Filmiholic : Meri duniya - bilkul filmi

Amar, Akbar, Anthony, Manmohan Desai’s 1977 movie  takes the separated-at-birth, double role device prevalent in many Hindi movies over the years and puts a twist on it.  

The set-up is this:    driver Kishenlal (played by Pran), just home from having taken the fall for his boss, Robert, and gone to jail, finds his three small sons starving and his wife, Bharti, ill with TB.   Enfuriated that Robert has not kept his word to support the family financially, the father sets off to confront him.

While he’s gone, the long-suffering Bharati (Nirupa Roy, who else?), pens a suicide note, leaves it with the boys, and runs off to do herself in, so as not to be a burden to the family.   Over at Robert’s palatial home, he and Kishenlal have a showdown and a shootout, and Kishenlal escapes in a car that, unbeknownst to him, contains gold bricks (albeit some very light ones).   Upon finding his  baby  sons and the note, he piles the kids into the car, and zooms off, Robert’s men in pursuit, to look for the missus.   He stops briefly to deposit them at the foot of a statue of Gandhi, telling them to stay put.   The baddies find and chase him.    He crashes, police and crooks think he’s dead, but, he’s actually escaped with a box of those ultra-lite gold briquettes.   Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Bharati runs to her designated suicide spot, but before she can reach wherever it is, a tree branch falls on her, and PLAF! she’s suddenly rendered blind.

(You with me so far?)

So, we have one father – Kishenlal – in hiding, one mother – Bharati – blind and home to an empty  house, and the three babies, what happens to them?   One wanders to the road in search of food and is hit by a car and injured, and rescued by the police.   He is raised as Amar.     Another lands up at the door of a church and is taken in by a priest.   He is raised as Anthony.   The smallest is found alone and crying by the Gandhi statue, and taken home by a Muslim tailor.   This is Akbar.

Fast forward to the present.   Akbar (Rishi Kapoor) is a qawwali singer and friend of Anthony (Amitabh Bachchan), who’s a bit of  a  chancer, running a small bar and giving 50% of his earnings to the poor.   Amar (Vinod Khanna) has become a police officer.   By a series of circumstances, before the opening credits have yet to roll, Bharati is in the hospital in need of a tranfusion for her rare blood type, and lo and behold, the 3 guys just happen to be there and match, but of course, no one realizes that they’re all related.

As with Deewar and Zanjeer, Amitabh Bachchan’s wardrobe is fantastically trendy  in this film.   In one scene, he appears in a red leather jacket, and bell-bottom jeans with a patch, the ubiquitous ’70s decoration, two fingers making a peace sign in the red, white and blue stars and stripes of the American flag, topped off with a floppy newsboy cap.   He dons a different color cap in another scene, and also rotates his jewelry between an oversize ankh (how Valley of the Dolls!) on a silver chain around his neck, or a cross large enough to belong to a bishop.  

Not to be outdone, Rishi Kapoor, the Qawwali King, shows up in one scene for his concert wearing purple trousers, a mesh wife beater (or cut banyan, depending on from whence you hail) topped off by a see-thru green shirt, lavender scarf  and oversize sunglasses.

For the sold-out qawwali concert (where we hear the song Pardah Hai Pardah), upon bumping into the blind and ticketless Bharati who’s come to hear Akbar and give him a flower, Anthony behaves like the perfect son and tells her that he has a special pass to get them in, and once in the hall “You sit on my seat and I’ll sit at your feet.”   Hai rabba.   With celluloid sons like this, Indian kids in real life have got a lot to live up to.

The three brothers find three equally cute girlfriends.   Akbar’s is Salma, a  fetching Muslim doctor (played by Neetu Singh) whose father disapproves of his daughter’s choice of suitor, though he’s eventually won over, not by the hijras who serenade him, but  after Akbar saves him and Salma from a fire.   Amar falls for Laxmi, a woman suspect (played by Shabana Azmi) who he’s been sent  undercover to  tail, as she’s been implicated in some hitchhikings-cum-robberies.   When we first catch a glimpse of her, she’s poised by the roadside, looking very comely  in oversize yellow flares and a matching green, yellow and black blouse.   It turns out Laxmi has been committing the crimes, but only because she was forced to.

