People, profanity sounds more repulsive in one's mother tongue, I firmly believe, especially if said mother tongue is Hindi or any of the regional languages of India, in which case I will probably never buy an exorbitantly priced ticket to a movie house in Bombay, to watch a run-of-the-mill Hindi film.
Let me tell you why we went to see the much touted Yeh Saali Zindagi. I chanced upon a slickly written critique of this film in the TOI. Film reviews have come a long way since when I was growing up, I will grant you that. Barring a few big names like Firoze Rangoonwala (Screen), Bikram Singh (Filmfare) and the formidable Baburao Patel (Motherindia) most reviewers in those days, in Bombay at least, were content to issue brief, staid notices of new releases. But while reviews today are more breezily written they lack depth and hint only at a verisimilitude in perception. It's probably because they have to deal with characters crudely drawn, representing the brute in man and the devil in penmanship! It's okay to be choosy in one's roles and Irfan Khan, a fine performer otherwise (The Warrior, Mumbai Meri Jaan), certainly needs to do so. We have precious few good actors working today and as cine goers we do deserve an occasional well drawn, mature characterization. I was squirming in my seat watching him mouth this defilement of language. I do not remember the other names that throng the credits of YSZ....honestly, I do not care.
I have been in and out of movie houses for most of my life and have lost count of the number of movies I have simply walked out of--never though, for the filth and violence that this screenplay of YSZ portrays. The language in its crudeness leaves nothing to the imagination: it goes beyond the usual allusions. These were the most disgusting 40 minutes I have spent in a movie house in Bombay, or anywhere else for that matter! This film was not going anywhere even if we had stayed to its end.
From back in the early 60s I remember a review of Ajanta Arts' Mujhe Jeene Do, a tale of banditry, ransom and mayhem, that Sunil Dutt had the courage to shoot in the robber-infested ravines of the state of Bihar. One line from that review has stayed with me over the years: "....this is not a film that we want our women and children to see...." I wonder what that reviewer would have had to say about the writing in YSZ!
The times, they have changed and in their eagerness to keep up with contemporary world cinema our producers and screenplay and dialogue writers have lost track of perspective. Call me dated but brazenness is not everything that one looks for in a movie, especially when one recalls the great writing that emanated from the likes of Rajinder Singh Bedi, Inder Raj Anand, Wajahat Mirza and Ramanand Sagar to name a few~writers who made us think and encouraged us to change the way we interpreted life, to muse upon it! True, a lot of the films were mediocre but they were not ever repulsive. It is since the late 70s that films have donned a crude mantle. Permissiveness has reached its nadir in recent years and needs to be muzzled.
....And Hum Dono
I have finally watched this fine Nav Ketan production on the big screen: not a patch on the black and white which I followed up with at home, despite the colour and the cinemascope. This is one of the few Dev Anand starrers from which, thankfully, his gangly silliness is missing. It was good to see the young faces of Sadhana and Nanda and Dev himself, from fifty years ago this year, not to speak of the mature performances of the then already-aged character artistes Lalita Pawar and Gajanand Jagirdar and Leela Chitnis. The latter is especially forceful as Dev's mother: mesmerizing in her initial confrontation with Sadhana, simply brilliant in her metamorphosis in the scene that immediately follows. Sadhana's controlled turbulence is the perfect foil, to that senior thespian's outburst. To cap it all, the perfect chiaroscuro helps to carry the symbolic situation: all this, however, is lost on colour.
And like the colour, so the sound. Jaidev's fine soundtrack has been 'improved' upon, Dev-saab would have us believe. Where the mere plucking of a string was enough to indicate a nuance, we are now subjected to drawn out computer-backed wails. Even the strains of the famous Nav Ketan logo have been altered! Our films, unfortunately, have trained us to seek depth where none exists, and often our songs reek of bathos more than emotion. This is one film where the songs are well placed. Sahir Ludhianvi's fine lyrics have depth and meaning actually adding to the story's anti-war message, and thankfully, where digitization does not intrude Jaidev-ji's fine background music still makes its presence felt.
I am convinced that the classics need to be left alone. Once the DVD of the current coloured version of Hum Dono is released, the black and white will fade from memory and with it, the significance and charm of the pre-colour 60s era (B. R. Chopra's Naya Daur and K. Asif's Mughal-e-Azam have met the same fate). Those of us who still have the original DVD of this fine film need to hang on to it at least until our generation has run its course. The film is a happy experience of the black and the white of life. We need not have sullied it with the colours of the rainbow.
