usha herself to sabotage her happiness.  What is remarkable here is that it is Rajni who finally reveals Usha's prognosis to the clueless girl.  Rajni tells Usha bluntly that men are not to be trusted, and while her motives are nefarious, there's a weird backward truth to what she's saying - the men strive to control Usha by concealing her illness, and only a woman, Rajni, gives Usha anything resembling a truthful account of what is happening to her.  She does not intend to do so, but ultimately Rajni empowers Usha. 

Suresh is powerless too, in an entirely different way.  He is at least nominally in charge of his own destiny, but as he falls in love with Usha he becomes more and more helpless, treading ground he's never covered before in his heartless, mercenary life. A hard heart softened by love may be a time worn cliche, but it is a thing of beauty when well-executed, and Ashok Kumar does a masterful job with this trajectory.  When I watched Howrah Bridge - another movie in which Ashok Kumar pretends to love Madhubala only to fall for her for real - I complained that Ashok's about face was abrupt and not sufficiently conveyed.  Here, though, his turnabout forms most of the meat of the movie.  In one standout scene, Suresh grapples with his conscience, which appears to him in the form of a photograph of himself (never mind why he keeps such a photograph on his nightstand!) that comes to life and scolds him for his reprehensible decpetion.

So, there is a lot going on in this movie, and I admit that I appreciated it more on a second viewing, when I could skim through Johnny Walker's numerous, lengthy scenes - he irritates me a lot more here than he usually does - and focus on these interesting nuances in the story and characterizations.  And, of course, on the pretty - there is lots and lots of pretty to enjoy.  Madhubala is utterly radiant - even if her imposed fecklessness grates at times, she does play a marvelous ingenue, and she's simply lovely. 

 

That is just the prettiest of the many pretty songs in Ek saal.  Early in the film, some dancers perform for Usha on her birthday - wishing her "tu jiye hazaaron saal" - and her childlike delight at their performance is just scrumptious.   Toss in a couple of entertaining cameos - Usha's doctors include an uncharacteristically nerdy and straight Mehmood, as well as Madan Puri - and there is plenty to make Ek saal worth watching.  If nothing else, it will please Amrita to know that I am thoroughly sold on her favorite jodi.  A copy of Mahal arrived in the mail today...

Tezaab (1988)

तेज़ाब

Dir. N. Chandra

The excellent Asim Burney won the drawing to choose Filmi Geek's 200th review, and his choice was Tezaab ("acid"), the 1988 film that made a star out of Madhuri Dixit. The movie was a huge hit, and folks roughly my age who grew up with Hindi movies no doubt remember it with loving nostalgia. 

Shyamlal (Anupam Kher) is a gambling alcoholic, who finances his carefree lifestyle by exploiting the singing and dancing talents of his daughter Mohini (Madhuri Dixit).  But his debts catch up with him when the underworld boss Lotiya (Kiran Kumar) kidnaps Mohini.  Mohini's friend Jyoti (Suparna Anand) witnesses the kidnapping and sends for her brother Mahesh (Anil Kapoor), who had been Mohini's college classmate and beau, to come rescue her.  There is just one problem:  Mahesh is now a gangster known as Munna, wanted by the police and banned from the city.  Police Inspector Gagan Singh (Suresh Oberoi), who remembers Mahesh from his pre-crime days as a promising young naval cadet, captures him, and after listening to the story of how he became a banished criminal, strikes a deal with him - Inspector Singh will look the other way for 24 hours, to give Munna  a chance to save Mohini.  In return, Munna must return to his upstanding, law-abiding ways.

So much for summary - the top comment on the YouTube page for Tezaab does a much better job at hitting the highlights:

Epic Dance 0:06:33 Epic Scene 0:30:27 Best "You are under arrest" ever 0:24:37 Best "Hi" ever 0:57:50 Epic Jump 1:14:00 Epic Pose 1:14:12 Epic Laught 1:28:11 Epic Fight 1:45:14 with Epic Win Face 1:45:37 another Epic Dance 1:47:27 THE EPIC SCENE 2:08:50 The Epic Pursuit 2:11:53 Epic Hammer Fight 2:34:30 The Epic Last Fight 2:37:41

What can I add to that?  Tezaab is EPIC.  And I think the best way to appreciate this movie is to put yourself in the mind of someone to whom it really would be epic - say, an Indian male who was a young adolescent at the time of this movie's release.  Tezaab is in no way a movie for me.  But there is enough in it for me to understand something of why it was a hit in its time, and why a certain generation - especially that generation's boys - remember it so fondly.   Everything about this movie is BIG - big fights, big car chases, big explosions, overwrought drama even by filmi standards, all supported, of course, by a background score full of bombastic fanfares and strategically-timed thunderclaps.  It's not hard for me to imagine that a boy of certain age would, at the time, have found Anil Kapoor's Munna the coolest thing EVER, what with his self-sacrificing bravery and the stupendous super-filmi dialogue that rolls effortlessly from beneath his trademark mustache. 

