Post by odadune on Jul 20, 2015 0:23:44 GMT
This is a (mostly) pretty sweet domestic drama about a hard-charging newspaper editor (Sanjeev) and his wife (Tanuja, aka Nutan's kid sister and Kajol Devgn's mother). They are educated and affluent-the scenes set in their household were shot in Tanuja's real life apartment-but Tanuja feels something lacking in their marriage. She has no interest in working outside the home, but she has so many servants that she's hardly a "homemaker" in any sense that a middle-class NRI or westerner would understand. Her solution is to dismiss most of the servants, retaining only a very old family retainer (AK Hangal) to handle some tasks she either finds boring or isn't good at, and devote her energies to cooking Indian style foods, planning parties that will introduce their jetsetting intellectual friends to the Way We Do Things In India, and reconnecting with her workaholic husband. I remember it as being pretty nonjudgmental-there isn't really any implication that Tanuja being a homemaker and trying to indulge her husband is the right and natural and unbending order of things, she just finds herself in a situation where this seems like a good idea. From what I can tell, Tanuja mostly played kind of giggly, giddy young women at this point in her career, and that sparkle, with a glint of steel underneath, is what makes this character feel like she's embarking on a minor adventure rather than making herself over into The Good Wife, if you know what I mean.
There's a rather dull subplot about an ex-boyfriend of hers going to work for her husband, and her husband, long after she's shown the ex-boyfriend his walking papers, deciding something is up. This leads to a brief but distasteful scene where the husband gets really mad at her, for the first time in the film. People sometimes give Sanjeev flak for being hammy, but his problem as an actor was not really the fact that in broad, over the top masalas (which Anubhav is not) he could be as broad and theatrical as anyone else. His problem was that he was almost painfully intense: it was like the dials on his screen persona were numbered 1-5 and then 11 and 20, with nothing in between. After spending most of the film with his intensity dial at about 3 or 4, and coming off as a mellow and likable, if somewhat self-centered guy, he cranks it up to eleven for this spat with the wife, and we get the same kind of bellowing and snarling he would later direct at Amjad Khan in Sholay, only directed at giggly, mischievous Tanuja. Only the fact that she stands her ground, and although offended by the way he talks to her is not at all afraid of him, makes it at all palatable, and the fact that the film's director was reputedly abusive to his real-life wife adds an uncomfortable dimension to this scene. But the moment passes, and the charming young couple in the movie are back on good terms again for the ending.
I forgot to mention that this film contains one of my favorite "montage" picturizations:
Shemaroo has this on youtube unsubbed; I would say that it is rather a talky movie to watch in that state if you don't know Hindi well, and recommend trying for a subtitled dvd if possible, but you can judge for yourself:
There's a rather dull subplot about an ex-boyfriend of hers going to work for her husband, and her husband, long after she's shown the ex-boyfriend his walking papers, deciding something is up. This leads to a brief but distasteful scene where the husband gets really mad at her, for the first time in the film. People sometimes give Sanjeev flak for being hammy, but his problem as an actor was not really the fact that in broad, over the top masalas (which Anubhav is not) he could be as broad and theatrical as anyone else. His problem was that he was almost painfully intense: it was like the dials on his screen persona were numbered 1-5 and then 11 and 20, with nothing in between. After spending most of the film with his intensity dial at about 3 or 4, and coming off as a mellow and likable, if somewhat self-centered guy, he cranks it up to eleven for this spat with the wife, and we get the same kind of bellowing and snarling he would later direct at Amjad Khan in Sholay, only directed at giggly, mischievous Tanuja. Only the fact that she stands her ground, and although offended by the way he talks to her is not at all afraid of him, makes it at all palatable, and the fact that the film's director was reputedly abusive to his real-life wife adds an uncomfortable dimension to this scene. But the moment passes, and the charming young couple in the movie are back on good terms again for the ending.
I forgot to mention that this film contains one of my favorite "montage" picturizations:
Shemaroo has this on youtube unsubbed; I would say that it is rather a talky movie to watch in that state if you don't know Hindi well, and recommend trying for a subtitled dvd if possible, but you can judge for yourself: