surakksha . nagin . basant bahar . munimji. urrf professor. hum kisise kum nahin .

it starts off with a bang and just goes on in the same register. mithun in a convertible surrounded by hot chicks at cuffe parade singing ‘mausam hai gaane ka’. but this is the coast of pleasure. ranjeeta on a water scooter and the playboy club on a high floor in a skyscraper t where gunmaster g9 walks on air; or the place that gets washed away when the ssk or the shiv shakti kiran boils the arabian sea until it washes over the marine drive and its thermocol houses (but this ray can be reversed); or the hotel rooms in wide angle with ice cream colors and lights. the other coast is made up of the docks where the poisonous water snakes are in warehouses and the evil mastermind plots his murders with a nagra machine. this irritated mukul for some reason. a light meter was used to detect radiation, a nagra was a futuristic message sending device and a shooting light became plastic surgeons light. for me it was only part of the feast. ‘b’ grade like it is supposed to be. was raveekant nagaich really conscious while he was making it?

‘lsd’ took the tacky mall landscapes on the new city and turned them into the narrative of surveillance, sex and violence. ‘urrf professor’ performs a similar reinvention of the western suburbs of bombay. thakur complex and its half built roads, aarey milk colony and the western express highway digital and pixellated are the backdrop for the story of a the lottery ticket obsessed overweight assassin hired to kill cheating wives and husbands. if i thought that ‘sankat city’ was way off the sane radar then ‘professor’ took the madness to a completely different level. it reminded me of the brilliant ‘bheja fry’ episodes of late 90s channel v which were also fantastic.

1950s bharat bhushan melodrama ‘basant bahar’ with a singer who loses his voice after drinking a potion smuggled to him by a jealous competitor falls in love with a courtesans daughter. after a completely random series of events whose sequence and logic was to connect the songs together, at the end the girl kills herself by swallowing a diamond and the singer cuts his own tongue out. implausible , you might think, but the tone is set early when manna de beats bhimsen joshi in a singing competition. this is a strange relationship with the classical in the films. the more serious singers are always caricatured by sidekicks making faces when the taans are being sung, while at the same time a devotion to music is being advocated. meanwhile the sets all serve as shorthand for the emotion of the moment. flowers equal fertility and happiness and a dead branch sadness. the film requires the audience to channel all the systems of meanings embedded in these icons through their experiences with other arts to trust the narrative.

they must have had a ruin set in all the film studios in the 1950s. the place where women swooned and pined for separated lovers through misunderstandings and family rivalries. in ‘nagin’ vyjayantimala sizzles as she dances to the sound of the been across the line between two rival tribal clans of poison gatherers. while hit song after hit song repeats the been motif, all the stops are pulled out for the climax in colour. a snake rebites her and sucks in the poison and she dances across the fire to the arms of the waiting lover. the poor pradeep kumar tries to dance and ends up looking like a marionette.

nalini jaywant gets wet at least three times in ‘munimji’ while dev anand in and out of a disguise watches. this disguise is worn because he is so handsome that he does not want his boss who is actually the son of the maid and is in his place to feel jealous. it is a terrible disguise but we know that- and they know we know that. after all he is the hero no matter how he chooses to masquerade it.

fast forward to rishi kapoor and tariq in ‘hum kisise kum nahin’ where both play different versions of a fictional manjit- the son of a rich man from hong kong. while rishi kapoor has the diamonds hidden in a belt by his father beirut in mind, tariq has his long lost childhood lover- kajal kiran in her debut. pulpy fabulous- fight sequences, comedy scenes, the film has it all- especially some of the greatest music of the 70’s. the competition song and the qawwali with zeenat aman’s special appearance. for me the film only worked when rishi kapoor is on screen. he is terrific.