Filmi Geek

Hera pheri (1976)

हेरा फेरी

Dir. Prakash Mehra

My movie reviews here at Filmi Geek usually hew to a standard format.  An introductory paragraph like this one is followed by a brief plot summary - often just the first third of the story, enough to lay the foundation for a discussion of the movie's portrayals and themes.  Then, the bulk of the text is devoted to just that discussion.

With Prakash Mehra's Hera pheri ("monkey business"),  though, that format just won't fit.  This movie is, at its best, a series of reasonably entertaining bits that tell a barely-coherent story about the power of friendship.  But that is a very charitable reading.  I watched the movie twice - paying fairly close attention the second time - and I still don't think I followed the plot all the way through.  And since the story really has no bearing on one's enjoyment of this otherwise largely satisfying masala jaunt, I won't spend any more words on it.

At the core of Hera pheri is one of Hindi film's epic buddy-pyaar jodis, Amitabh Bachchan and Vinod Khanna.  Their Vijay and Ajay (no points for guessing which one is Vijay) do not quite reach Jai and Veeru territory when it comes to lifetime devotion and finishing one another's sentences.  But what they lack in longevity they more than make up for in homoeroticism.  

Isn't it romantic?  The gay subtext is so strong that (as either Beth or Amrita put it, may they forgive me for not remembering which) it isn't even really subtext - it's just text. In one scene, Ajay and Vijay curl up under a blanket together to sleep on the living room floor, while Kiran (Saira Banu) sleeps in their bedroom.  Vijay gets up in hopes of a rendezvous with Kiran, only to discover that Ajay has tied the two of them together with a bit of rope.  ROPE.  Later in the movie, they tearfully embrace and declare that their love for one another transcends all other relationships.  Coupled with Ajay in hot pants and that knotted blouse shirt, one has to conclude that at least some of the crew of this movie knew exactly what they were doing.

Buddy-pyaar romance aside, Hera pheri offers plenty in the way of satisfyingly fun masala antics.  A hilarious extended sequence in a casino features Vijay pulling a magnificent card-table scam against Asrani, in which he coolly scams the casino manager at the same time.  The casino itself is one of those superb sets that one only finds in masala movies of the 1970s.  The set is showcased well in Padma Khanna's item number, "Aapka sarkar kya kuchh," where the playing-card decor of the casino is reflected in the playing-card design of Padma's outfit. 

And there's nothing quite like a song in which the heroes pull off a supreme con job by posing as holy men.  I loved this gambit in Shaan and it works brilliantly here as well, in the movie's indisputable highlight, the qawwali "Darbar mein uparwale ke."

 

In another hilarious sequence, the boys set up a whole cadre of smugglers, thugs, and all around nasty guys with threatening phone calls, hoping to ambush them at the casino.  After some first-class sneaking around...

...the fellas get caught out, and what follows is a terrific Keystone-Kops-esque chase with some quality comedic fight scenes.  (Incidentally, comedy dishum-dishum beats earnest dishum-dishum hands down.) 

One of my favorite sequences comes during the breakup phase of the romance - the inevitable down-point late in the film where Ajay and Vijay have had a falling out, and Vijay mourns the loss of his true love.  Vijay wanders through dark streets, past a long sequence of movie posters plastered to a wall - posters that alternate between the titles Dost and Dushman.  At one point Vijay rips one of the posters, and the word "Dost" floats dejectedly down a culvert.  It's really quite an elegant series of shots, perhaps the most artful in the film. Technical problems prevent me from putting a screencapture here, but you can see it about three and a half minutes into this song.

With all of this and more masala goodness going for it - including a filmi-insane maa, Ajay's dubious parentage cemented by a long-lost pendant, and a villain's lair tricked out with numerous images of the famous Trimurti from the Elephanta cave - Hera pheri could have been a repeat-watcher as satisfying as Parvarish, Manmohan Desai's gem featuring the same pair of actors.  What holds it back - and ultimately drags it down into the realm of mere rainy-afternoon, half-attention timepass - is its terrible C-list female stars.  Saira Banu is rarely that appealing even in her prime, and here she is well past it, bringing very little life or energy to the screen.  I hate to have to say this.  Saira Banu was only in her mid-30s when this movie was made, and I want very much to favor female stars as romantic leads up to and well beyond this age.  But Saira Banu doesn't make my case for me.  Her first appearance in the movie, which doesn't come until a full hour in, is just puzzling - a squealing, appalling attempt at playing the ingenue.  This is forgivable as it becomes clear that her character is not meant to be ingenuous.  But it doesn't offset one's gut reaction that she be muted and removed from the screen as quickly as possible.

