its not merely lip service coming from a ‘advanced for its time..’ patronizing that makes me say that i loved ‘sant tukaram’. drowned in music and chanting pandurang pandurang vithala vithala, the saintly central figure could well have been annoying. but perhaps it was his carriage and the way his body shone with some strange inner light that made you almost believe the story about the lower caste common man who sees god through performing his everyday duties- badly. his frustrated wife and starving children suffer for his piety.
'tumsa nahin dekha' saw nasir husain do his separated at birth story again. not that it matters that everything in the film was predictable. after all that is what is fun about a formula. and the film wallows in all the song and dance and melodrama possible. shammi kapoor and nimmi first hate then love, pran eavesdrops on conversations, tribal men and women turn out to have hearts of gold and all ends happily ever after. the songs are the usp; as in ‘paying guest’ where dev anand romances nutan in disguise as a paying guest in her hosue in lucknow.
most of the romancing happens on the terrace with moonlight in the sky and distant windows through which jealous lovers can watch. the roofscape is like a corbusian roof garden. bridges and platforms behind which you can hide and parapets to lean against.
in 'taxi driver' bombay looks lovely. shot on locations all over south bombay the story is a classic cinema city tale. kalpana kartik comes to the city to find work as a playback artists and gets saved from being molested in a coconut grove in juhu by a taxi driver. then a love happens. the mansions of worli sea face is where the producers, directors and evil henchmen of the financiers live. parallely in the darkened clubs of the city gold hearted vamps pay the price for unrequited love. for some reason i think the pencil thin moustache is a sign of the typical bombay wallah. first it is the henchmen who leer lustfully behind it; and then there is johnny walker who in almost every film plays the anglicized playful mastana- inured into a perpetual happy-go-luckiness by the city.
pradeep kumar’s painted-on moustache is really his only sign of manliness. a marionette behind vyjayantimala’s nagin, in anarkali he plays the completely daft prince salim. while his supposed beloved languishes- and she does a lot of it in the film- the man covers in fear of his father. and that in short is the whole film. the languishing takes its toll. even the hit songs that follow in rapid succession cant alleviate the boredom. when i was much younger i remember being completely terrified by the last sequence when anarkali is buried alive singing ‘yeh zindagi usiki hain’ even as her lover rushes towards her. the final brick that completely conceals her still managed to be the only time in the film that i was marginally interested.
‘out of thin air’ follows the nascent ladakhi film industry efficiently enough. stars are spoken to about their bollywood aspirations, directors about their inspiration from thai action films, scriptwriters about the penchant for ladakhis to cry in films, and in between we see the incredible mountains of ladakh.
1 comment:
I love seeing Bombay too in the old films. That's one of the pleasures of watching an old film, recognizing a part of the city, and seeing it as it used to be. I haven't seen 'Taxi Driver' though.
Post a Comment