The relationship that gets the most screen time is that of Anthony and Jenny (played by Parveen Babi), and the reason for that is because, just to add more twists to the plot, Jenny is actually the daughter of Robert, but she was kidnapped as a baby by Kishenlal, for revenge of the loss of his sons, and raised by him.   Anthony sees her for the first time at St. Mary’s church in Bandra, where she has come to attend Mass, beautifully groomed in a pale yellow, tiered dress and black lace mantilla (this was back when women used to still cover their heads inside a church).   She has returned from overseas for a visit and Kishenlal has assigned her a leering, beefy goofball of a bodyguard named Zebesko, who soon decides he’d like to guard Jenny’s  body full-time as her husband.   Perhaps because of the atrocious poncho he wears in one scene, or because of his eerie resemblance to Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz, Jenny is repelled and rebuffs him.

One of the best scenes and songs in Amar, Akbar, Anthony  takes place at the Easter Dance Jenny attends with Zebesko in tow, where a giant egg is rolled onto the dance floor and Amitabh Bachchan pops out, wearing a squishy stovepipe  hat and tuxedo, and procedes to sing the almost totally nonsensical, but catchy, mambo: My Name is Anthony Gonsalves.   In between the  lyrics (sung by Kishore Kumar) he spouts phrases like “Wait, wait, WAIT!   You see the whole country of the system is juxtapositioned by the hemoglobin  in the atmosphere because you are a sophisticated  rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberence of your own verbosity!”   For days after watching this movie, I couldn’t get that song out of my head.

There are many other memorable scenes, including the drunk scene AB does, talking to his mirror twin after a brawl, dabbing medicine on the other guy’s wounds, and another where he shows up at the church in a three-piece white suit and pink tie ready to get married only to find the priest who raised him murdered, and he angrily addresses a statue of Jesus (much like Vijay in Deewar at the temple as he was dying) saying “Tell me the name of who did this or I’ll become so bad” (of course, just then a locket – containing the clue – drops from the dead priest’s hand).

Invariably, the various strands of the story criss-cross each other, with a miraculous religious eyesight healing (hey, I guess this precedent is why the makers of Fanaa figured they could get away with it) ending up with the Big Climactic Scene with all three brothers (in costume, and singing), all three girlfriends, one villian, one wronged father, and a score of bad guys, out at Robert’s house, which looks like Hernando’s Hideaway, or  a hotel I stayed at once in Puerto Vallarta.  

See it or skip it?  

You must see it!   In addition to the sweet notion of the film, that inspite of religious beliefs we are all brothers and should all get along, the movie just has a terrific, happy-go-lucky feel to it, and between the songs,  the crazy storyline,  the fab costumes and the attractive triumvirate of heros and  their accompanying heroines, what’s not to like?

Black and white, and visually precious.   This 1959 film is often cited as an example of the golden age of Hindi cinema.

Directed by and starring Guru Dutt, who committed suicide  in 1964 at the age of 39, the film is considered by many to be at least partially autobiographical.

The movie opens with an old man in tattered clothes making his way through the gates of Ajanta Pictures.   He enters a set and slowly climbs two levels up.   He sits in semi-darkness and watches as the crew get ready for a shot.   Flashback, and we see the same man, the filmmaker Suresh Sinha (Guru Dutt), in a three-piece suit, smoking a pipe in the same studio, surrounded by women asking for his autograph.   We learn that in the past he was married and separated from his wife and daughter, and while filming Devdas, he discovers an unknown,  Shanti (played by Waheeda Rehman) who he enlists to be Paro in the film, and who he soon falls in love with, much to the distress of his adolescent daughter, Pammi.   It is Suresh’s daughter, not his wife, Bina, who confronts Shanti and persuades her to break off any sentimental entanglement with her father.   Shanti gives in, quits her acting career and moves away to be a teacher in a small village, and from there, Suresh’s life falls apart.   His movie is a failure, he loses a custody battle for his daughter, and he descends into a circle of drinking and neglecting his work that soon has him broke and living in a shack.