Let me tell you why we went to see the much touted Yeh Saali Zindagi. I chanced upon a slickly written critique of this film in the TOI. Film reviews have come a long way since when I was growing up, I will grant you that. Barring a few big names like Firoze Rangoonwala (Screen), Bikram Singh (Filmfare) and the formidable Baburao Patel (Motherindia) most reviewers in those days, in Bombay at least, were content to issue brief, staid notices of new releases. But while reviews today are more breezily written they lack depth and hint only at a verisimilitude in perception. It's probably because they have to deal with characters crudely drawn, representing the brute in man and the devil in penmanship! It's okay to be choosy in one's roles and Irfan Khan, a fine performer otherwise (The Warrior, Mumbai Meri Jaan), certainly needs to do so. We have precious few good actors working today and as cine goers we do deserve an occasional well drawn, mature characterization. I was squirming in my seat watching him mouth this defilement of language. I do not remember the other names that throng the credits of YSZ....honestly, I do not care.
I have been in and out of movie houses for most of my life and have lost count of the number of movies I have simply walked out of--never though, for the filth and violence that this screenplay of YSZ portrays. The language in its crudeness leaves nothing to the imagination: it goes beyond the usual allusions. These were the most disgusting 40 minutes I have spent in a movie house in Bombay, or anywhere else for that matter! This film was not going anywhere even if we had stayed to its end.
From back in the early 60s I remember a review of Ajanta Arts' Mujhe Jeene Do, a tale of banditry, ransom and mayhem, that Sunil Dutt had the courage to shoot in the robber-infested ravines of the state of Bihar. One line from that review has stayed with me over the years: "....this is not a film that we want our women and children to see...." I wonder what that reviewer would have had to say about the writing in YSZ!
The times, they have changed and in their eagerness to keep up with contemporary world cinema our producers and screenplay and dialogue writers have lost track of perspective. Call me dated but brazenness is not everything that one looks for in a movie, especially when one recalls the great writing that emanated from the likes of Rajinder Singh Bedi, Inder Raj Anand, Wajahat Mirza and Ramanand Sagar to name a few~writers who made us think and encouraged us to change the way we interpreted life, to muse upon it! True, a lot of the films were mediocre but they were not ever repulsive. It is since the late 70s that films have donned a crude mantle. Permissiveness has reached its nadir in recent years and needs to be muzzled.
....And Hum Dono
I have finally watched this fine Nav Ketan production on the big screen: not a patch on the black and white which I followed up with at home, despite the colour and the cinemascope. This is one of the few Dev Anand starrers from which, thankfully, his gangly silliness is missing. It was good to see the young faces of Sadhana and Nanda and Dev himself, from fifty years ago this year, not to speak of the mature performances of the then already-aged character artistes Lalita Pawar and Gajanand Jagirdar and Leela Chitnis. The latter is especially forceful as Dev's mother: mesmerizing in her initial confrontation with Sadhana, simply brilliant in her metamorphosis in the scene that immediately follows. Sadhana's controlled turbulence is the perfect foil, to that senior thespian's outburst. To cap it all, the perfect chiaroscuro helps to carry the symbolic situation: all this, however, is lost on colour.
And like the colour, so the sound. Jaidev's fine soundtrack has been 'improved' upon, Dev-saab would have us believe. Where the mere plucking of a string was enough to indicate a nuance, we are now subjected to drawn out computer-backed wails. Even the strains of the famous Nav Ketan logo have been altered! Our films, unfortunately, have trained us to seek depth where none exists, and often our songs reek of bathos more than emotion. This is one film where the songs are well placed. Sahir Ludhianvi's fine lyrics have depth and meaning actually adding to the story's anti-war message, and thankfully, where digitization does not intrude Jaidev-ji's fine background music still makes its presence felt.
I am convinced that the classics need to be left alone. Once the DVD of the current coloured version of Hum Dono is released, the black and white will fade from memory and with it, the significance and charm of the pre-colour 60s era (B. R. Chopra's Naya Daur and K. Asif's Mughal-e-Azam have met the same fate). Those of us who still have the original DVD of this fine film need to hang on to it at least until our generation has run its course. The film is a happy experience of the black and the white of life. We need not have sullied it with the colours of the rainbow.