When I started up the movie, I was greeted with this:

 

This may as well say "Carla, you will hate this movie."  I am a complete wimp when it comes to movie violence; no matter how fake or stylized it is, I really have no tolerance for it.  When I saw Ram Lakhan, I was pleasantly surprised at how rich and interesting it turned out to be.  Tezaab, though, is the movie I feared I would get when I sat down with Ram Lakhan - weakly plotted, needlessly violent, and overwhelmingly male.  The story is, on the whole, weak and barely coherent - the flashbacks-within-flashbacks narrative structure doesn't make it any easier to follow - and largely an extended excuse for motorcycle chases, explosions, and fistfights.

And there is more "violent" than "love" in this violent love story.  Indeed, Tezaab's is one of the lamest, most weakly motivated love stories I've ever seen.  Mahesh first meets Mohini when both are fresh-faced college students.  He seduces her on a bet, to prove to his idiot friends that he knows the secret to winning a girl.  This trope - the idea that all women are identical, and are guaranteed to respond like automata to an expert execution of the right formula - is offensive enough that I can't give it a pass in any movie, of any era.  And the nominal love story only gets stupider from there.  Mohini discovers Mahesh's ruse and responds with justifiable anger.  For some reason this makes him decide he really does love her after all, enough not to just threaten suicide but actually attempt it.  Naturally this melts away Mohini's anger, and after his wounds heal they frolic together for a song or two.  Later, though, after his exile from Bombay, Mahesh decides that he's no good for Mohini, and abuses her horribly in order to make her hate him.  This isn't so much love story as it is incoherent nonsense.

On the plus side, though, it's incoherent nonsense involving Madhuri Dixit, who is blessed with a perfectly radiant smile and the sheer talent to elevate even the most unbearable garbage to near watchability, at least while she is on the screen. 

I could look at that all day!  Madhuri does a lot with what she's given in Tezaab.  Mohini has a few nearly fierce moments as she tries to stand up to her drunken, abusive father.  And she has some truly funny moments as well, especially when Mahesh feigns interest in another girl (part of his magic formula, which of course works flawlessly), and Mohini works out her jealousy in a hilarious sequence of frustrated facial expressions.

You can't talk about Madhuri in Tezaab without mentioning her famous number "Ek do teen".  This song may have launched a star career, but in the eyes of this firangi Madhuri-lover with the benefit of a quarter-century of hindsight on it, I really have to say that the song is more famous than good.  While I can imagine its impact in its day - even on this insipid song with ridiculous choreography, Madhuri is clearly something special - if I want to watch Madhuri today, I have dozens of much, much better songs to choose from. 

Also in Tezaab's assets column are a few notable performances from supporting actors.  Bolstering the film's underlying message (to the extent it has one) of redemption and moral rectitude are the story arcs of Inspector Singh and Mahesh's loyal friend Baban (Chunky Pandey).  Both shine through the bombast and bluster and even offer something approaching subtlety.  As Singh,  Suresh Oberoi projects a delicate charm and maturity akin to Jackie Shroff's character in Ram Lakhan - his seriousness and upstanding morality is wrought too broadly and stiffly to be believed, but he is perfect as an archetype and a foil for Munna's bitterness.  And even his straight-arrow  flawlessness has its limits; when they are finally reached at the film's end, it is a satisfying closure for his arc.  As for Baban, he is a wonderful surprise, and the most three-dimensional and complex character in the film.  He shows tenderness, loyalty, fearlessness, rage, wits, roguishness, and charm.  Chunky Pandey does a great job with this interesting character (and even gets a sweet song  nearly to himself, "So gaya yeh jahan").  I would watch a whole movie about him - even without Madhuri.

At any rate, while I can't say I really enjoyed watching Tezaab, I didn't really expect to either.  (In fairness to it, I liked it much better on second viewing, when I could better follow the nested flashbacks, better appreciate what little subtlety there is, and skip the most unbearable parts.)  But I do get a lot from watching movies that were huge commercial hits - if nothing else, they offer a small, imperfect window onto the time and culture that created them and on the people who cherish them.  And that window is a big part of the fascination of Hindi movies, for me.