Though not containing a Rosebud mystery that is revealed only toward the end, I still was reminded of Citizen Kane as I watched Kaagaz ke Phool.   Both tell the story of a man who had, seemingly, everything and lost it.   Both men were captains in their own industry, both characters fell for younger, unpolished women while they were already married, and became undone by their loves.   Interestingly, both possess  totemic items that have great significance to the protagonists; Charles Foster Kane has Rosebud, Suresh has his daughter’s doll and Shanti’s knitting that he keeps in a cupboard in the sitting room.   The movie’s title appears  in the haunting line of the song that plays as Shanti tries to chase after Suresh on the studio lot, only to be intercepted by autographs seekers, and she loses him: no nectar in paper blossoms.

S.D. Burman’s music and Kaifi Azmi’s lyrics are haunting, especially the most famous song from the film, the mournful Waqt Ne Kiya Kya Haseem Sitam.

There are some lighter moments – in the scenes with Bina’s rich and stuffy Anglophile  parents and Johnny Walker as the rakish brother-in-law – but they are few, and sometimes feel forced.   The one genuinely funny scene is where the soon-to-be-replaced actress portraying Paro as she argues with Suresh that she thinks her character should be “fancier” and wear a side part in her.   Her ideas are vetoed, as is she.

One terrific extra on  the DVD is a three-part Channel 4 documentary on Guru Dutt  by Nasreen Munni Kabir, who more recently produced a hit biography of Shahrukh Khan.   It’s an extensive examination of his movies and his life away from the camera.   In addition to family members sharing their thoughts, Kabir has also gotten his peers and collaborators – such as V.K. Murthy and Kaifi Azmi – to talk about their work together.   Murthy explains how he came up with a way to shoot two beams of light in a particular shot in Kaagaz ke Phool, and Kaifi Azmi (famous poet and lyricist, as well as father to Shabana) recites a poem about Guru Dutt (translated on screen as):

No one comes to this world to live forever

But no one leaves the world in quite your manner

For once, death, too, must have been disconcerted

For no one has embraced death in quite your manner

I fear lest the ocean may be blotted  up

For no one sprinkles their ashes in quite your manner

You bore a grudge against the tavern-keeper

For no one slakes their thirst with poison, in quite your manner

I accept that you were saved by the light

But no one extinguishes the lamp in quite your manner

No one comes to this world to live forever

But no one leaves the world in quite your manner

See it or skip it?

See it.   Though the pace is slower than in most movies today, the use of light and shadows is something to see, and the tale of unrequited love is classic.

I’ve no one to blame but myself.  

I took this 2002 Sridevi Productions movie home because I like Nana Patekar, one of the three lead actors, and had  read, several times over, back when the movie was first released that, surprisingly,  Karisma Kapoor had done a good turn in it.  

What a sorry waste of $2.

Good Lord, if this movie were made by white people, they’d be accused of being anti-Indian, it  contains such an amazing array  of  clichés (smelly peasants,  uncultured rough  chauvinist natives, and on and on).

Karisma Kapoor plays the part of Nandini,  an Indian girl based in Canada, possibly born there (this already  is a stretch of the imagination).    Her parents are both  dead and her uncles are  hoping to find a good husband for her.   They set sights  on her buddy, Shekhar, played by Sanjay Kapoor.   The two marry and have a baby boy, Raja, when suddenly some violence back in India prompts Shekhar to rush back home, his wife and child in  tow.   I could have sworn that the faux TV news clips mentioned Bihar, though the scenery where the movie is filmed in India is obviously  Rajasthan.   Nandini learns that her husband has quite an extensive family, though he seems to have let on to her that  he was alone in the world.

Once they touch down in rural India, Nandini turns into the perfect Memsaab, fanning the air in front of her and wrinkling her nose at the smells around her, clutching her precious son  and shrieking every time a local gets too close for comfort.   The small family is almost attacked on the bus ride home  by warlords hostile to Shekhar’s father, Narasimha  (Nana Patekar), but, lucky for the trio, Nana’s men show up just in the nick of time, guns blazing.   The prodigal son is welcomed home with a slaughtered goat, whose blood he and Nandini are expected to walk through.   Poor Nandini turns five shades paler and plotzes at the prospect.

Enter Nana.   The mighty patriarch, clad in the same white dhoti and tee  with pale coral scarf throughout the whole movie, first appears  crouched in the huge, crumbling fort, surrounded by dozens of pigeons.   We soon learn that the eye-for-an-eye battles between his guys and the ones who attacked the bus have been going on for a long time.  

What a head of the family Narasimha  is: he insults his son repeatedly for being a wimp, growls at Nandini to dress modestly  (her arms are exposed) and is tickled to see his grandson, who he declares he will make into a lion.

There is also a long suffering Mrs. Narasimha and some sisters, but they, for the most part, stick to type in the background.   The mother cries that she’s missed her son all the years he’s been away and the sisters fawn over their new bhabhiji, telling her how pretty she is.

Shekhar and Nandini grow increasingly disturbed by the violence that surrounds them and plan their return home, until Shekhar is killed by the opposing warlords and Narasimha refuses to allow his grandson to leave with Nandini (who he taunts frequently by addressing as  Madam).   Since there  is no question of calling the cops to intervene,  we now have the set-up of the  struggle that takes us through to the end of the movie.

I’m pretty easygoing when it comes to most  movies and with Bollywood flics I can usually find something to like, even if it’s just the music or the locales or the clothes, but even I’m pretty much stuck here!   The only thing I can say is, Nana plays the flinty codger Grandad to a T,  cackling out a HEE HEE HEE every so often, in between angry rants.   In one of the most puzzling scenes, after he orders the beheading of a rival in a threshing machine, the southern Astaire  Prabhu Deva appears for a song and dance number in tribute to Narasimha’s leadership, joined by dozens of village men.

Oh yes, and then there’s the much touted Ishq Kameena number, inserted jarringly in the second half of the movie.   It’s only purpose is to introduce Shahrukh Khan’s chatty character, Jaisingh, and give us the chance to see Aishwarya Rai in a wet costume with a tramp stamp just above her tailbone.   Turns out SRK will be present  in  a lot of the last quarter of the movie, and he gets the funniest line of the entire film (spoken in the midst of an action scene): “If the camel gets hurt, Maneka Gandhi will kill you.”

See it or skip it?

Skip it!   Don’t even think of watching this movie, unless you are blinded by an undying love for Lolo or Nana and will sit through anything in order to see them.   (Sanjay doesn’t even register.)

Even 30 years since its release, Yash Chopra’s  Deewar still has a lot going for it:  classic Amitabh Bachchan as Vijay, leggy and brooding, in full angry-young-man mode, the breathy voice and soft eyes of  Shashi Kapoor as Ravi, the Dudley Doright brother of the family, compelled to pursue his bad boy brother.

The story revolves around the love triangle  of the two boys and their mother, the long-suffering Nirupa Roy, as the three struggle to survive in 1970s Bombay (and wow, does it look  tidy and uncrowded).   They find themselves in this situation after the father, a coal miner and would-be union organizer, is forced to betray the striking workers because the mine’s owner has taken his family hostage.   After cutting a deal and securing their release, he runs away in disgrace, riding around endlessly on trains.   His son Vijay is caught by some angry villagers and forcibly tattooed with the words “My father is a thief”.  

Having made their way to Bombay, mother and sons live under a bridge with many other poor people.   Their mother tries to eke out a living as a construction worker.   Ravi, ever the good boy,  dreams of returning to school, and so Vijay turns  shoeshine boy to earn the school fees for him.   In a telling moment, two obviously well off men stop to have their shoes, and when one of them throws money  to Vijay, the boy tells him “I polish shoes, I don’t beg.   Pick up that coin and hand it to me.”   The other man comments to his associate “That boy will go far.   He’s a long distance runner.”   Vijay’s pride flares to anger when the boss at the construction site where his mother works insults her, and he throws a brick,  hitting the boss in the head.

Flash forward and the boys are now adults.   Ravi is dating a police chief’s daughter and looking for work (unsuccessfully), eventually deciding to become a policeman himself, since he has no influential contacts to get him in through the door for an interview.   Vijay works on the docks as a coolie, sauntering around confidently, with his rope (that the coolies use to haul boxes) casually tossed around his neck like a scarf.   His badge number is 786, which he learns from an older Muslim man he befriends, is lucky and will bring him prosperity.   After standing up to a mafia thug who takes a portion of every coolie’s wages, Vijay catches the eye of the thug’s well-dressed mafia boss and soon has a job himself, eventually becoming so successful that he buys a huge house for his mother and brother to live in with him, and he even buys the apartment building that his mother had been working on when Vijay through the brick at her boss.

