Filmi Geek

Aandhi (1975)

आंधी

Dir. Gulzar

That a nation has anointed a female leader or two is in no way a sign that the women of that nation are treated with equality or full respect by either the powerful or the public.  The recent revelations by U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of her treatment at the hands (literally, sometimes) of certain male colleagues makes that point all too clear in my own country.  Gulzar's excellent Aandhi highlights some of the ways it has been true in India, even at a time when the national reins were held by Indira Gandhi, arguably the most powerful woman in that country's history. 

The focus of Aandhi, Aarti Devi (Suchitra Sen), is in some ways based upon Indira Gandhi - close enough to cause trouble with the censors during the Emergency, as they forced the reshooting of some scenes before allowing its rerelease.  But the film is not so much about that interesting, polarizing woman herself.  Rather, it is about what Aarti must sacrifice, as a woman and as a human being, in exchange for the power and the privilege of public service.  

As the film opens, Aarti Devi is the front-runner in a hotly contested election, and her chief opponent Chandersen (Om Shivpuri) is gaining ground.  Chandersen is a self-proclaimed man of the people, whose rhetoric contrasts the wealthy, sheltered, foreign-educated Aarti Devi with his own poor background (though his campaign is backed by an industrialist).  Aarti's crafty and not always above-board campaign manager, Lallu Lal (Om Prakash), commandeers a wing of a hotel as headquarters for an extended campaign stop.  What Lallu does not know is that the manager of this hotel, JK (Sanjeev Kumar), is Aarti's estranged husband, whom she has not seen in years.  

The unexpected reunion rattles both Aarti and JK.  They begin to spend time together between Aarti's press engagements and speeches, sharing tea and nostalgic meals poignantly served by Brinda (AK Hangal), JK's servant, who has known Aarti since she was child; she addresses him as Kaka, completing the domestic picture that draws both JK and Aarti in.  They clearly still share tremendous affection for one another, made awkward by years of separation.  (At one point Aarti goes to call JK in for dinner and hesitates, unsure how familiarly to address him.)   But as each of them reminisces about the growth and the souring of their relationship, we see in flashback why these obviously tender feelings were not enough to keep their marriage intact. 

These flashbacks, and the response to rumors in the film's present sparked by the couple's late-night strolls, underscore that even the apparently powerful Aarti Devi is contained and owned by the rigid expectations of patriarchy.  In Aarti's youth, her industrialist father K. Bose (Rehman) opposes her marriage to JK, because Bose has higher expectations for her than keeping house and breeding children.  Yet this is not a sign of Bose's progressivism; he wants her in politics to ensure that he has a politician in his pocket when his business needs one.  Aarti's five years at Oxford, which Bose does not wish to see wasted, are an investment in his company's future, not in his daughter's autonomous personhood.

And so Aarti's desire for domesticity, expressed in her marriage to JK, is a kind of rebellion against Bose's control.  But when she grows restless in that rebellion and becomes involved in politics, she affronts JK's sense of ownership over her; he declares in so many words that she belongs to him, and must obey his command to quit public life, or cease - almost by definition - to be his wife.  To be fair to JK, Aarti is so caught up in her work as to be thoughtless and insulting to him, cavalierly suggesting that he leave the hotel business for a more high-tone job that will make her look better in upper-crust society.  But when their interests clash, it is Aarti whose identity is compromised. A woman can be a politician or a wife, but not both.

And in Aandhi's present, simply being seen walking with a man is enough to subject Aarti to public opprobrium and jeopardize her political career.  Rallies form at which she is publicly shamed, her morals called into question.  No matter that the man is her husband; this fact is unknown and perhaps of little interest to her detractors.  There is nothing progressive about voting a woman into power, when in exchange she is held to a standard that would never apply to a male politician, and expected to be pure and superhuman, a goddess.  There is a reason they call her Devi.

This push-me, pull-you between the desire for power and the call to service on the one hand, and the simple human need for love, companionship, and family on the other, is an exhausting strain on Aarti, conveyed in a thoroughly masterful performance by Suchitra Sen (notwithstanding a Bengali accent that even my nonnative ear could detect).  Her expressive face registers deep intelligence and determined weariness; though Aarti looks tired of the relentless political maneuvering she must perform, there is also an archness to her demeanor, always on the edge of breaking into a wry smile.  And the expression of control, the firmness she shows when speaking resolute words in a press conference, seems a willful facade that melts in the gentle warmth of the reunion with JK.  Suchitra Sen's performance is a pure conduit for Aandhi's narrative force; even if no words were spoken, you could read from her face the seductiveness of the notion of abandoning the constant labor of public life, and returning to comforting domestic simplicity.

Aandhi's narrative, though, is not so oversimplified; its thoughtful conclusion acknowledges the reality that domesticity would never suit Aarti Devi, while leaving a sense that her estrangement from JK is over, that some kind of tender relationship can survive, even if not a traditional marriage.

As satisfying as this relationship arc is, Aandhi is also a very good story of political gamesmanship. Lallu Lal and his counterparts in Chandersen's campaign maneuver their pieces around the board, manipulating the press, each other, their financial backers, and even sometimes the candidates themselves; Lallu Lal is often cagey with Aarti, keeping her in the dark even as he pulls various tactical strings.  Daubed on this cynical backdrop are bits and pieces that might read as satire if they rang just a little less true.  In one scene, Aarti Devi inspects an array of campaign posters, and complains that too many of them are printed in English.  "There should be more in Hindi," she scolds, in English - crisply expressing one of Aandhi's themes, that leaders proclaiming to be for the people are not necessarily of the people. 

Another superb bit of political wryness comes in one of the film's fantastic songs, a qawwali sung at a political rally, in which the assembled rabble offers sarcastic greetings to the politicians who are putting in their appearances:  "Salaam kijiye, ali janaab aaye hain/yeh paanch saalo ka dene hisaab aaye hain."  This rally does not end well for Aarti Devi.

 

And so Aandhi is two excellent films in one, loaded with trenchant observations about the nature of politics, sympathetic exposure of the price that women in particular must pay to achieve any kind of worldly power, and a very tender examination of how a couple's relationship grows and changes over the years.  It is a tremendously rewarding piece of cinema. 

   

The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014)

Dir: Lasse Hallström

This Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg co-production is pleasant enough while it is happening, but like an empty meal that leaves you hungry an hour later, doesn't stand up to much contemplation afterwards.  It is so watered-down and so Hollywooded-up as to leave nothing satisifying to chew on.  It is a better movie to watch than to think about.

As a story of an Indian family putting down roots in the French countryside, it could have something to say about clash of cultures, but nothing here ventures beyond the facile and obvious; for the most part the family fits seamlessly into French life and are welcomed comfortably by everyone in the little town except for one exceptionally snooty chef and a handful of overtly violent xenophobes.  As the story of a young man discovering his culinary passion and talent in the blending of his native Indian cuisine with the structured formality of French cooking, it could have been a richly glorious food movie; but there is surprisingly little in the way of cooking or food presentation or even interesting food talk.  Imagine a food movie made by filmmakers who aren't all that interested in or knowledgable about food.  In one scene the budding chef Hassan (Manish Dayal) asks his French friend and rival Marguerite (Charlotte Le Bon) what to do with fresh corn.  Grill it over an open flame, Marguerite suggests, and Hassan looks as though the whole brilliant world of sophisticated French technique has opened to him - the filmmakers either don't know, don't care, or assume the audience won't know that fresh corn is grilled over an open flame on every other streetcorner in Hassan's native Mumbai.  In the universe of The Hundred-Foot Journey, Hassan learns French cooking from books, not in a kitchen; the many hours of trials and failures that must have accompanied his self-taught mastery of the five basic French sauces (Hollandaise, Béchamel, etc.) are not even hinted at. Instead, we are only shown the revelation of his perfectly-executed samples to a stunned Marguerite.  Again and again this film skips the interesting parts of the culinary odyssey and cuts to mastery by fiat, genius because the script says so.  

Equally silly is the representative traditionalist's reaction to Hassan's injection of Indian ideas into the established culinary landscape of the French countryside.  Consider this exchange between film's haughty representative of La Grande Cuisine, Madame Mallory (Helen Mirren) and the boy wonder Hassan, as he instructs her to add such exotica to an omelette as chili powder and cilantro.  "Why change a recipe that is two hundred years old?" Mallory asks, horrified.  Hassan replies, "Maybe two hundred years is long enough."  Cue swelling score, remove tray of freshly-baked eyerolls from the oven.  The amount of pearl-clutching Mallory does in scenes like this is as bizarre as the notion that a Michelin-starred chef in the 21st century would be gobsmacked by chili powder and cilantro.  

On the other hand, it's Helen Mirren, amirite?  Nobody goes to a movie like this one for novel or trenchant observations on East and West and whether the twain shall meet.  They go to see Helen Mirren and Om Puri (as Hassan's father, Abbas Kadam) chew up the French scenery.  And in this respect, The Hundred-Foot Journey absolutely delivers.  Om Puri is big and loud, offering his trademark combination of gruffness and charm in a role that hits just about every stereotype there is of the bombastic Indian patriarch and still manages to be sweet and winning and a lot of fun.  (Fans of Indian films - that is, nearly all of you reading this - will appreciate a vanishingly brief cameo by Juhi Chawla in the film's opening scenes, as Hassan's mother.  Haila!)

And for her part, Helen Mirren's Madame Mallory is by turns pinched and uptight, and utterly exasperated, deflating in that sigh of disgust that is so stereotypically French.  And as long as she is villainous, pursing her mouth in that uniquely Gallic sneer of contempt, she is fun, even if she is twirling her proverbial moustaches.  In one scene, the mayor warns Mallory that her crusade against the Kadams runs the risk that the townsfolk will perceive her to be in sympathy with the ugly, overtly racist strain of sentiment in the town.  "Monsieur Mayor," she returns, with a French accent thick as vichyssoise, "I am rarely perceived to be in sympathy with anyone." It is a decent laugh, and there are many such that season the script. 

The amusing villainy can't last, however; one thing that makes this story so very Hollywood is that Madame Mallory is fully redeeemed and then some, eventually so thoroughly defanged and even cuddly that it is almost sweet when a little romance develops between her and Abbas Kadam.  This about-face is abrupt and too perfectly complete, obliterating any possible lingering stain on Mallory's character.  When the movie shows us some of that nasty xenophobic element to which the mayor referred, both the script and Madame Mallory fall all over themselves to make completely clear that her rageful, irrational hatred of the Kadam family is nothing like their rageful, irrational hatred of them.  She may be a hyper-traditionalist, controlling loon, but she's no racist.  The result is that another character's bad act turns Madame Mallory from the villain to the prodigal hero's chief supporter, literally overnight.  It doesn't make a great deal of narrative sense. 

And what of that hero?  Hassan's odyssey is nominally the central narrative of the film - the titular hundred-foot journey is his, from the chaotic, curry-infused kitchen of his own restaurant to the precise classical formality of Madame Mallory's restaurant across the road.  But this is too much told in shorthand, in a script that seems to place the art of cooking in ingredients rather than technique, and a director who must think that cooking isn't all that interesting to watch.  The long and unnecessary epilogue could have been elided to make room for the good stuff that is missing first two-thirds.  Still, the end of the film is pleasant, the prodigal son's return, as he realizes that the best ingredients are those that come from home, whether home is Mumbai or a little forest by a little town nestled in a little French valley.  

 

Parents' nightmare: Mardaani (2014) and Siddharth (2013)

By coincidence, in the span of one weekend I watched Siddharth (dir. Richie Mehta) and the latest Yash Raj production, Mardaani (dir. Pradeep Sarkar), two films both nominally concerned with India's terrible child-kidnaping and child-trafficking scourges.   A title card at the end of Mardaani notes that on average, a child is abducted every eight minutes in India.  This is almost too staggering to contemplate, and both films help you get your mind around this horrendous fact by personalizing it, giving name and face and voice to the children or the families.    And yet the two films could not be more different.  Siddharth, contemplative and meticulous, is a sad study, focused on one family's loss rather than the fate of the missing child.  Mardaani takes a broader view, making explicit what in Siddharth is left to the imagination.  And, it taps an emotional vein of vengeance more than pity.  Mardaani, brash and unsubtle, is all about rage.  

As Mardaani begins, the cop at its center, Shivani Shivaji Roy (Rani Mukherjee) Dabanggs around Mumbai, all swagger and bravado. Unlike Chulbul Pandey, though, she is incorruptible - perhaps Shivani is more like Ajay Lal, the tough cop described in Suketu Mehta's Maximum City who broke the 1993 bombings.  Shivani uses interrogation techniques described in that book, like the merciless feeding of sweets without water, to wrest information from the criminals she collars.  She leads a dramatic raid on a medium-time gangster, earning exasperated sighs from her by-the-book commander, and spontaneously breaks up a politico-religious mob trashing a shop, slapping around its stunned ringleader, a guy twice her size.  But Shivani shows a motherly side too; she and her husband are raising a niece whose parents have died, and she serves as a surrogate aunty for an orphaned kid, Pyari, whom she rescued from the streets and and placed in a shelter.  Pyari goes missing, and the investigative trail that Shivani follows to find her leads to a child trafficking ring led by an arrogant psychopath who calls himself Walt (Tahir Bhasin).  Shivani's mission to break up the ring is professional, and it becomes increasingly personal too, as Walt taunts her with phone calls and worse. 

Rani Mukherjee, with a good script and in capable directorial hands, is a very good actor, and she handles the challenge of Shivani Shivaji Roy with an appropriate blend of cocksure strutting and vulnerability.  It is not an easy task.  Shivani's Chulbul Pandey routine edges on the cartoonish, and it might have been tempting to balance the brashness of it with exaggerated squishiness in the film's more emotional scenes.  For the most part, though, Rani handles both with adequate coherence, showing a consistent theory of Shivani's character.  At her best, she blends them perfectly, as in a scene right before the interval where, on the phone with Walt, she keeps her voice even and confident for his benefit, while her face twists with the beginnings of tears in a display of vulnerable emotion that only the audience can see.  Shivani Shivaji Roy talks a tough game and packs the punch to back it up, but in moments like these she is a human being too, and holding herself together through this chase does take some effort.  

And in the end, arguably, Shivani Shivaji Roy breaks.  The end of Mardaani, like the end of Mrityudand, is a sort of triumph of female will, a catastrophic bursting of the dam of oppression and suffering in a torrent of revenge.  It is not clear whether one is intended to cheer at this turning of the tables, or be appalled.  It is a terribly bleak idea, that the only way for a weak and oppressed class - children, or women, or both - to wrest power from merciless, violent men is to play the game on the same terms they do, with more merciless violence.  The mardaani of the title may refer to the kind of masculinity that endorses and patronizes and profits from the vile treatment of Pyari and the other kidnapped girls, who are dolled up, groped, auctioned, raped, and more.  Or it may refer to the kind of masculinity that Shivani works so hard to embody in her small, strong frame, the kind that speaks the language of the fist and the firearm.  Indeed, it may refer to both.  But it is grim and sad to think that the only way to defeat the exploitative type of masculinity is to adopt the values of the savage, bloodthirsty kind.

And yet, if the repugnant child exploitation of Mardaani is taken as a proxy for the horrendous high-profile rape incidents that have driven India's discourse about gender for the last couple of years - as I think it must be - then perhaps it reflects more than just the general statement that the only way the powerless can save themselves is to take up the weapons of the powerful and bash their heads in with them.  It reflects the tremendous unanswered rage that many women must feel in the face of one outrageous rape case after another.   In Mardaani, politicians patronize Walt's services, pawing and assaulting and dehumanizing the girls.  In the real world, politicians and judges make outrageously demeaning statements about women who ask for it by not keeping to their place.  In that world it's not entirely unreasonable to start to doubt the effectiveness of a political solution.  In that world, headlines about women striking back, attacking and beating and emasculating their attackers, become increasingly common.  Mardaani taps into a vengeful strain of the zeitgeist, and expresses it in a filmi form that is undoubtedly as satisfying for some as it is unsettling for others. 

***

Unlike Mardaani,  Siddharth leaves to the audience's imagination the fate endured by its titular boy.  Siddharth's father, Mahendra Saini (Rajesh Tailang), sends him from their home in Delhi to work a stint at a trolley factory in Ludhiana.  The boy never returns, and Mahendra sets out to find him, on a journey that takes him as much through his own heart as it does from city to city.  

Mahendra, a melancholy zipper-repairer struggling to make ends meet, is at first perplexed at the notion that there is anything irresponsible in sending Siddharth off into illegal child labor.  Why have a son, he asks, if not to put him to work?  As the story progresses, though, Mahendra bends under a growing burden of guilt.  Whatever Siddharth is enduring is left unnamed - the closest he comes to knowing that is a sort of urban legend given to him by another boy at the Ludhiana factory, that the children who vanish wind up in Dongri.  Mahendra, who lived all his life in Delhi, has never heard of this Mumbai neighborhood, and neither does anyone he talks to for a good while.  Dongri begins to take on a mythical quality, both the mysterious, sinister end-of-the-line for abducted kids and the mystical holy grail of Mahendra's search.  

Mahendra's distress is not just for the unknown whereabouts of his son, but also the anxiety endured by his wife Suman (Tannishtha Chatterjee in a hard-eyed, tense, excellent emotional performance) and their little daughter (Khushi Mathur).  And so Mahendra grows increasingly determined to find Siddharth, though following the trail to Ludhiana and eventually Mumbai imposes great financial strain on the family.  At one point, Mahendra humiliates himself to an extortionate thug (Mukesh Chhabra) for the right to work the neighborhood near the Delhi rail station, hoping to find someone who knows where the mythical Dongri might be.  He sells Suman's jewelry, too, and reluctantly accepts cash from relatives. 

Siddharth is shot and acted in a street-level, realistic style that draws you right in to the swirl of the city.   Most scenes have no background score (save a few montage sequences with oddly swelling Western strains), so that when Mahendra sits on a streetcorner the ambient sounds of Delhi are vividly present; the constant honk of horns of all sizes, the putter of tuk-tuk motors, the clatter of bikes and scooters, the squeal and rumble of buses, the shouting of people.  Low camera angles put you on the ground, crouched beside Mahendra as he fixes zippers for people like him and people much wealthier, or inside the house beside Suman as dust motes swirl in lone rays of sunlight that find their way into the gali where they live.  

This is enormously engaging, this Delhi presented in unstylized style.  But the palpable realism of Siddharth also makes its grim and unresolved ending inevitable.  And yet the movie is so absorbing  that anything else would be gratingly false.  Like a Shyam Benegal film, it makes mind-boggling injustice accessible by projecting it on a human scale, a close focus on a small number of people deeply affected by a something that most people are accustomed to thinking of as a "global issue," described in human-rights reports in terms of vast numbers and statistics.  The result is a beautiful, harrowing film, deeply sympathetic, that exposes the raw realities left behind by a child abduction in a way that Mardaani, for all its explicit exhibition and all its fantastical acts of vengeance, cannot.       

Astitva (2000)

अस्तित्व

Dir. Mahesh Manjrekar

I give Astitva full marks for trying.  It is courageous in its determination to say things about female desire that are rarely said, not just in the movies but in societal discourse at large.  It offers a woman, Aditi (Tabu), neglected by her husband for months on end while he travels abroad for business.  Lonely and hungry for contact, Aditi gives in to many months of pent-up desire and sleeps with her music teach Malhar Kamat (Mohnish Bahl).  Many years later, Aditi's husband Shree (Sachin Khedkar) discovers this secret that Aditi has kept, and that their son Aniket (Sunil Barve) is Malhar Kamat's, not his.  Shree is mortified - his pride assaulted, he perceives his manhood called into question - and he scorns Aditi and and their marriage.

In Astitva, Aditi is the aggrieved party, by far the more sympathetic character. Her tryst with Malhar Kamat is presented as an understandable response to deep neglect by a deeply self-absorbed man, a moment of weakness which she powerfully regrets, and for which she atones with decades of silent and absolute devotion to her family.  Astitva does not judge Aditi for having sexual needs or for giving into them.  To the contrary, the film's very point is that women, just like men, experience sexual desire, but unlike men, are expected to subjugate that desire to satisfying the needs of men, securing their egos, and keeping them happy at any cost.