The other lead, Sulakshana Pandit, is utterly forgettable.  This poor-woman's Neetu Singh may as well be a cipher; she is thoroughly lacking in charm, appeal, charisma, or any of the other qualities that make her contemporaries so enjoyable.  Indeed, one wonders how excellent this movie could have been if the budget had room for, say, the real Neetu Singh in Sulakshana's place, and Parveen Babi in Saira Banu's.  That would have been a masala flick for the ages.  As it stands, Prakash Mehra seems to have known what he had - that is to say, what he lacked - in these two, as they get relatively little screen time between them.  And so, for the first time ever, I can say of a masala movie that it did not need to give its female leads more to do.  If nothing else, Hera pheri is an object lesson for directors in just how crucial women are when it comes to elevating a movie into something truly memorable.  Neglect them, and your movie withers on the vine.

 

Hira aur patthar (1977)

हीरा और पत्थर

Dir. Vijay Bhatt

When I visited Beth, we watched a whole mess of movies.  "Mess," it turns out, is an apt description of Hira aur patthar ("diamond and stone"), about as disappointing an attempt at masala as I've ever seen.  Beth and I figured we could not go wrong with a movie that featured each of our respective fake-pretend movie significant others, Shashi Kapoor and Shabana Azmi.  As an added bonus for me, there is also Ashok Kumar, my recent fascination.  When "with Asrani and Bindu" came up in the credits, Beth and I actually high-fived each other.  A short time into the movie we caught a glimpse of Manorama as well.  "This is going to be great," we thought.  What better way to spend our visit together than with this cast?  Alas.

As a young boy, Shankar loses his faith in God - particularly Jagdishwar, worshiped in the temple high on a clifftop overlooking his village - when his mother is fatally wounded in a fire and the boy's prayers fail to revive her.  The fire was set by a cruel zamindar, Vikram Singh (Raj Mehra), bent on extracting as much money as possible from the farmers who work his land.  Shankar's father and uncle (Bharat Bhushan and Chandrashekhar), now without their farm, take up the work of carrying pilgrims up to the temple on a doli.  Even when he grows to adulthood, though, Shankar (Shashi Kapoor) still refuses to visit the temple, and won't even mount the steps - despite the entreaties of his cousin Tota (Asrani), Shankar refuses to carry a doli of his own.  To shoulder his share of the family's debts to Vikram Singh, Shankar plans to make his fortune in the city.  On the eve of his departure, though, he meets Gauri (Shabana Azmi), the daughter of the security officer who guards the temple.  Smitten, Shankar relents - he stays in the village, agrees to carry the doli, and gladly climbs the steps each day to visit Gauri.  But he still refuses to enter the temple, enraging Gauri's father.  And when Shankar and his friend Dr Anand (Ashok Kumar) learn of Vikram Singh's thievery against the village and the temple, Singh's son Pratap (Narendranath) plots to put Shankar's life and liberty in peril.  Pratap has another reason to want Shankar out of the way - the girl he loves, the vampish Rupa (Bindu), favors Shankar over him.

Hira aur patthar starts off with so much promise.  The seeds of masala goodness are sown early and one expects them to sprout richly.  There is terrific trauma-drama-o-rama as young Shekhar bounds up and down the temple steps screaming pleadingly for Jagdishwar to save his mother's life.  There is a marvelously filmi passage-of-time sequence, in which the frustrated boy shows his anger with God by casting stones at his reflection.  Ripples spread, the credits roll, and soon we see the grown Shankar sitting on the very same riverbank, still casting angry stones. 

This is the kind of foundation that great masala films are laid upon.  There is a charming meet-cute sequence between Gauri and Shankar at a vegetable stand, in which she accidentally squirts him with tomato seeds, and smiles that bashful, tooth-covering smile characteristic of Shabana Azmi when she was this young and self-conscious.

There is even a pretty decent first action sequence - Shankar takes on Pratap Singh in the open market, knocking over vegetable stands and snack carts to rescue Gauri from Pratap's harrassment.  (This is after Pratap manhandles Gauri in the street and a bunch of men stand around just watching.  Just like real life!)

Reminiscing about these early scenes with Beth, I described them as "back when we still thought this was going to be a good movie." 

"We were so young and naïve," Beth replied.

So where does it all go wrong?  It's hard to say exactly where Hira aur Patthar bumps off the rails.  It just loses steam and takes a turn for the boring about halfway through.  Bindu lacks her full glory as a vamp, and Pratap is about as mealy and unsatisfying a villain as I've ever seen. The movie lacks any kind of connective tissue, any grand masala theme to tie all the elements together.  It flirts with a couple ideas - Shankar's steadfast denial of religious faith is one, and a false start in which it appears Shankar will organize the doliwale into some kind labor force is another - but nothing crystallizes.  There are no great songs, no boisterous qawwali, no costume-donning antics, no climactic set-up to chase the villain down in his lair.  In short, Hira aur patthar is not grounded enough to be a passable serious movie, and not silly enough to be a passable masala movie.  To misapply Gertrude Stein, "There is no there there."

There are just a couple of moments worth their masala salt that lift Hira aur patthar out of Filmi Geek's new "Execrable" category and into "Timepass".  One comes in service of Tota's quest to marry a village girl named Chanda (Jayshree).  This hilarious scene features wedding rites performed in the back of a speeding truck driven by the stereotyped friendly Punjabi truck driver, while the bride's father and his choice of groom follow in a car that falls apart piece by piece.  There is also some elegant suspense in a fight scene between Pratap and an unruly customer who tries to rape Rupa - a stabbing occurs behind an upturned couch, and for quite a long effective moment it is not at all clear who died.

But that's about it, and it's just not enough to sustain.  It's telling that this far into the review I haven't had much to say about either of the principals, for whom Beth and I ostensibly chose this movie.  That is because even they don't have a lot to offer.  Shashi Kapoor comes as close to phoning it in as I've ever seen him do, and Shabana Azmi - my dear, beloved Shabana Azmi - just doesn't have a whole lot to do save some flitting (and as much as I adore her, she's not really much of a flitter) and some fretting. They look pretty, though, and Shabana always gives good sari.

And if nothing else, the Hira aur patthar offers a generous helping of the marvelous Manorama and the faces she pulls like no other.  So I leave you with a sampling of that - a Manorama panorama, if you will. 

Barfi (2012)

बर्फी

Dir. Anurag Basu

It is no small feat for a movie about a deaf young man and a severely autistic young woman to avoid a "this week ... a very special episode of Bollywood" tone.  But Anurag Basu's touching story Barfi (I can't bring myself to use the exclamation mark appended to the official title) succeeds in avoiding that pitfall.  The movie offers a gentle look at the nature of love, and, notwithstanding a few narrative bumps, fills the screen with enough smiles and tenderness to be every bit as sweet as the confection both it and its main character are named for - with a light touch of sadness, too.

Barfi (Ranbir Kapoor), a deaf and mostly mute young man, is a gentle-hearted scoundrel, a good-natured smiling troublemaker who steals his father's liquor and performs minor acts of vandalism around his picturesque Darjeeling home.  Barfi is instantly smitten when he sees Shruti (Ileana D'Cruz), whose family has just moved into town.  Shruti is newly engaged, though, and Barfi settles for a playful friendship with her.  Soon, though, Barfi's mischievous tenderness reaches her heart, and Shruti has to choose between Barfi's vibrant love and a solid, conventional, but perhaps dull life with her fiancé.   In the meantime, Barfi's father falls ill, and to finance his treatment, Barfi decides to kidnap Jhilmil (Priyanka Chopra) the autistic granddaughter of a Darjeeling millionaire, and hold her for a modest ransom.  An unexpected connection develops between Barfi and Jhilmil.  But Jhilmil is profoundly antisocial, and even her hard-won trust of Barfi is a fragile thing, threatened by his obvious love for Shruti. And now the police are after Barfi, as a mystery unfolds about Jhilmil's ultimate fate and her family's intentions for her.