But, given that Ravi has now become a policeman, of course their stories dovetail and Ravi confronts Vijay, asking him to give up the life of crime.   When Vijay refuses, Ravi and their mother move out, determined to return to a lower standard of living, rather than live under the roof of a mobster, even if he’s family.   Shortly after, Ravi finds himself obliged to hunt down his own brother, to the conclusion of the film.

One aspect of the movie that surprised me, given that  it was released in 1975, is how open the portrayal is of Vijay’s relationship with the prostitute, Anita (played by the recently deceased Parveen Babi, whose latter years and end of life were sad, when not tragic, compared to how it was at the time Deewar).   The two meet at a very mod, carousel-themed (yes, really) hotel bar, where he has come on business.   She is seated  at the bar, in a shiny, long red dress with two thigh-high slits, drinking by herself.   When she gets talking to Vijay and their mutual  attraction is apparent, she blows smoke at him, which he inhales with pleasure, in a brief moment of  sensuality.    Her clothes and the drinking and smoking indicate outwardly that she’s not the  good girl you’d bring home to Maa because she’s  good bahu material, but we learn later that she  aspires to the same as all women were assumed to hope for then: marriage and children.    

One scene shows a shirtless, post-coital  Amitabh sitting up in bed, shoulder-to-shoulder with Parveen, as she lights a cigarette and passes it to him.   I think I actually gasped out loud at the sight of the Big B’s nipples peeking out over the top of the folded sheet, not because of his near nudity (though, come to think of it, in how many other films has he appeared so scantily clad?), but rather because today, we rarely, if ever,  see a man and woman (hero or heroine, or both) together in bed in a Hindi movie, except if they’re married or it’s a dream sequence, or it’s a sex farce like Masti or Kya Kool Hai Hum.

At a particularly dramatic moment in the film, there’s a  fantastic scene where Vijay, who always refused to  enter the temple any time he accompanied  his mother and Ravi, now does go in to the temple, and looking upward, angry and  hurt, addresses God, opening with “You must be very happy today.”   Amitabh has a similar  - though much shorter and less angry – scene in Amar, Akbar, Anthony.

One of the treats of seeing an older movie, especially one from the ’70s or ’80s, is the opportunity to consider what was the peak of fashion at that time, and boy, this movie does not disappoint.   More so than the women, it’s the men’s clothes that leave a lasting impression.   There’s the poster classic shot of Amitabh in the godown, blue shirt, long beige-clad legs stretched out before him, cigarette in mouth.   In another scene,  he arrives to  meet with his fellow mafiosi at a Bombay hotel pool and bar, in a turtleneck, blazer and bellbottom pants.   Though the clothes are certainly dated,  given Amitabh’s height and smoldering good looks, he’s able to pull almost all ensembles off successfully, with one exception.   There is a laugh out loud moment when we see him at the bar where he meets Anita, all done out in (I kid you not)  a black and white polka dot vest and bow tie, together with a black shirt and suit.   This excruciating fashion violation  is  balanced out later when, at their father’s funeral, Ravi is dressed in the traditional plain white kurta pajama, but Vijay shows up a bit late, and, cool man of style that he is, wearing a pair of white flared trousers and white mod shirt,  several buttons open from the neck down.

The baddies are memorable too, as they usually are in Hindi movies, for their atrocious bad taste in all things design-related, as they revel in their  polyester safari suits, Qiana shirts, fat velvet lapels  and swollen bow ties.   We may be poorer, but we can comfort ourselves with thoughts like “Even if I had his kind of money, I’d still never have a taxidermied jaguar in a glass case sitting in my dining room” or “If that guy’s lapels were any wider, they’d wrap around his shoulders and be continued on his back.”   The exception is Davar, an Oleg Cassini-looking man, the original Dapper Don,  chauffeured around Bombay in a huge American boat of a car, always impeccably turned out.

The music, though a suitable accompaniment to the film, contains nothing so exuberant or melodic to have me looking to see where I could get myself a copy of the soundtrack.

 See it or skip it?

See it!   This is one of the movies that made Amitabh Bachchan and it is a classic.   And, as Rachel Dwyer points out in her 100 Bollywood Films,  it  marks an interesting time in Hindi cinema where the hero is actually an anti-hero.