The film unequivocally takes Aditi's side. It does so by making Shree a cartoonishly self-absorbed jerk.  You can almost imagine how his mother must have doted on him; this is a man who was raised to believe the universe begins and ends with his needs and desires and comfort.  There is no doubt that such men exist, but it is narratively lazy for Shree to be quite so repugnant.  Astitva also stacks the deck in its portrayal of society at large, which is represented here by an old friend of Shree's, Ravi (Ravindra Mankani) and his progressive divorcee wife Meghna (Smita Jaykar). These two are relentlessly critical of Shree and supportive of Aditi, which is nice, but doesn't seem especially realistic.  Wouldn't the society that creates men like Shree be likely to support the worldview it inculcates in him?  There could have been someone in the film to take that point of view. 

Still, in Astitva's strong moments, it goes places that movies rarely - if ever - dare to go.  Aditi's final speech ticks off a list of talking points that become increasingly bold and shocking.  She observes that women have desires, same as men.  Shree has affairs with women while he is on the road, but expects complete fidelity from her, alone at home for long stretches.  So, she asks him in nearly these words, what is she supposed to do when she gets horny?  This is already a remarkable acknowledgement of female sexual desire, on par with the Shabana Azmi's speech at the climax of Fire.  Aditi goes further, though.  She upbraids Shree for satisfying his own needs without restraint and even without consent. "You have raped me many times," she says.  The idea that sex within a marriage can be rape is not universally accepted (particularly in India) now, a decade and a half later.  It is a very bold position for a movie to take. 

It is also Astitva at its best.  It takes until these final few minutes for Tabu to wake up from a lifeless, morose performance and finaly bring some energy to the role.  It is good, an intense and quiet sort of energy, and it is worthy of Tabu, but it comes at the end of a dull, unsubtle, largely artless film.  Despite its courageous and important ideas, Astitva's execution is terribly flawed.  The movie beats you about the head with the cudgel of Shree's sexism and egotism.  In one scene, Shree belittles Aditi in front of Ravi and Meghna, insists no woman in his family will ever work, and opens and reads a certified letter delivered for Aditi.  In the next scene, Meghna, alone with Ravi, exclaims that Shree is "a male chauvinist pig!"  Thank you, scriptwriters - I could not have figured that out on my own without Meghna to make it explicit.  And who says "male chauvinist pig" anyhow? 

It is a mystery why so many movies about social issues - and especially feminist ones - suffer from such ham-fisted execution.  From Amu to Lajja, Bawandar to Water, and even, I admit, my cherished Fire, many message films have had righteous intent but been badly miscalibrated.  Satyajit Ray and Shyam Benegal were able to construct delicate narratives,  conveying their messages in films like Charulata and Ankur through stories, emotions, and symbolism.   Astitiva, though, is stiflingly literal, and suffers from an aggravating excess of exposition.  Aditi's relationship with Malhar Kamat is shown in flashback songs and images, but these are narrated by Aditi in voiceover.  Instead of interpreting a narrative of loneliness and desire, we learn from Aditi's say-so that she felt lonely and desirous. Similarly, we know of Shree's affairs only because his friend mentions them; this, too, could have been shown instead of narrated.  In place of engaging narrative and characters, in place of subtlety and theme, we get bare exposition and bombastic dialogue.

Nor is there much in the way of visual symbolism or artistry.  The film is staged like a play, and not a very well-wrought one.  One notable exception is a song in which Aditi rolls around in the grass looking very amorous indeed (need it be said that Tabu does this staggeringly well?), and eventually gazes lustily at a hunky Mohnish Bahl, twirling in a rain-soaked white kurta; here, for once, we are invited to share an experience with a character, and are shown rather than told what she feels.  Too, the scene is a clever visual turn, upending the customary male-gaze centered rain scene.  

 

Uff.

Otherwise, though, visual presentation simply seems unimportant to Manjrekar.  There is not even an attempt to age the characters, though the film's present and flashback time frames are separated by 25 years.  So 50-year old Aditi is indistinguishable from 25-year-old Aditi, except perhaps for the addition of spectacles.  While it's true that the aging of characters is rarely convincing, the absence of even a nod in its direction is distracting;  Tabu plays the mother of an actor five years her senior (Barve) without so much as a dusting of grey in her hair.

And so, while the message of Astitva is important, refreshing, and brave, it is somewhat lost in the earnest unsubtlety and failure of cinematic craft.  I want to love Astitva for even acknowledging that women experience lust, so rare is this basic statement of female humanity.  But instead of being a compelling and provocative film, Astitva is an over-eager after school special, a Very Special Episode, but just not a very artful piece of cinema.       

The Train (1970)

Dir. Ravee Nagaich

Notwithstanding a fairly unremarkble (if not downright dumb) plot and a star I do not especially like, The Train is a terrifically fun mystery-suspense sort of movie that more than makes up in style what it lacks in other elements.  In both visual sensibility and story-framing, it is almost as good as a Vijay Anand gem.  And even though Rajesh Khanna is in nearly every scene, he somehow restrains the froggy, droopy-eyed mumbling that makes him so doughy and unpleasant in certain other films. 

One of the many pleasures of The Train is its abundance of Helen, who not only gets two songs but plays a substantial role as well, as Lily, the gangster's moll who is also in love with our hero, Inspector Shyam (Khanna).  In a noteworthy detail, Lily is a former college classmate of Shyam; it is not so common for a vamp to have an education.  But if you have ever seen a movie in which Helen plays a character, Lily's ultimate fate won't surprise you.  It occurs to me to advise Hindi film characters that if they want to survive to the film's end, they should not be played by Helen. 

  

Like a Vijay Anand film, The Train motors along at a fairly engaging pace.  This is partly because it foregoes the development of a romance.  At the film's opening.  Shyam and Neeta (Nanda) are already seriously involved.  This is a smart move, as it trims the story, keeping the focus mostly on the crimes and the intrigue.  But it is clever, too, in that it raises the stakes; when the romance goes wrong, there is a sense of a deep relationship in jeopardy, not the cheap fluff of a love-at-first-sight infatuation that just began a few minutes ago. 

And so The Train remains gripping, even as the story grows a little stupid.  Neeta and Shyam are on the rocks because Shyam, ever the upstanding police inspector, turned in Neeta's father when he escaped from prison after being accused (falsely, Neeta insists) of murder.  Meanwhile Shyam is on the trail of some murderous jewel thieves led by "Number 1" (Madan Puri).  The cartel operates a hotel where Neeta has taken a job, and where Lily dances, when she is not trying to seduce Shyam.  Soon Shyam is saddled with a buffoonish witness, Pyarelal (Rajendranath), who has been conned by a member of the gang - a woman who looks a whole lot like Neeta.  Shyam must endure traveling around with Pyarelal for while, tracking this mysterious woman from city to city on the Calcutta Express (the titular train), so that Pyarelal can identify her.  

In another clever pacing maneuver, the obligatory comic side plot of movies of this era is absorbed into the main story in the form of Pyarelal, who is doofusy but good-hearted.  Pyarelal is more than a little stupid; he surely tries Shyam's patience, though Shyam maintains a facade of equanimity.  But I do love Rajendranath, big lovable teddy bear that he is.  He projects the most delightful, guileless sweetness.  And since he is part of the story, his goofy antics do not anchor the motion of the film the way comic side-plot characters so often do.

The Train makes use of some interesting visual metaphors as well, mostly through several rapid-cut sequences.  One such intercut sequence of images conveys a sort of dream-state version of Shyam and Neeta's romance; it seems like the beginning of a song picturization.  But it ends abrubptly with an overhead shot of the two of them, reclining in a patch of grass among a flurry of falling flower petals, as Shyam dreamily asks, "kya yeh asli hai, ya sapna?" The clever sequence invites us into Shyam's sleepy, love-warmed state of mind.  Detailed bits of craft like this help to elevate The Train above its pulpy plot, to something beyond mere timepass, making it a memorable, stylish piece of cinema.