Barfi's greatest strength is its tender playfulness - there are more "aww" moments than a visit to Cute Overload, and enough real laughs too to keep the film from veering irretrievably into the cloying. (Even the movie's one fart joke is adorable and funny.)  Barfi's relationship with his father is affecting and hilarious, and his path to Shruti's heart is suitably magical and filmi while still being utterly charming.  Ranbir Kapoor must be directed very carefully; he can easily become far too boingy-boingy, and needs to be held back from ferret-on-speed territory.  Anurag Basu succeeds at this; Ranbir is charming and likeable and puts his full physical talent to work channeling his grandfather channeling Charlie Chaplin.  The effect of this could be forced and eye-rolling, but Ranbir's air is natural and infectious, and he fully sells Barfi as a playful soul who just wants to make the people he loves smile - not as an attention-seeking clown.

Kapoor shows some depth, too, in the movie's more emotional, less playful scenes.  Barfi obviously has very little dialogue - two of the three main characters more or less do not speak at all - and it taxes all the actors, as well as the director, to keep the story moving and the emotions palpable without the usual crutch of filmi dialogue, overwrought or otherwise.   In one of the movie's strongest and most moving scenes, Barfi finally loses his jovial cool after approaching Shruti's parents to ask for her hand, and meeting her fiancé there.  In a wonderful sequence that operates both literally and symbolically, a Barfi endures a rapid series of small frustrations as he leaves Shruti's home - he bangs hard into the door, his umbrella sticks, the chain falls off his bicycle.  Barfi finally explodes at Shruti in a silent tirade of love and anger. The scene is perfectly executed - Barfi's resentment, Shruti's confusion, all rendered in gesture and expression. 

The movie's rumination on the limitless capacity of love, is a refreshing change from the usual filmi trope of love as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.  During the film's first half, Shruti's mother comments explicitly that one can love more than one person. The echo of these lines makes the ensuing love triangle and its resolution more sweet than bitter, and more believable than contrived.  Indeed, I wondered at first whether I should be troubled by the movie's favoring of the "disabled" match over the "mixed" jodi.  Is the movie suggesting that Barfi doesn't rate an unimpaired wife, or that he has a responsibility to settle for Jhilmil?  But Shruti's mother's words quelled my concerns - Barfi, like Shruti's mother, has room in his heart to love both Jhilmil and Shruti.  And Shruti does get a full, fair opportunity for a happy ending with Barfi - she chooses otherwise.  Because she comes to regret that choice, the result is a movie that in no way questions whether she could have been happy in an unconventional marriage to a deaf man. And, of course, this last stirs a poignant bite of sadness into Barfi's sweet mixture.  Shruti does not get a happy ending.  Despite this, the movie's overwhelming sense of loves leaves a satisfying feeling of warmth and sweetness.  It's a nice bit of narrative sleight of hand.   

As Jhilmil, Priyanka Chopra gets full credit for a performance that is immersive, physical, thoroughly unglamorous, and in many ways less annoying than Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.  One might take issue with some of the characterizations of stereotyped autistic behaviors - these are rather stylized, as they often are in movies of any language.  They also suffer some inconsistency; Jhilmil's ability to function independently and cope with strangers varies for narrative expedience.  Nevertheless, Priyanka Chopra's rendering of what the script gives her is brave and flawless.  For all Kareena Kapoor's crowing about her role in the upcoming Heroine - especially her silly claim that no other actor could do the role - here is Priyanka Chopra just putting her head down and acting.  The willingness to sacrifice glamor for the sake of storytelling is what separates the actors from the movie stars.

Barfi is not without a few warts.  It suffers most from its convoluted narrative structure.  The movie begins in the present day, and operates in flashbacks - including the dangerously indulgent tangle of flashbacks within flashbacks - to several different time periods and locales:  1972 in Darjeeling, 1978 in Calcutta after Barfi's arrest, 1978 in Calcutta before his arrest, 1978 in Darjeeling.  All this jumping about seems to be in service of building an intrigue that the movie doesn't really need, and makes the narrative a little confusing to follow at times.   But this is really a small quibble in an otherwise beautifully crafted movie that is delightful and warming - the narrative does sort itself out by the end, and a few moments of confusion are well worth the ample reward of tenderness, joy, and smiles.

Konchem ishtam konchem kashtam (2009)

కొంచెం ఇష్టం కొంచెం కష్టం

Dir. Kishore Kumar Pardasani

I haven't explored much in the way of Telugu movies, or even any Indian films in languages other than Hindi.  This is not for want of curiosity - it's a matter of self-preservation.  I tend to go for depth - when I decide to learn about something, I become obsessed and compelled to learn as much as I can.  And so the rabbit hole of south Indian cinema beckons me, but I hesitate to jump in. 

A few months ago, though, I stumbled across the lovely song "En kadhal solla," from a Tamil film called Paiyya.  And I was rather taken with its scrumptious star, Tamannah.  So when I had a chance recently (thanks to Beth, from whom I stole the screenshot at the top of this post) to watch Tamannah in an entire film, Konchem ishtam konchem kashtam ("a little sweetness, a little sorrow"), I decided to dip my toe in. What I got was a movie that, as its title promises, is sometimes quite sweet indeed. But - while it thankfully never gets all the way to sorrowful - Konchem ishtam konchem kashtam does reach tedium more than once.  At its weakest, in its plodding and often stupid second half, the movie is part Dilwale dulhaniya le jayenge, part The Parent Trap. And when it ventures into that territory, the movie is just not very interesting.

Geetha Subramanyam (Tamannah) has such a close relationship with her father Subramanyam (Nasser) that she made his name part of her own.  So Geetha is recalcitrant when Subramanyam sends her to Hyderabad to study.  Once there, though, she settles in comfortably, staying with her cousin's family, and developing a close mentoring relationship with a professor, Rajyalaxmi (Ramya Krishna).   And she meets a fellow student, Rajyalaxmi's son Siddhu (Siddharth), a skirt-chasing pleasure-seeker who doesn't impress her much at first.  But soon, she sees a tender side of him, and romance blossoms.  The stern Subramanyam, though, doesn't approve of her choice.  Siddhu's parents are separated, Subramanyam notes, and so Siddhu, with no role model for a successful partnership, would not make a suitable husband.  Siddhu offers Subramanyam a deal - if he reunites Rajyalaxmi with Siddhu's father Prakash (Prakash Raj), then Subramanyam will give his consent to the match between Siddhu and Geetha.  Now Siddhu faces only the small challenge of bringing his estranged parents back together.

This last leg of the story, the conceit of reuniting the estranged Rajyalaxmi and Prakash, is what drags Konchem ishtam konchem kastham into the weeds.   It is just too naïve and unbelievable to be satisfying.   Some movies are, of course, supposed to be fantasies, and one can be sure that an effervescent Telugu romance with impossibly beautiful young principals is not in any way striving for realism.   But the one-two punch of tired, silly plot elements - the girl who won't take a step without her father's approval, and the boy desperate to repair his broken childhood by rekindling romance between people who fell out of love two decades earlier - is just too much for the movie to bear; it bends under the strain, and grows insipid.   One is left wondering why we are made to sit through it - if the plot succeeds, it's facile and childish; and if it doesn't, why did the movie waste so much time on it?

Despite this weak final lap, the movie does show signs of smartness, though these are sometimes frustrating because the payoff is so unsatisfying.   The "rakish gadabout goes to great lengths to win over his girl's father" device is handled better here than in Dilwale dulhaniya le jayenge, where the insufferably arrogant Raj's approach is to lie and cheat the family at every turn.   Here, at least, Siddhu has to make good on his end of the bargain, asinine though it is - when he tries to deceive Subramanyam by hiring actors to play his parents, Geetha vetoes the scheme.  

And there is some unexpected modernness and maturity in the backstory of Rajyalaxmi and Prakash's separation, which was rooted in Rajyalaxmi's dissatisfaction with being left to the duties of housekeeping and childrearing while Prakash, taking her utterly for granted, pursued the challenges of building a business.   Even Subramanyam, as a stern father and leader of a traditional village, shows signs of progressiveness.  After all, Subramanyam insists that Geetha go study in Hyderabad because he wants to set a good example in the village in support of higher education for young women.   And it's not a knee-jerk "divorce is a blot on a family name" sort of reaction that drives his disapproval of Siddhu as a son-in-law, but the considerably more reasoned position regarding Siddhu's inexperience with healthy relationships.  Whether you buy that reasoning or not, at least it is an attempt to get beyond the expected clichés of an old-fashioned patriarch.

These signs of intelligent life aren't quite enough to overcome the eye-rolling tedium of the movie's second half - but fortunately, Konchem ishtam konchem kashtam offers enough other pleasures to make it, on balance, still an enjoyable watch.   It is colorfully and artfully shot, with a bright primary palate like a bowl of Skittles.   Some of the relationships are touchingly handled - Siddhu's relationship with Prakash faithfully represents the awkward chumminess that sometimes characterizes divorced dads trying to negotiate whether to be a parent or a buddy.  Rajyalaxmi is that rare appealing mature woman of substance, not a sort of character one gets to see too frequently in any culture's movies.   And I get a special pleasure from Geetha's attachment to her chosen surname, Subramanyam - she steadfastly refuses to take Siddhu's name on marriage, and in an adorable moment of capitulation Siddhu finally offers to become a Subramanyam himself.  It is always a treat to see a young woman asserting the first and strongest symbol of her identity in this way, and to see young men realizing that it's not a threat to them.

Above all else, though, when Konchem ishtam konchem kashtam works well, it rides the the appeal of its leads, Siddharth and Tamannah.  Key to any romantic story is that the audience get behind the pairing and root for it to succeed.  Konchem ishtam konchem kashtam invokes the mildly annoying trope in which the solid love of an uptight good girl can transform an immature jerk into a nice guy - but there is enough of the genuine in Siddhu's emergent, gentle sweetness to make this forgivable.   Siddhu does beat up a bunch of thugs (as, I am told, any Telugu hero worth his salt must), but he does it out of Geetha's sight, and refreshingly, his fisticuff prowess has no influence on her feelings for him.  On balance, he is a just a cute guy who has a bit of growing up to do, and watching him do it is not an unpleasant way to spend a movie - especially when he cuts loose in the movies stupendous songs, like this one in which he expresses his frustration with Subramanyam.

 

And then there is Tamannah. Oh, my - Tamannah. She is a little younger - okay, significantly younger - than most heroines who make my heart race, and I admit I feel a bit like pervy uncle at times watching her on screen while my brain short-circuits and the only thoughts I can express go something like this: I WANT TO LICK.

 

(Watch past the horrible Black Eyed Peas song in the beginning; it gets better, I promise.)

Apart from being most lickable and blessed with magnificent hips, Tamannah is more than adequate to what her role asks of her - which is really not all that much more than being fetching, whether laughingly scratching the faces of people she dislikes out of photographs, pouting, or tossing her head in uptight indignation.  Tamannah has the art of being fetching down cold, and she's just a delight to watch.

All the songs are terrific, both the slick compositions that are unmistakably Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, and the colorful, jubilant picturizations.  The songs, in fact, are really where this movie and its adorable leads shine the most brightly.  The story may be artless, the comedy side plots a mixed bag.  (These revolve around Geetha's cricket-obsessed uncle (Brahmanandam) or Siddhu's inexplicably middle-aged chum (Venu Madhav).)   But get Tamannah and Siddharth together on a screen sparkling with gorgeous bursts of vibrant color - preferably with a passel of dancers and one of Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy's springy songs behind them - and you'll quickly forget how laboriously you had to slog through the scenes between.  These sometime sweetnesses really do make the whole worthwhile.

 

Tamannah playing rugby in the rain? Kids doing air guitar? What's not to love?

Mahal (1949)

महल

Dir. Kamal Amrohi

Madhubala.  Ashok Kumar.  The oldest Hindi movie I've seen to date, my first from the 1940s.  How could Mahal ("mansion") be anything but fascinating?  The answer is:  A plodding pace, lengthy expositions of nonsense nonlogic, and a bizarre storyline in which every character seems to suffer from one or another form of mental illness conspire to create a movie that is, in the words of my Twitter friend Gobbledyspook, "Atmospheric, but meh." 

Hari Shankar (Ashok Kumar) has inherited a moody mansion on the outskirts of Allahabad. On his first night there, his gardener narrates a peculiar story of love and tragedy that climaxes with the mysterious disappearance of the home's builder and his lover.  Hari is stunned to discover, from a portrait blown off the wall by a stormy gust, that the man of the tale is a dead ringer for himself.  Late that night, he is bewitched by a ghostly singing, and entranced by the apparition of a young woman, Kamini (Madhubala).  On urging of his barrister friend Shrinath (Kanu Roy), Hari abandons the mansion and leaves for Kanpur, where he marries Ranjana (Vijayalaxmi), the woman his father has chosen for him.  But Kamini's eerie singing haunts him - Hari returns to the mansion on compulsion, driven in late night trances to follow Kamini throughout the grounds.  The story she tells him terrifies and enthralls him - he is the reincarnation of the mansion's builder and Kamini, trapped between worlds (or something) when he died, has been roaming the mansions twisting corridors ever since, waiting for his return.  Hari is driven to ever more bizarre lengths to uncover the secret that will reunite him with his eternal love - maybe even driven to murder.

I wish I were a funnier writer so that I could do true justice to this bizarro movie.  Reviewing it straight just won't convey how weird and off-the-rails the story really is.  The DVD print opens with this contrite confession:

But if it were completely honest, it would say: 

Hari's symptoms are more indicative of mental illness than janam-transcending love.  He suffers from night sweats, auditory hallucinations, and a mysterious somnambulic state that causes him to wander nightly at 2:00 AM and repeatedly fall down sets of stairs.  None of the lengthy and outlandish sequences of exposition explain this strange behavior, but insanity seems to run in his family - in one particularly weird sequence, his father hands Hari a loaded revolver and orders Hari to kill him on the spot.  Kamini, too, is not quite right in the head. In her bizarro-world logic, she and Hari can be reunited only if her spirit occupies the body of the girl who serves Hari's tea, and Hari murders this girl.  Go ahead and read that sentence again - I'll wait.  I'm fairly sure it won't make any more sense the second time around. But the besotted Hari buys it hook, line, and sinker.  He even produces his own, even more nonsensical, embellishment upon it at the movie's tragically ironic conclusion, which feels like something O Henry might have written under the influence of profound depression. 

There seems to be no one in this film who is not deranged in one way or another.  In an attempt to distract Hari from his fixation on Kamini, Shrinath hires some women of dubious repute to seduce his friend.  The result is an uncanny song set in the creepiest brothel ever, populated by women whose dead-eyed expressions are not the least bit tantalizing.

Hari is understandably unimpressed, and flees the place at the stroke of 2, when Kamini's uncanny voice again calls to him from the ether.

Ranjana, Hari's beleaguered bride, suffers from debilitating depression as well, but at least hers is well-founded - Ranjana, after all, is married to a psychotic man who is obsessed with an apparition, and who drags her on endless exhausting treks into the mountains.  There, he visits mystics and primitive priests, hoping to find - well, whatever it is that he is hoping to find.  Poor Ranjana is horrified by one ritual he forces her to witness, a brutal trial and capital punishment of an allegedly adulterous mountain woman.  The young woman is forced to dance (and looks preternaturally cheerful doing so, considering the circumstances) while a man who looks like an extra from Amrish Puri's grotesque scenes in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom chucks knives at her. 

It's no wonder that Ranjana loses her shit - anyone would, married to such a certifiable nutjob as Hari.  (My friend Sonal, with whom I watched Mahal, points out that it was rather brave of Ashok Kumar to take on such a demented role during the upswing of his career.)

Mahal is not all a gruesome parade of horribles.  Ashok Kumar and Madhubala, after all, are both impossibly beautiful, and there are worse fates than spending the duration of a movie gazing at their lovely faces, especially as young as they are here.

Madhubala's transcendent beauty matches well with the hauntingly lovely strains of "Aayega, aayega," perhaps the only worthy legacy of this movie.  But even these quickly become repetitive, as highlighted by Minimal Bollywood Poster's coincidentally recent take on the film.

There is some creative and wonderful cinematography in Mahal - shots from interesting angles, and shots cleverly framed through arches and wrought-work.  

All of this does contribute to the dark, spooky atmosphere of the film, which begins on the proverbial dark and stormy night, and pretty much stays parked in that lot throughout.  Indeed, the movie feels like an extended two-and-a-half hour cinematic Bulwer-Lytton award.   

The movie's pacing is an attempt, too, to establish the otherworldy atmosphere of a ghost tale - it's rare to see a film where characters consistently talk and move quite so slowly.  In one excruciating scene, Kamini takes Hari on a tortoiselike ambulation through the mansion's secret passageways, during which she explains their past-life relationship.  She walks him up a stone stairway, step by languorous step, only to turn around at the end and return, just as ponderously, to where they came from.  It's atmospheric, all right, but the atmosphere is stifling.

In short, even ever-increasing pyaar for the Ashok-Madhubala jodi isn't quite enough to make me glad I gave a few hours to watching Mahal. But it isn't a total loss - I had a much better time writing this review than I did watching the movie.  And between this and Ek saal, I have the seeds of a nice collection of shots of Ashok Kumar gazing at pictures of himself.

(The latter from Ek saal.)