Post by odadune on Jul 19, 2015 23:49:12 GMT
Koshish, directed by Gulzar is an unusual film. It stars Jaya Badhuri (not yet Jaya Bachchan) as a young deaf-mute woman from a working-class family who meets a deaf-mute man (Sanjeev Kumar). They go to school together and learn sign language, prank call people, hang out, fall in love, get married, have a healthy child, lose it due to a horrifying accident caused by Jaya's evil brother (Asrani), have another healthy child, and watch him grow up. It's all very sweet, low-key, and relatively naturalistic, except for a somewhat overwrought epilogue set some years after the death of Jaya's character, where Sanjeev's boss tries to arrange a marriage between the boss's mute daughter, and Sanjeev's son, who can speak and hear, but also uses sign language, and Sanjeev very melodramatically guilt-trips his son when the young man initially refuses the match.
Its attitudes definitely raise eyebrows at times, with the teachers at the school uttering sentimental twaddle about how deaf and mute people are protected from all the viciousness that speech is used for, and Sanjeev's refusal to let his son follow his own heart and try for the kind of love marriage Sanjeev's and Jaya's characters had. The logic behind the arranged marriage makes more sense to me, after a couple hundred Indian films, than it did back when Koshish was about the 12th-15th Indian film I'd seen: the son is a bright, educated young man, but without an advantageous marriage he won't get very far; and meanwhile, the boss's daughter stands a much better chance in marriage with someone who knows sign language and has grown up around people with similar disabilities than she would with the average upper class suitor. Even so, the epilogue is a fair bit below the rest of the movie, which feels less caricatured in its portrayal of disabled people than most films of that era, less cloying than about half the modern films on subjects and far less depressing than the other half. And the songs are pretty good.
Shemaroo has it on youtube without subtitles, but if there was ever a movie you could safely skip those on, it would be this one:
Its attitudes definitely raise eyebrows at times, with the teachers at the school uttering sentimental twaddle about how deaf and mute people are protected from all the viciousness that speech is used for, and Sanjeev's refusal to let his son follow his own heart and try for the kind of love marriage Sanjeev's and Jaya's characters had. The logic behind the arranged marriage makes more sense to me, after a couple hundred Indian films, than it did back when Koshish was about the 12th-15th Indian film I'd seen: the son is a bright, educated young man, but without an advantageous marriage he won't get very far; and meanwhile, the boss's daughter stands a much better chance in marriage with someone who knows sign language and has grown up around people with similar disabilities than she would with the average upper class suitor. Even so, the epilogue is a fair bit below the rest of the movie, which feels less caricatured in its portrayal of disabled people than most films of that era, less cloying than about half the modern films on subjects and far less depressing than the other half. And the songs are pretty good.
Shemaroo has it on youtube without subtitles, but if there was ever a movie you could safely skip those on, it would be this one: