CHENGATHEM

1983 160’ col Malayalam

d Bhadran pc Divya lyr Puthyakam Murali c Vipin Das m Ravi

lp Mammootty, Murali, Satyakala, Captain Raju

Early Mammootty crime movie. Telephone operator Anne marries rich criminal Tony (Mammootty), discovering his occupation only after their marriage. His illegal dealings are however presented as a consequence of his childhood experiences, when his mother was killed by villains and he was imprisoned. When Anne is raped by another man, Daniel, Tony kills Daniel and becomes a fugitive from justice, this time chased by sadistic cops not very different from the villains of his childhood. He is eventually caught. Although similar in many ways to Bachchan-type themes e.g. with Prakash Mehra, what is often noted with Mammootty is the extent to which corruption, crime and violence are treated as a fact of life and with remarkably little moral posturing. The violence of law enforcement agencies is, likewise, treated on a par with that of organised crime, distinguished only by the assumed goodness of the hero and those in his protection.

  COOLIE

1983 177’ col/scope Hindi
co-d Manmohan Desai co-d/co-st Prayag Raj pc M.K.D. Films Combine co-st Pushpa Raj Sharma sc K.K. Shukla dial Kadar Khan lyr Anand Bakshi c Peter Pereira m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Amitabh Bachchan, Waheeda Rehman, Rishi Kapoor, Rati Agnihotri, Shoma Anand, Suresh Oberoi, Kadar Khan, Om Shivpuri, Satyen Kappoo, Nilu Phule, Goga, Puneet Issar

Remembered mainly as the film in which Bachchan suffered a near-fatal accident. The frame recording the incident is frozen as the legend of his injury flashes on to the screen. It is also Manmohan Desai’s most aggressively communal film. Iqbal (Bachchan) is orphaned when the villain Zafar (Khan) kills his father and rapes his mother Salma (Rehman). Zafar also bursts a dam killing hundreds of people. Iqbal grows up to become a leader of the coolies (porters) at a railway station. Other characters are the drunken journalist Sunny (Kapoor), a foster-child of the villain who befriends Iqbal, and the rich heroine Julie (Agnihotri) whose father was also killed by the villain. The end of the film, shot at the Haji Ali mosque in Bombay, makes an appeal to the lumpenised Muslim underclass when an injured Iqbal invokes the power of Allah to deal the death blow to the villain. Iqbal also enjoys an electoral triumph over Zafar, foreshadowing Bachchan’s election as an MP in 1984. Not to be confused with the Malayalam film Coolie (also 1983) directed by Ashok Kumar.

  DHOLA MARU

1983 152’ col Gujarati

d/sc Mehul Kumar pc G.N. Films p Govindbhai N. Patel st/dial Ramjibhai Vania lyr Kanti-Ashok c Randev Bhaduri m Mahesh-Naresh

lp Naresh Kanodia, Snehlata, Jayashree T., Kalpana Dewan, Padmarani, Arvind Joshi, Firoz Irani, Nalini Chonkar

Major Gujarati box office hit retelling the love legend of Dhola, son of the Navrang Garh chieftain, and Maru, daughter of the king of Pingal Garh. Promised to each other in their childhood, problems arise when the queen of Pingal Garh kills Dhola’s father in order to annex his property. She later adopts her own brother as her heir while her evil subordinate Gumansinh falls for Maru.

  ENTE MAMATTUKUTTIYAMA

aka For my Mamattukuttiama
1983 116’ col Malayalam d/s Fazil p Appachan pc Navodaya lyr Bichu Thirumala c Ashok Kumar m Jerry Amaldev

lp Baby Shalini, Gopi, Sangeetha Naik, Mohanlal, Purnima Jayaram, Thilakan, Baby Manju

A regressive melodrama deploying all the myths about motherhood to make a plea on behalf of children born out of wedlock. Sethu (Naik) and Vinod (Gopi), distraught by the death of their own child, focus all their emotions on their adopted child, little Mamattukuttiyama, Tintu for short (Shalini). However, Tintu’s real father Alex (Mohanlal) reclaims the child, explaining that his wife Mercy (Jayaram) had been forced to give away the illegitimate child and had gone insane as a result. Only reunification with her daughter will cure her. Overcoming her feelings, Sethu in the end personally hands over the child to its biological mother. Fazil remade the film in Tamil as En Bommu Kutti Ammavukku (1988). It was also an instance of the negative roles Mohanlal played in his early career.

  GODAM

aka Warehouse
1983 140’ col Hindi

d/s/co-dial/m Dilip Chitre pc NFDC st Bhau Padhye co-dial Vasant Dev lyr Sharatchandra Arolkar, Sushama Shreshtha c Govind Nihalani

lp Satyadev Dubey, K.K. Raina, Trupti, Vijaya Chitre

A tragic story about a woman’s relentless suffering in an isolated village. Yesu (Trupti) is a child bride married to the retarded son of a lecherous old man who threatens to rape her. She kills the old man and hides in a disused warehouse where she is protected but sexually exploited by the caretaker Edekar (Raina) and his helper Dharma (Dubey). One morning, Edekar opens the warehouse to find Yesu has hanged herself. Almost the entire film is set in the abandoned warehouse, atop an isolated and rocky hill, intended to provide a hallucinatory, mystical experience. The hyperactive camera, with montage cut-outs of Queen Victoria and the monkey god Hanuman, and soundtrack, where Sharatchandra Arolkar’s music jostles with John Coltrane, presents an excess that contrasts with the spartan setting. Noted Marathi poet Chitre’s only feature.

  HERO

1983 173’ col Hindi

d Subhash Ghai pc Mukta Arts st Mukta Ghai sc Ram Kelkar lyr Anand Bakshi m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Jackie Shroff, Meenakshi Sheshadri, Sanjeev Kumar, Shammi Kapoor, Amrish Puri, Bindu, Shakti Kapoor

The orphan Jackie (Shroff) is raised by notorious criminal Pasha (Puri). When Pasha is arrested, he asks Jackie to silence the main prosecution witness, a retired police officer, Mathur (Shammi Kapoor). Jackie kidnaps Radha (Sheshadri), Mathur’s daughter, who then falls in love with him and asks him to give himself up. The obstacles are Mathur, who hates Jackie, and Jackie’s rival (Shakti Kapoor). Jackie has to save both Mathur and Radha from Pasha in the violent climax before he can be forgiven. Ghai’s independent hit marketed its unknown lead, Jackie Shroff, via a major advertising campaign using a series of teaser ads. The film includes several of Ghai’s trademark song picturisations in mountainous locales (e.g. Ding-a-dong baby sing-a-song).

  HIMMATWALA

1983 179’(157’) col Hindi

d/sc K. Raghavendra Rao pc Padmalaya p Krishna dial Kadar Khan lyr Indivar c K.S. Prakash m Bappi Lahiri

lp Jeetendra, Sridevi, Amjad Khan, Waheeda Rehman, Satyen Kappoo, Shakti Kapoor, Shoma Anand, Asrani

Ravi (Jeetendra), a government engineer, arrives in his ancestral village to right all the wrongs perpetrated on his family by the villainous Zamindar Sher Singh Bandookwala (Khan) and also - on behalf of the State - to introduce welfare measures represented by the dam he is to build on Sher Singh’s property. Sher Singh, who runs his own ‘parliament’ and system of dispensing justice, had earlier forced Ravi’s upright father (Kappoo), a school teacher, into bonded labour and raped Ravi’s mother (Rehman). The villains now force Ravi to donate his sister Padma in marriage to the evil Shakti (Kapoor), but in the end he reforms the villains. The hero bullies Sher Singh’s initially arrogant daughter Rekha (Sridevi) into supporting him and opposing her father. This modernisation melodrama, of the same generation as e.g. Bangarada Manushya (1972) and some of Bhartirajaa’s films, was also a vehicle for the successful entry of South Indian production capital into Hindi cinema and the best-known of the several Jeetendra-Sridevi films usually referred to as ‘South’ pictures in the Bombay media. This shift sometimes created unusual rhetorical structures as it sought to transpose local idioms onto a ‘national’ terrain: e.g the opening sequence in which Ravi’s mother tells him of the family’s unhappy history is narrated in quickfire, quasi-documentary imagery with freeze frames and cutaways providing ‘information’ accompanying the mother’s strident voice-over.

  HOLI

aka Festival of Fire
1983 116’(120’) col Hindi

d/co-sc/co-lyr Ketan Mehta pc Film Unit, Neo Film Associates st/co-sc/co-dial Mahesh Elkunchwar based on his play co-dial/co-lyr Hriday Lani c Jehangir Choudhury m Rajat Dholakia

lp Sanjeev Gandhi, Manoj Pandya, Rahul Ranade, Ashutosh Gowarikar, Amole Gupte, Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah, Deepti Naval, Shriram Lagoo, Aamir Khan, Mohan Gokhale

Mehta’s first Hindi film addresses the increasing lumpenisation of university students featuring scenes of victimisation reminiscent of Volker Schloendorff’s Der junge Toerless (1966). Forced to attend a lecture on India’s cultural heritage while on holiday, the boys rebel. The violence gradually escalates into a major battle with the authorities as the colourful and anarchistic pre-Vedic spring festival, Holi, turns into a menacing festival of fire with burning school furniture. The college principal induces a boy to denounce the leaders of the rebellion. The informer is publicly humiliated and is forced to commit suicide. Mehta decided to shoot almost all the scenes in sequence shots, often using a crab-dolly or a steadycam, and using synch sound rather than playback or post-synched sound (in spite of the complicated songs and the musical accompaniment). The film’s enthusiastic and hallucinatory participation in student violence (of which it is supposedly critical) allows it to move away from its original political thrust, conveying existential despair instead. The film enjoyed a cult audience in New Delhi for a short period.

  INIYENKILUM

1983 201’col Malayalam

d I.V. Sasi pc Geo Movie Prod, st Rose dial T. Damodaran lyr Yusuf Ali Kacheri c Jayanan Vincent m Shyam

lp Mammootty, Mohanlal, Lalu Alex, Ratheesh, Ravindran, T.G. Ravi, Seema, Rani Padmini, Sunitha Sharma, Balan K. Nair

Extraordinary and long-drawn out melodrama contrasting conditions in Kerala with those in Japan. A group of performers from Kerala are invited to Japan, but they are left stranded when their criminal host disappears. With the assistance of Nambiar (Nair), a benevolent Tokyo-based Malayali, they learn about the Japanese economy, initiating - on their return - a series of reformist movements that end up with the revolutionary overthrow of corrupt leadership. The film continued Sasi’s tendency (America America, also 1983) to set his plots in exotic foreign locales, and also his ‘hard-hitting’ and often satirical collaborations with Marxist writer Damodaran (cf. Angadikkapurathu, 1985; Vartha 1986).

  JAANE BHI DO YAARON

aka Who Pays the Piper
1983 143’(130’) col Hindi

d/s Kundan Shah pc NFDC co-s Sudhir Mishra dial Ranjit Kapoor, Satish Kaushik c Binod Pradhan m Vanraj Bhatia

lp Naseeruddin Shah, Ravi Baswani, Bhakti Bharve, Om Puri, Satish Shah, Pankaj Kapoor, Satish Kaushik, Neena Gupta, Deepak Qazir, Rajesh Puri, Zafar Sanjari, Vidhu Vinod Chopra

Extraordinary slapstick comedy, a genre almost unknown in Indian cinema since Kishore Kumar’s early films. Two bumbling photographers, Vinod Chopra (N. Shah) and Sudhir Mishra (Baswani), are employed by Shobha (Bharve), the editor of a scandal sheet, Khabardar. They have to spy on millionaire property developer Tarneja (Kapoor) and police commissioner D’Mello (S. Shah). The photographers uncover dirty business between Tarneja and his equally unsavoury rival Ahuja (O. Puri). The commissioner is killed by one of the builders who, as a result, wins the contract to build a flyover that collapses shortly afterwards. The photographers get hold of D’Mello’s corpse in order to prove that he was murdered, but they lose it, which gives rise to an extended sequence where everyone chases everyone else. In the end, the photographers are framed for the collapse of the fly-over. The film, set in the same early 80s of e.g. Anand Patwardhan’s documentary Hamara Shaher (1985), refers directly to specific corrupt Bombay politicians of the period. The collapse of the flyover, shown in a video clip in the film, is in fact footage of the actual Byculla Bridge in Bombay which collapsed shortly before the film was made. Commissioner D’Mello refers to the then police chief Julio Ribeiro (who appears in the Advertising Club meeting in Patwardhan’s documentary), Tarneja and Ahuja are a composite picture of Bombay’s biggest builder Raheja, while the Shobha who runs a scandal sheet is an allusion to Shobha Kilachand, aka Shobha De, former editor of a film gossip and city magazine. In addition, the film repeatedly refers to e.g. Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) and to New Indian Cinema, including some of Shah’s former FTII colleagues: film-makers Vinod Chopra (on whose Sazaaye Maut, 1981, Shah had been a production manager) and Sudhir Mishra, who lend their names to the photographer duo. The Albert Pinto code-word of the two amateur sleuths refers to Saeed Mirza’s film (1980). Large posters of Kumar Shahani’s Maya Darpan (1972) and Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti (1969) can be seen pasted on the walls during the chase. The film was a mild commercial success and influenced mainly a brand of TV comedy (cf. Shah’s TV series Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi, 1985, and one he made together with Mirza, Nukkad, 1987).

  KATTATHE KILIKOODU

aka Bird’s Nest in the Wind
1983 136’ col Malayalam

d Bharathan pc Grihalakshmi Prod. st Nedumudi Venu sc T. Damodaran lyr Kavalam Narayana Panicker c Vasant Kumar m Johnson

lp Gopi, Mohanlal, Srividya, Revathi, Lalitha, Shantakumari, Master Prashab, Baby Poonambili, Baby Anju, Baby Preetha, Krishna Swamy

Melodrama about the fears of young women’s sexuality (a recurrent Bharathan theme, cf. Rathi Nirvedham, 1978; Ormakkayi, 1982). A callous and immature teenage girl, Asha (Revathi), who sets out to turn a middle-aged professor’s (Gopi) head and nearly destroys his entire family. In the end, the girl marries the boy she wanted from the beginning, Unni (Mohanlal), the college’s athletics coach.

  KAVIRATHNA KALIDAS

1983 189’ col Kannada

d Renuka Sharma pc Anandalakshmi Ents. p Saraswathi Srinivasa, V.S. Murali, V.S. Govindu dial/lyr Chi. Udayashankar c V.K. Kannan m M. Rangarao

lp Rajkumar, Bhatti Mahadevappa, Balkrishna, Ramesh, Srinivasa Murthy, Sivaprakash, Musari Krishnamurthy, Vadiraj, Thoogudeepa Srinivas, Master Arjun, Jayapradha, K. Vijaya, Sudhasindoor, Papamma

Folk mythological-biopic of Sanskrit poet and dramatist Kalidasa. The illiterate but wise shepherd (Kannada superstar Rajkumar) is made to dress up as a prince by a wicked minister (Balkrishna) who wants to get even with the King for having rejected his son as a match for the Princess. The Princess (Jayapradha) marries the impostor, but when she discovers the truth, she prays to Kali to grant her husband the gift of learning. The wish is granted but the shepherd, now Kalidasa, loses his memory and ends up as an admired and envied poet in the court of Bhojaratna. The Princess follows him there and the two are reunited after much intrigue.

  KHAIDI

1983 157’ col Telugu

d/sc A. Kodandarami Reddy pc Samyuktha Movies p K. Dhananjaya Reddy, K. Narasa Reddy, S. Sudhakara Reddy st/dial Parachuri Bros. lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy, Rajashri c V.S.R. Swamy m Chakravarthy

lp Chiranjeevi, Madhavi, Sumalatha, Ravu Gopala Rao, Nutan Prasad, P.L. Narayana, Ranganath, Sangeeta, Chalapathi Rao

Action thriller establishing Chiranjeevi as a megastar. Having been falsely accused of crime, he becomes a lone avenger. The poor Suryam (Chiranjeevi) falls for university colleague Madhu (Madhavi). In retaliation, Madhu’s father and village landlord Veerabhadraiah (Gopala Rao) auctions the house of Suryam’s father, the peasant Venkateshwarulu (Narayana). The landlord’s associate in villainy, the village munsiff (Prasad), kills Suryam’s sister and accuses Suryam of the deed. He is later tortured by the landlord. They also kill Dr Sujata (Sumalatha) when she offers shelter to the hero. The film begins with Suryam’s escape from the police after a spectacular fight and much of the story deals with his efforts to dodge arrest while getting at the bad guys. In the end he kills Veerabhadraiah and the munsiff before surrendering to the police.

  KHANDHAR

aka The Ruins
1983 108’ col Hindi

d/sc Mrinal Sen p Jagadish and Pushpa Chokhani pc Shri Bharatlaxmi Pics st Premendra Mitra’s Telenapota Abishkar (The Discovery Of The Village Telenapota) c K.K. Mahajan m Bhaskar Chandavarkar

lp Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Geeta Sen, Pankaj Kapoor, Annu Kapoor, Sreela Majumdar, Rajen Tarafdar

Three friends from the city visit some ruins where an aged mother (Sen) and her daughter Jamini (Azmi) live. The mother awaits the arrival of a distant cousin to marry Jamini but the man is already married and living in Calcutta. The photographer Subhash (Shah) takes pity on the family and pretends to be the awaited suitor. The mother dies contented but when the threesome leave again, Jamini stays behind facing a life of loneliness in the ruins. The second Sen film to receive a Hindi release, its passive storyline and heavy emphasis on meaningful looks was a major departure from his political cinema of the 70s. Sen commented that ‘The film is partly memory and partly fantasy punctuated by bits of instant happenings’, and created an expressionist set of broken walls and ruins to replicate the woman’s state of mind. Claiming the influence of Robert Bresson, he also said that with this film he finally put the IPTA influence behind him, something he had aimed to do since the communist government returned to power in Bengal in 1977 which made the IPTA aesthetic into official policy.

Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah in Khandhar

  KOODEVIDE?

aka Where is the Nest? aka In Whose Nest?
1983 150’(103’) col Malayalam d/sc/dial P. Padmarajan pc Prakash Movietone st Vasanthi lyr O.N.V. Kurup c Shaji N. Karun m Johnson

lp Mammootty, Suhasini, Rehman, Jose Prakash, Prem Prakash, Sukumari, Rajani Menon

A story of ambition and resigned frustration set in Kerala’s old Syrian Christian community, a milieu unfamiliar to the noted Malayalam novelist, scenarist and director Padmarajan. Alice (Suhasini), who lives with her brother (P. Prakash), is a teacher at the reputable Ootacamund convent school. An MP, Xavier Puthooran (J. Prakash), sacrifices his wife and son for his career. The MP’s neglected and unruly son Ravi (Rahman in his debut role), is foisted upon the school and Alice manages to turn him into a prize student. Her boyfriend Capt. Thomas (Mammootty) feels intensely jealous of the attention Alice bestows upon Ravi. He kills the boy apparently by accident, but later surrenders to the police, leaving Alice frustrated in all aspects of her life.

  LEKHAYUDE MARANAM ORU FLASHBACK

aka Lekha’s Death a Flashback
1983 172’ col/scope Malayalam d/s K.G. George p David Kachapally, Innocent pc Sathru Intl. dial S.L. Puram Sadanandan lyr O.N.V. Kurup c Shaji N. Karun m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Nalini, Gopi, Mammootty, Shubha, Jayashri, Jayachitra, Sharada, Nedumudi Venu, John Varghese, Adoor Bhawani, Thilakan, Venu Nagavalli, Innocent, Meena

Controversial film because of its alleged exploitation of the well-publicised suicide of the Tamil actress Shobha. When a poor Kerala family moves to Madras, their young daughter Shanthamma becomes the teenage film star Lekha (Nalini). However, the young girl hangs herself. The film recounts the events leading up to her decision, including a stint as a prostitute and the merciless exploitation she suffers from her alcoholic father (Varghese) and her pushy mother (Subha) as well as from her professional colleagues, esp. from her lover, the unhappily married Suresh (Gopi), a director of art-house films. The film depended heavily on the real-life events and characters to whom it alluded, while continuing the director’s fascination with the thriller format (Yavanika, 1982).

  MALAMUKALILE DAIVAM

aka The God Atop the Hill
1983 111’col Malayalam

d P.N. Menon pc Suryamudra Films s/lyr Kalpatta Balakrishnan c Deviprasad m Johnson

lp Sudharani, Master Suresh, Kunjandi, Balasingh, Lakshmi Geetha, Subramanyam, Unni Mary, Sathyendra, Ranjith, Gabriel, Rani Abraham

Symbolic tale set in a tribal village at the foot of the Banasuran Mountains in Kerala. Religious superstition and ignorance maintain stasis in the village. A relentlessly intelligent boy escapes its oppressive confines and later returns, determined to bring enlightenment to the village. The event is represented in terms of a torchlight procession up the forbidding, god-guarded mountains shielding the villagers from the ‘outside’.

  MANDI

aka The Marketplace
1983 167’ col Hindi

d/co-sc Shyam Benegal p Freni M. Variava, Lalit M. Bijlani pc Blaze Film Ents co-sc Satyadev Dubey, Shama Zaidi lyr Mir Taqi Mir, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Insha, Makhdoom Mohiuddin, Talwar Danda, Ila Arun c Ashok Mehta m Vanraj Bhatia

lp Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil, Naseeruddin Shah, Amrish Puri, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Saeed Jaffrey, Om Puri, Sreela Majumdar, Harish Patel, Neena Gupta, Soni Razdan, Ila Arun, Geeta Siddharth, Aditya Bhattacharya

Apparently inspired by The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (Colin Higgins, 1982), Benegal’s rare venture into comedy touches on religion and politics via the motif of prostitution. Brothel madam Rukmini (Azmi) tries to make her ‘girls’ conform to the time-honoured traditions of a kotha (a brothel where music and dance flourish). The women’s mischievousness forces the establishment to find another home. Problems arise when Sushil, the son of Major Agarwal (Jaffrey), a local notable, falls in love with the prostitute Zeenat (Patil), Agarwal’s illegitimate daughter. Instead, Sushil is supposed to marry the neurotic daughter of Mr Gupta (Kharbanda), a property developer who makes the brothel shift locations yet again in order to separate Sushil from Zeenat.

  MAYA MIRIGA

aka Maya Mriga aka The Mirage
1983 115’ col Oriya d/sc/co-st Nirad N. Mahapatra pc Lotus Prod. co-st/dial Bibhuti Patnaik c Rajagopal Mishra m Bhaskar Chandavarkar

lp Bansidhar Satpathy, Manimala, Binod Mishra, Manaswini, Sampad Mahapatra, Sujata, Vivekananda Satpathy, Kishori Debi, Managaraj, Shriranjan Mohanty, Kunumuni, Tikina

FTII-graduate Mahapatra’s low-key first feature, shot on 16mm with non-professional actors in Puri, a small coastal town in Orissa. The plot concerns the break-up of a middle-class extended family. The former freedom fighter Raj Kishore (Satpathy), now an elderly school headmaster, lives with his four sons and only daughter. The eldest son Tuku (Mishra) and his wife Prabha (Manaswini) are expected to help pay for the education of the younger siblings while the second son Tutu (Mahapatra) marries a well-off woman (Sujata) who insists on a separate household. In the end, Tuku refuses to keep shouldering the burdens of the extended family and the unit disintegrates. The director, a noted teacher and writer of film theory, acknowledges the influence of Yasujiro Ozu’s editing style.

  MHARI PYARI CHANANA

1983 130’ col Rajasthani

d/sc Jatin Kumar pc Jayashree Ents st Bharat Vyas’s play Ramu Chanana dial/co-lyr Suraj Dadhich c H. Lakshminarayan m Narayan Dutt

lp Satyajit Puri, Pooja Saxena, Ramesh Tiwari, Bina Shyam, Ajay Sinha, Suraj Dadhich, Ritu Khanna, S.D. Chavan, Hakim Keranvi, Master Anil

Successful Rajasthani melodrama adapted from Vyas’s stage hit. Poor Ramu (Puri) and rich Chanana (Saxena) are childhood lovers but class differences keep them apart as her desires conflict with the need to maintain her father’s social standing. The film evokes the Laila-Majnu and Shirin-Farhad legends with overtones of Devdas thrown in for good measure.

  NAYANMONI

1983 140’ col Assamese

d Suprabha Debi pc Rajendra Chalachitra sc Guna Sindhu Hazarika c Indukalpa Hazarika m Jitu-Tapan

lp Nipon Goswami, Bidya Nair, Vandana Sharma, Girija Das, Ishan Barua, Gauri Barua

Debut feature by Assam’s first woman director. Moina marries the rich Arup although his parents disapprove. She insists on a separate establishment away from her husband’s joint family, which creates difficulties when her husband dies. Her lone struggle to bring up her children eventually wins her the affection of her estranged in-laws.

  ORU INDHIYA KANAVU

aka An Indian Dream
1983 141’col Tamil

d/s Komal Swaminathan p T.P. Varadarajan, Vijayalakshmi Desikan pc Shri Muthiallammal Creations lyr Vali, Vairamuthu c M. Kesavan m M.S. Vishwanathan

lp Suhasini, Rajeev, R.K. Raman, Samikkannu, Lalitha

The celebrated playwright and scenarist of Thanneer Thanneer (filmed in 1981) turned director with Yuddha Kandam (1983) and this emphatic reformist melodrama is his 3rd effort. It tells of a woman intellectual, Anamika (Suhasini), who, when exposed to tribal authenticity, becomes an activist on behalf of the tribals in the Javadhi Hills. Overcoming the extremes of political persecution with the help of an honest and therefore victimised policeman, Muthuvel (Rajeev), she exposes the rapist of a tribal woman (Lalitha): the son of a powerful politician who stops at nothing to cover up his son’s crime.

  RACHANA

aka Writing aka Rachna
1983 149’ b&w Malayalam

d Mohan p Sivan Kunnamppilly pc Thushara Films st Eastman Anthony sc/dial John Paul lyr Mullahakshmi c Vasant Kumar m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Nedumudi Venu, Srividya, Gopi, Mammootty, Poornima Jayaram, Vijay Menon, Jagathi Srikumar, Ramu, Isaac Thomas

The story, told in flashback, of a writer, Shriprasad (Gopi), who uses his wife Sharada (Srividya) to get to know a simple-minded man, Unni (Venu), so that he may use him as source material for his next novel. The duped simpleton finds out the truth and commits suicide, leaving the wife insane with guilt and the writer a broken man even though the author of a highly acclaimed novel. The director is a well-known playwright and stage director as well as a prolific film-maker.

  RANGULA KALA

aka Colourful Dreams
1983 136’ col Telugu

d/st/co-sc/co-m B. Narasinga Rao pc Suchitra Int. co-sc/co-lyr Devi Priya co-sc Uppala Narasimham co-sc/dial S.M. Pran Rao co-lyr Gaddar, Angaiah c Venugopal K. Thakker co-m Janardhan lp B. Narasinga Rao, G. Narayana Rao, T. Saichand, Kakarala, Chandra, Venkata Reddy, Roopa, Shakuntala, Shesham Raju, Sangeetha Behal, Rajyalakshmi, Usha Sheikh, Haritha, Amar Mohan

Narasinga Rao’s debut is an existential melodrama with the director playing a romantic painter, Ravi, whose friends include a trade union leader (Kakarala), an auto-rickshaw driver, a Marxist journalist (Narayana Rao) and a glib, successful painter (Saichand) whose success contrasts with Ravi’s inability to sell his own work. His neighbour Kankamma, who rejects an evil landlord’s advances, is evicted from her house; the trade unionist is killed in police custody; and Ravi starts exhibiting his work on the streets to indicate his growing politicisation to the satisfaction of his Marxist friend. The film is geared to the CPI(ML)-led political movements in Northern AP and included the compositions and songs of the region’s best-known radical poet and performer, Gaddar.

  SAGARA SANGAMAM

aka The Confluence
1983 160’ col Telugu

d/st/sc K. Vishwanath p Edida Nageshwara Rao pc Poornodaya Movie Creations dial Jandhyala lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c P.S. Niwas m Ilaiyaraja

lp Kamalahasan, Jayapradha, Sarath Babu, S.P. Sailaja, ‘Sakshi’ Rangarao, Vankayala, Janaki, Arunkumar, Bhoomeswararao, Potti Prasad, Manju Bhargavi, Mohan Sharma

Vishwanath’s sequel to Shankarabharanam (1979) concentrated on classical dance. The drunken dance critic Balakrishna Bhagavatar (Kamalahasan) writes a review denouncing a mediocre but much-touted dancer (Sailaja). It turns out, in a flashback, that the dancer is the daughter of the reviewer’s old flame Madhavi (Jayapradha). Madhavi persuades Balakrishna to teach her daughter. He eventually dies of a broken heart but his pupil achieves mastery in classical dance so that the classical art (cf. Shankarabharanam) will live on. The film is dominated by Kamalahasan, who demonstrated a remarkable, unexpected skill to dance the Bharat Natyam, although the rest of the film’s classicism is pure kitsch.

  SAGARAM SHANTHAM

1983 126’ col Malayalam

d P.G. Vishwambaran pc Premadevas Films st Sara Thomas Babu sc John Paul lyr O.N.V. Kurup c K. Ramchandra Babu m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Mammootty, Nedumudi Venu, Sreenath, Ramu, Shanti Krishna, Sukumari, Manochitra

Early Mammootty melodrama establishing some of the key tenets of his later screen persona: his commitment to helpless women, as well as his penchant for taking on the role of an avenging angel. He is the motor mechanic Anandan, who is rejected by his childhood friend Sridevi because of class differences. However, she marries a villain and gets thrown out on the streets, pregnant and penniless. Anandan takes revenge on her husband and ends up in jail, while she promises to wait for his release to marry him.

  SANAKEITHEL

aka Golden Market
1983 131’ col Manipuri

d M.A. Singh pc Th. Dorendra Singh st/m N. Pahari c Suresh Patel

lp A. Memi, Master Tony, Somorendra, Manao, Upen, Ingochouba, Anwar Ali, Shahnawaz Khan, Holkhomang, Ibechaobi, Bijoy, Meena, Meim Chaoba, Maharaj Okendrajit, G. Ibeyaima Devi

Melodrama featuring criminal violence in Imphal, the (for most Indians) exotic capital of Manipur. It addresses issues like unemployment, drugs and the nexus between an oppressive state power and an entrenched feudal elite through the story of a widow, Nungshi (Memi), and her son Ibungobi (Master Tony). When the independent-minded Nungshi is gang-raped and becomes a crazed beggar, her son joins a group of criminals operating in Imphal’s ‘Golden Market’. Ibungobi eventually realises that the beggar is his mother, but is too late to help her even though one of his criminal friends is a local politician. Shot under very difficult conditions, the film is a courageous effort to go beyond the exotic and miserabilist stories featured in many art-house films originating in India’s smaller film industries.

  SMRITICHITRE

aka Memory Episodes
1983 135’ col Marathi

d Vijaya Mehta pc Doordarshan st Laxmibai Tilak’s autobiography sc Mangesh Kulkarni lyr Laxmibai Tilak c R.C. Mapakshi m Mohan

lp Vijaya Mehta, Suhas Joshi, Pallavi Patil, Ravindra Mankani, Shirish Joshi, Mangesh Kulkarni, Vishwas Mehendale, Rekha Kamat, Sudhir Joshi

Vijaya Mehta’s debut is a TV film based on the legendary Marathi autobiography of Laxmibai Tilak (1868–1936), a major social reform text evoking the life of her husband, the philosopher Narayan V. Tilak (Mankani and, as an older man, Sudhir Joshi). The film covers 20 years of her life, from her marriage to her conversion to her husband’s religion, Christianity. It also tells of her childhood, the loss of her two children, her self-education and her husband’s conversion in Ahmednagar while she spent another five years in the same town rigidly adhering to her Hindu beliefs. The predominantly theatrical actors contribute to a theatrical film. The main character is played by three different actors: for the childhood scenes, Patil takes the role; as a young woman she is played by Suhas Joshi and as an old woman by Mehta herself.

  ACCIDENT

1984 121’ col Kannada

d Shankar Nag pc Sanket Prod. s Vasant Mokashi dial G.S. Sadashiv c Shankar Deodhar m Ilaiyaraja

lp Anant Nag, Shankar Nag, Ashok Mandanna, Srinivasa Prabhu, Ramesh Bhatt, Arundhati Rao

Fast-paced crime movie with two rich young men getting involved in a major accident that could threaten the election prospects of the corrupt politician Dharmadhikari. A police inspector is forced to withdraw from the case but a courageous journalist eventually reveals the political connections. Like Shankar Nag’s previous film, Minchina Ota (1980), it is apparently based on a true-life incident.

  ACHAMILLAI ACHAMILLAI

aka Fearless
1984 161’ col Tamil

d/s K. Balachander pc Kavithalaya Prod. lyr Vairamuthu, Erode Tamizhanban c B.S. Lokanathan m V.S. Narasimhan

lp Saritha, Rajesh, Delhi Ganesh, Pavithra, Ahalya, Prabhakar, Vairam Krishnamurthy, Veeraiah, Jayagopi, Charley T.

After the critical success of Thanneer Thanneer (1981), Balachander pushes his jaundiced view of (Tamil but also general Indian) politics further with this grotesque drama symbolising the conditions of life in independent India. The central character is Thenmozhi (Saritha), a textile worker, who loves and marries Ulaganathan (Rajesh), a pragmatic politician whose daily compromises eventually lead to provoking communal riots and callous corruption. A strong and lively woman, Thenmozhi ends up killing her corrupt husband. The film repeatedly evokes, in its political references, the old tradition of political propaganda in Tamil film, with numerous symbols and clear distinctions between good and evil: most notably in the climactic sequence when the wife, stepping on to a dais to garland her husband, has a knife hidden in the garland with which she publicly stabs him. Sridhar Rajan described the film’s opening as ‘a stunning surrealist streetside strewn with corpses [a]nd, later, we see the evocative visuals of men with loudspeakers growing out of their throats, each vying democratically to down the other vocally in the battle of the ballot’. The grotesque side of the story is evident in e.g. Thenmozhi’s deformed brother born on Independence Day and named Swatantram (i.e. Independence) and in her blind father, a former freedom fighter who is corrupted by Ulaganathan’s promise to pay for an operation to restore his sight.

Rajesh (left) and Saritha in Achamillai Achamillai

  ADMI AUR AURAT

aka Man and Woman
1984 56’ col Hindi

d/sc Tapan Sinha pc Doordarshan st Prafulla Roy c Kamal Nayak m Ashish Khan

lp Amol Palekar, Mahua Roy Choudhury, Kalyan Chatterjee, Nirmal Ghosh, Parimal Sengupta, Sudhir K. Singh, Dipak Sanyal, Samir Mukherjee

A simple TV drama about a young, pregnant Muslim woman who walks 20 miles through the Vakilgunga hills to a hospital to deliver her baby. A kind Hindu poacher helps her to overcome geographical obstacles and inclement weather. In the end, when the child is born, the hunter learns that the woman is a Muslim, but he nevertheless takes the news of her son’s birth back to the woman’s husband.

  ALKOOTTATHIL THANIYE

aka Alone in the Crowd
1984 139’ col Malayalam

d I.V. Sasi pc Century s M.T. Vasudevan Nair lyr Kavalam Narayana Panicker c Jayanan Vincent m Shyam

lp Balan K. Nair, Mammootty, Seema, Shubha, Sumitra, Unni Mary, Mohanlal, Pappu, Lalu Alex, Adoor Bhasi, Prashab

A film from a prolific sexploitation director advocating adherence to old-style family values and unconditional submission to patriarchy. A dying father’s three children rush to his bedside but, as the old man clings on to life, his two daughters return to their busy urban lives and his son’s wife leaves for fear of missing out on her Harvard fellowship. The son, Rajan (Mammootty), stays and the old man’s niece Ammukkutty (Seema), a schoolteacher who helped Rajan in his education but was not allowed to many him, is summoned to come and look after the men. With exemplary devotion Ammukkutty tends to their needs while reconciling all members of the family with each other. The happy ending demonstrates the transcendent value of filial piety.

  ANDHl GALI

aka Blind Alley aka Dead End
1984 152’ col Hindi

d/sc/m Buddhadev Dasgupta pc K.B.S. Films st Dibyendu Palit’s novel Ghar Bari dial/lyr Gulzar c Kamal Nayak

lp Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Deepti Naval, M.K. Raina, Anil Chatterjee, Mahesh Bhatt, Satya Bannerjee, Shyamanand Jalan, Anuradha Tandon

The final part of the director’s trilogy dealing with contemporary middle-class Bengali politics (Dooratwa, 1978; Grihajuddha, 1982) is his first film in Hindi. Set in Calcutta in the early 70s, the central figure is a left activist and school teacher, Hemanta. Narrowly escaping being murdered by the police, Hemanta finds his political organisation in disarray and flees to Bombay where he leads a quiet life though his nerves are still shattered by his Calcutta experiences. Through a friend, Rakesh, Hemanta meets Jaya and they marry. To help raise money to buy a flat, Jaya reluctantly becomes a model for advertisement photographs. Obsessed with the desire to secure a middle-class lifestyle, Hemanta forces Jaya to take on demeaning photographic assignments and, to impose his will on her, he rapes her. Jaya commits suicide and Hemanta finds himself facing the police again.

  ANKAHEE

aka The Unspoken
1984 135’ col Hindi

d/p Amol Palekar pc Suchimisha sc Jayant Dharmadhikari, Vasu Bhagat, S.G. Akolkar st C.T. Khanolkar’s play Kalaya Tasmeya Namaha dial Kamalesh Pandey c Debu Deodhar m Jaidev

lp Amol Palekar, Deepti Naval, Shriram Lagoo, Anil Chatterjee, Dina Pathak, Devika Mukherjee, Vinod Chopra, Seema, Vinod Mehra

Palekar follows his Marathi film Aakriet (1981) with this Hindi melodrama about fatalism, adapted from a noted experimental play. Nandu’s (Palekar) father (Lagoo) is an astrologer who stoically lives with the knowledge that his predictions mostly come true. Nandu resents his father’s fatalistic attitude and rebels when his father predicts that Nandu’s first wife will die in childbirth, which puts a damper on Nandu’s marriage plans with Sushma, a rational woman prepared to take the risk. Instead, Nandu marries the retarded but curable Indu (Naval), hoping to circumvent his father’s prediction. Indu is taken to hospital to give birth and she survives, but Sushma commits suicide to assert her right to determine her own destiny.

  ANUBHAVA

1984 135’ col Kannada/Telugu/Hindi

d/co-p/s Kashinath pc Shri Gayatri Arts co-p Satyanarayana, Thotayya, Dattatreya, Umapathi dial/lyr[Te] Rajashri lyr[K] V. Manohar c K. Sundaranath Suvarna m L. Vaidyanathan

lp Kashinath, Umashree, Master Vasanth, Dinesh, Arvind, Kaminidharan, Shivraj, Sivan Kumar, Venkatapathy, Prasannakumar, Mohammed Asha, Sarojamma, Bhagya

The village girl Gauri (Bhagya) is to marry Ramesh, an urban office clerk (Kashinath), who builds up his physique and reads sex manuals while she clings to her adolescence and plays with little boys. Arriving in the village with a large supply of contraceptives, Ramesh is frustrated by Gauri’s behaviour and allows himself to be seduced by Padmi (Umashree). He returns to the city with Padmi, who then takes off with a criminal, which gets Ramesh in trouble with the police. Eventually, a transformed Gauri arrives with her family, and Ramesh, in all sorts of trouble, gratefully accepts her. Starting off as a rural sex comedy, the film runs out of ideas in its effort to prolong the narrative. It introduced future actor-director Kashinath, an unlikely hero with few star qualities but possessing a wry sense of humour and an intimate familiarity with the details of lower middle-class urban life.

  APRIL 18

aka April Pathinettu
1984 153’ col Malayalam d/s Balachandra Menon pc Sathosh Films lyr Bichu Thirumala c Vipin Mohan m A.T. Ummar

lp Balachandra Menon, Venu Nagavalli, Adoor Bhasi, Gopi, Shobhana, Jose Prakash, Raju, Santosh, Shankaradi, Srinath, Unnimary, Adoor Bhawani, Sukumari, Srilatha

A melodrama about a conscientious policeman, played by the director, whose visits to a convict’s wife (Unnimary) are misunderstood by his wife (Shobhana) who leaves home in protest. His father-in-law (Bhasi), who never liked his daughter’s choice for a husband, pushes for divorce. However, the unpleasant nature of the legal proceedings plus the nostalgic memories of their first meeting reconcile the couple.

  CHALLENGE

1984 152’ col Telugu

d A. Kodandarami Reddy pc Creative Commercials p K.S. Rama Rao st Yandamuri Veerendranath, based on his novel Dabbu-Dabbu sc Sainath dial G. Satyamurthy lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c H. Loksingh m Ilaiyaraja

lp Chiranjeevi, Suhasini, Vijayashanti, Ravu Gopala Rao, Rajendra Prasad, Gollapudi Maruti Rao, Smita

Based on Veerendranath’s novel (cf. Abhilasha, 1983), the unemployed Gandhi (Chiranjeevi) claims that human relationships are more important than money and bets the rich Ram Mohan Rao (Rao) that he can earn Rs 50 lakh in five years. With Laxmi’s (Suhasini) help he starts earning money, initially by selling ideas, then in partnership with the unemployed engineer Vidyarthi (Prasad), becoming a successful industrialist. Rao tries to destroy Gandhi’s business, but fails mainly because Rao’s daughter Harika (Vijayashanti) helps Gandhi. Laxmi sides with the workers when they have a dispute with Gandhi and eventually Gandhi, having proved his point, throws it all away, rejects Harika, who was to have been his reward, and returns to Laxmi.

  CHIRAI

aka Sirai
1984 143’ col Tamil

d/sc/dial R.C. Sakthi pc Ananthi Films p Mohan st Anuradha Ramanan lyr Pulamai Pithan, Muthulingam, Piraichoodan c Vishwam Nataraj m M.S. Vishwanathan

lp Rajesh, Prasanna, Pandian, Laxmi, Ilavarasi, S.S. Chandran, A. Shakuntala, S.N. Parvathi

The drunken landlord Anthony (Rajesh) rapes Bhagirathi (Lakshmi), wife of the village Brahmin priest. When her husband (Prasanna) rejects her, encouraged by a kindly policeman she moves in with her rapist and eventually develops an attachment to him. When he dies she prefers to be known as the man’s widow and refuses to rejoin her husband. A parallel story has a farm-worker (Pandian) courting a local politician’s daughter (Elavarasi), providing an opportunity to show the corrupt relationships between politicians and police. The story’s impact is diluted by gross comedy, cabarets, and a fight sequence inserted for box-office reasons. Laxmi gives an accomplished repeat performance of a rape victim (cf. Sila Nerangalil Sila Manitbargal, 1976). The film upset Brahmin organisations, which campaigned against it.

  DAMUL

aka Bonded until Death
1984 141’(125’) col Hindi

d/p/sc Prakash Jha pc Prakash Jha Prod. dial/st Shaiwal based on his story Kaabutra c Rajan Kothari m Raghunath Seth

lp Manohar Singh, Sreela Majumdar, Annu Kapoor, Deepti Naval, Pyare Mohan Sadhay, Braj Kishore, Gopal Sharan, Om Prakash

Melodrama set in Bihar addressing poverty, rural exploitation and the politics of Untouchability. Madho (Manohar Singh), the village head, uses the conventional system of bonded labour (i.e. labourers have to sign a paper assuming the debts of their ancestors) to subjugate the Harijan labourer Sanjeevan (Kapoor). Madho also runs an extortion racket based on stealing cattle and then requiring the owners to buy them back. Sanjeevan’s story is intercut with Madho’s multifarious misdeeds and the equally nefarious doings of Madho’s rival, the politician Bachcha Singh. Madho’s younger brother heads the gang of thugs who enforce the headman’s will, including rigging the elections, raping and killing the widow Mahatmeen when she threatens to expose him in court, framing Sanjeevan for the crime, etc. In the end, Sanjeevan’s wife Rajuli kills Madho. Jha’s 2nd film uses a continuously circling camera, converting the melodrama into a frontier tale of crime, sex and revenge, with colourful clothes and exotic accents.

  DHARE AALUA

aka Ray of Light
1984 162’ b&w Oriya

d/sc Saghir Ahmed pc Garuda Cinemagraphics st Manorama Das dial Sanjide Tayab lyr Suryamani Tripathi c Bidushree Bindhani m Harihar Panda

lp Prithviraj Mishra, Soumitra, Hemanth, Purna Bindhani, Dipen Ghosh, Soumendu Tripathi, Amrita Ahmed, Shivani Mahapatra

A courageous low-budget feature by Saghir Ahmed who teaches script writing at the FTII. The film addresses questions of rural oppression in ways markedly different from its usual treatment in Oriya cinema (cf. Manmohan Mahapatra). A joint family is partially fragmented when the patriarch’s only son (Mishra), a political activist, has to spend much of his time avoiding the police. The family informally adopts two children and is then blamed when one of them commits suicide while escaping from Panchanan (Ghosh), the children’s oppressive legal guardian. The children’s mostly absent journalist father (Mahapatra) causes the activist to be arrested, but eventually all the players of the drama come together. The director’s daughter Amrita Ahmed played one of the two children.

  GHARE BAIRE

aka Home and The World
1984 140’ col Bengali

d/sc/m Satyajit Ray pc NFDC st Rabindranath Tagore’s novel c Soumendu Roy

lp Soumitra Chatterjee, Victor Bannerjee, Swatilekha Chatterjee, Gopa Aich, Jennifer Kendall, Manoj Mitra, Indrapramit Roy, Bimal Chatterjee

Twenty years after Charulata (1964) Ray returned to Tagore, in colour, adapting a controversial novel that had increased in stature over the years. Set during the terrorist movements following the first communal partition of Bengal (1905), the book tells a triple story, interweaving the diaries of the zamindar Nikhilesh (V. Bannerjee), a critic of nationalism, with the stories of the man’s wife Bimala (Sw. Chatterjee) and of their guest, the fiery activist Sandeep (So. Chatterjee). Sandeep and Bimala become involved with one another, which for her leads to a sense of liberation. In the end Nikhilesh dies, and Bimala is widowed, punished for her transgression (the novel ends differently, with Nikhilesh accepting Bimala back). Ray played down the novel’s political overtones in favour of a straight love triangle enacted in a meticulously researched period setting. The film, which Ray had intended as his debut work, recalls Charulata in some ways. Ray’s son, Sandeep, completed the post-production after Ray suffered his first heart attack.

  KAANAMARAYATHU

aka The Invisible One
1984 137’ col Malayalam

d I.V. Sasi pc Vici Films s P. Padmarajan lyr Bichu Thirumala c Jayanan Vincent m Shyam

lp Mammootty, Lalu Alex, Rehman, Bahadur, Shobhana, Sabitha, Seema, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Sukumari, Noorjehan, Unnimary

Best known for starting the sexploitation genre in Malayalam cinema, Sasi adapts a script of the novelist and director Padmarajan (Koodevide?, 1983), a story of an aging, brutally practical businessman who reluctantly pays for the education of an orphaned girl originally sponsored by his father. The schoolgirl falls madly in love with the middle-aged businessman who, when the girl is about to be sent to a nunnery, allows himself to accept her love.

  KONY

1984 131’ col Bengali

d/sc/co-dial Saroj De pc West Bengal Govt co-dial Jayanta Bhattacharya st Moti Nandy lyr Rabindranath Tagore c Kamal Nayak m Chinmoy Chatterjee

lp Soumitra Chatterjee, Sreeparna Bannerjee, Moushumi Roy, Sarmishta Mukherjee, Subrata Sen, Swaroop Dutta

A sporting melodrama about a wayward but determined swimming coach, Kshitish Sinha (Chatterjee), and his star disciple, the female street urchin Kony (Bannerjee). Under her coach’s tutelage, Kony overcomes all adversities, including hostile sports administrators, and wins her race. Adapted from a story by the noted sports journalist and novelist Moti Nandy (cf. the novel Striker, filmed in 1978). Both the realism and the political references mandatory in Bengali cinema (club rivalry, Sinha becoming a speechwriter for a politically ambitious industrialist) are present, and Kony’s general defiance of both gender and class oppression keeps the sentimentalism within bounds. Director Saroj De was associated with the famous Agragami collective.

  LAKSHMANA REKHA

1984 113’ col Malayalam

d I.V. Sasi pc Murali Movies s P.V. Kuriakose lyr Bichu Thirumala c Jayanan Vincent m A.T. Ummar

lp Mammootty, Mohanlal, K.P. Ummar, P.K. Abraham, Adoor Bhasi, Seema, Kalaranjini, Kaviyoor Ponnamma

Bizarre Sasi melodrama exploiting the Kerala convention of marriage between cousins. Two brothers, Sukumaran and Sudhakaran both love their cousin Radha. She marries one of them, but her husband has an accident on their wedding night and is paralysed for life. A psychiatrist recommends that the wife has sex with her brother-in-law to solve her emotional problems. The paralysed husband, unable to handle this new development, is then killed by his father in order to end his miseiy. The father is arrested.

  MANIK RAITONG

aka Manik the Miserable
1984 149’ col Khasi d/sc Ardhendu Bhattacharya p/st Rishan Rapseng pc Neo Cine Prod, dial Humphrey Blaah lyr Skendrowel Syiemlih c Bijoy Anand Sabharwal m Kazu Matsui

lp William Rynjhah, Sheba Diengdoh, Gilbert Synnah, Veronica Nongbet, Benjamin Khongnor, Diamond Matthew

Documentarist Bhattacharya’s feature debut is the first film in the North-Eastern language of Khasi. It is a folk-tale about a poor man, Manik, and his beloved Lieng who is forced to marry the tribal chief Syiem. She refuses to live with her husband and at one time has a sexual encounter with Manik which leaves her pregnant. She raises the child, but her lover is condemned to death. She jumps into Manik’s funeral pyre and dies with him. Reputed to be one of Meghalaya’s most ancient legends, relating to the origins of the region when seven of the sixteen families with privileged access to heaven decide to live on earth. In spite of some awkward acting, the film evokes the sad fatalism of marginalised people’s folk idiom in India.

  MATI MANAS

aka Mind of Clay aka Terracotta
1984 92’ col Hindi

d/p/co-s Mani Kaul pc Infrakino Film Prod. co-sc Kamal Swaroop c Venu m T.R. Mahalingam

lp Anita Kanwar, Robin Das, Ashok Sharma

Episodic film about the ancient Indian tradition of terracotta sculpture and pottery and the several legends associated with this tradition. The artefacts involved include some of the oldest items of Indian civilisation (from the Indus Valley, 2500BC) and have been, together with the legends associated with terracotta techniques, central to historical research into e.g. the origins of patriarchy, the shift from pastoral to agrarian systems, etc. The film enacts a series of such legends. The first is of the Sariya Mata or cat mother whose kittens remained safe in the interior of the baked pot, a legend associated with Harappan archaeological sites which had human skeletons buried in womb-like pots. The second legend revolves around the Kala-Gora (Black-White) icon produced in the village of Molella, Rajasthan, and features the witch Gangli who transforms Gora into a bull by day, making him work in her oil-press, until finally Kala beheads Gangli. The film connects this tale with the Mesopotamian legend of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The third, and best-known, legend features Parashuram who beheads his own mother Renuka with his axe. Interwoven with these tales are stories narrated by the potters themselves and fictional sequences featuring three contemporary historians who recall the legends while looking at the terracotta artefacts, often through the eyepiece of a camera or from behind glass panes in a museum. Shot throughout Central, South and Eastern India, the film deliberately suppresses its variety of locations to achieve the idea of an integrated civilisation endowed with a sense of immortality through cultural (pro)creativity. At the same time, the techno-cultural process of film-making is presented as an extension of similar craft traditions.

  MOHAN JOSHI HAAZIR HO!

aka A Summons for Mohan Joshi
1984 123’(130’) col Hindi

d/p/co-st/co-sc/co-dial Saeed Akhtar Mirza pc Saeed Akhtar Mirza Prod, co-st/co-sc Yusuf Mehta co-dial Ranjit Kapoor co-st/co-sc Sudhir Mishra lyr Madhosh Bilgrami c Virendra Saini m Vanraj Bhatia

lp Naseeruddin Shah, Deepti Naval, Bhisham Sahni, Dina Pathak, Rohini Hattangadi, Amjad Khan, Mohan Gokhale, Satish Shah, Pankaj Kapoor, Arvind Deshpande

Mirza’s parody on housing legislation tells of Mohan Joshi (Sahni, the well-known novelist and brother of Balraj Sahni in his screen debut), a retired clerk who lives with his wife (Pathak) in an old Bombay tenement. Joshi sues his landlord, the evil property developer Kundan Kapadia (Khan), which starts a complicated and expensive legal procedure conducted by the slick lawyer Malkani (N. Shah). Eventually Joshi realises that one cannot win against entrenched economic powers. In the end, when the judge comes to see the condition of the building for himself, Kapadia’s men quickly cover its rickety walls with a coat of paint and Joshi, unable to control his anger, goes berserk and demolishes the place, making it collapse on to his own head. Mirza’s allegorical approach, using a crudely Brechtian idea of surface realism, allows him to cast the noted screen villain Amjad Khan (cf. Sholay, 1975) as the property developer with lather dripping from his chin or eating a leg of mutton.

  MUKHA MUKHAM

aka Face to Face
1984 106’ col Malayalam

d/s Adoor Gopalakrishnan p K. Ravindranathan Nair pc General Pics c Ravi Varma m M.B. Srinivasan

lp P. Ganga, Balan K. Nair, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Krishna Kumar, Karamana Janardanan Nair, Thilakan, Vishwanathan, Ashokan, Lalitha, Vembayam, Krishnankutty Nair, John Samuel, Shanmugham Pillan, Thambi

Gopalakrishnan’s melodrama that opened up a new direction in the genre in Malayalam film while looking at the unpalatable aspects of radical populism in Kerala. The first part is set in the 1945–55 period just prior to the short-lived 1957 CPI electoral victory in the State. The 2nd part is ten years later, after 1964, when the CPI split in two, later fragmenting even further. The central character is Sridharan (Ganga), a trade union leader who plays a key role in winning a strike against mechanisation. He is mercilessly beaten by thugs and has to go underground. This episode is told from the point of view of an idealist radical, Sudhakaran (Vishwanathan as a boy, Ashokan as a man). Years later, the old radicals have made their compromises and Sridharan has become a legendary emblem of integrity on whom the defeated survivors have projected their erstwhile radicalism. When he returns, there follows bitter disappointment at the discovery of the legendary hero’s human weaknesses. His name is invoked by all factions as a rallying cry, making his presence all the more embarrassing. One day, he is found killed. With the man safely out of the way, his image can once again be mobilised, untarnished by the complexities of real life. Violently attacked by the CPI(M) establishment in Kerala, the film works on several layers: in critiquing the state’s left establishment it also critically evokes a tradition of political melodrama in Kerala (cf. Thoppil Bhasi’s scripts). It suggests that its protagonist in all his roles - fiery leader, spent force, political legend - is inescapably reduced into stereotypical functioning, in the popular melodramatic sense, of one kind or another. The film thereby shifts the entire critique into one where the mass culture generated by incomplete capitalist growth merges with the rhetoric of left activism, the whole masking what the director suggests to be the major problem: the absence of a valid indigenous culture able to define the terms of its engagement with capitalist systems.

  MY DEAR KUTTICHATHAN/CHHOTA CHETAN

1984 96’ col Malayalam/Hindi/Tamil d Jijo pc Navodaya sc Raghunath Paleri st Navodaya’s script team lyr Bichu Thirumala c Ashok Kumar m Ilaiyaraja

lp Kottarakkara Sridharan Nair, Alumoodan, Dalip Tahil, Arvind, Mukesh, Suresh, Sonia

Made by the veteran director Appachan’s son, this box-office hit is a fantasy film designed to show off its special effects in India’s first 3-D movie. Kuttichathan is a mischievous genie living in an abandoned house. He is accidentally summoned by a group of children and appears in the guise of a boy who carries out all their wishes. This allows the director to stage scenes of children walking on the ceiling, speeded-up rickshaw rides and various other spectacular episodes. Sentiment is catered for by having the genie cure one child’s father of alcoholism. The genie eventually changes into a fox-bat and flies off. A dubbed Hindi version, Chhota Chetan, was also successful.

Bhisham Sahni in Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho !

  NEERAB JHADA

aka The Silent Storm
1984 119’ b&w Oriya d/sc Manmohan Mahapatra pc Chayadhwani Prod, st Nandlal Mahapatra c Raj Sekhar, B. Bindhani m Shantanu Mahapatra

lp Hemanta Das, Niranjan Patnaik, B. Tripathi, R. Das, Jaya Swami, Manimala

Mahapatra’s melancholic rural realism, deployed on an expanded canvas, tells of three peasants confronting a dastardly landlord. One of the friends goes crazy trying to find buried treasure in order to recover his land; another goes to the city where he finds even worse forms of exploitation; the third has a more complicated problem: his daughter falls in love with an employee of the landlord. He too loses his land and has to migrate, but in the process delivers the film’s ‘voice of hope’, suggesting that if sufficient numbers of people feel the way he does, the future might still be bright.

  NOKKETHA DHOORATHU KANNUM NATTU

aka Looking at Infinity
1984 130’ col Malayalam

d/s Fazil pc Bodhi Chitra lyr Bichu Thirumala c Ashok Kumar m Jerry Amaldev

lp Padmini, Nadia Moidu, Sukumari, Mohanlal, Nedumudi Venu, Thilakan, K.P. Ummar, Fazil, Raju

Contemporary melodrama about a young girl incongruously called Girly (Moidu) who brightens the life of her embittered grandmother, Kunjoojamma Thomas (Padmini). As the girl requires a critical operation, the grandmother finds that once more the story of her life repeats itself: the people she loves are invariably taken away from her. Actress Padmini, who had been living in the USA for many years, made her comeback with this film. Mohanlal played the relatively minor role of a neighbourhood youth who loves Girly.

  NOORAVATHUNAAL

aka 100th Day
1984 134’ col Tamil

d/s Manivannan pc Thirupathi Samy Films p S.N.S. Thirumal lyr Vairamuthu, Muthulingam, Pulamai Pithan c A. Sabapathy m Ilaiyaraja

lp Mohan, Vijayakanth, Thengai Srinivasan, Sathyaraj, Nalini, Ponni, Y. Vijaya, Janakaraj, Anuradha, Kovai Sarala

An efficient crime thriller notable as the film which the unemployed psychotic murderer Jayaprakash cited as the inspiration for his slaughter of a large family in Madras. The claim hit the headlines and ensured the film’s box-office success. The plot concerns a wayward son, Kumar, of an equally wayward father. Kumar steals museum pieces with the help of a security officer. He kills a young woman (shown before the credit titles) and marries the victim’s sister, Devi (Nalini), who finds out about her husband’s criminal activities and, with the help of her brother-in-law, exposes Kumar to the police.

  PAAR

aka The Crossing
1984 141’(120’) col Hindi

d/co-sc/c/m Gautam Ghose pc Orchid Films co-sc Partha Bannerjee st Samaresh Bose’s short story Paarhi dial S.P. Singh.

lp Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Utpal Dutt, Om Puri, Mohan Agashe, Anil Chatterjee, Ruma Guha-Thakurta, Sunil Mukherjee, Kamu Mukherjee

One of the former photo-journalist and documentarist Ghosh’s best-known films, it features a familiar New Indian Cinema cast: Shah, Puri and Azmi. A fable of exploitation in rural Bihar, in which the landlord’s (Dutt) men wreck a village and kill the benevolent schoolmaster (Chatterjee) who was its progressive force. The labourer Naurangia (Shah) breaks with a tradition of passive resistance and retaliates by killing the landlord’s brother. Naurangia and his wife Rama (Azmi) become fugitives from justice. After many efforts to find sustenance elsewhere, the two decide to return home. To earn the fare, they agree to drive a herd of pigs through a river, causing the pregnant Rama to believe she has lost her baby. At the end of the film Naurangia puts his ear to her belly and listens to the heartbeats of the unborn child. The original short story dealt mainly with the river crossing and the film was criticised for not adequately integrating this episode with the others. With this film Ghosh joined the trend of 70s ruralist realism, although the river-crossing episode achieves a wider metaphoric resonance.

  PANCHAVADIPPALAM

1984 140’ col Malayalam

d/sc K.G. George pc Jansuk Gandhimati Films st/lyr Veloor Krishnankutty dial Yesudasan c Shaji N. Karun m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Gopi, Nedumudi Venu, Thilakan, K.P. Ummar, Jagathi Srikumar, Venu Nagavalli, Alumoodan, Srinivasan, V.D. Rajappan, Innocent, Chandran Nair, Sukumari, Shubha, Srividya, Kalpana

A satirical comedy about political corruption and vanity. A henpecked politician (Gopi) wants his name attached to a new bridge, even if that means destroying another, perfectly serviceable bridge. The new bridge collapses during its official opening and kills a bystander.

  PARTY

1984 118’(155’) col Hindi

d/c Govind Nihalani pc NFDC s Mahesh Elkunchwar from his Marathi play

lp Rohini Hattangadi, Manohar Singh, Vijaya Mehta, Deepa Sahi, K.K. Raina, Soni Razdan, Shafi Inamdar, Om Puri, Amrish Puri, Akash Khurana, Naseeruddin Shah, Gulan Kripalani, Pearl Padamse

An exemplary tale set in a middle-class artistic milieu inaugurating Nihalani’s long-term project of filmed theatre. Mrs Rane (Mehta) hosts a party for the recipient of a literary prize (Singh). The gathered ‘intelligentsia’ are revealed to be shallow hypocrites compared with the absent poet Amrit (Shah), who abandoned his literary career to become an activist among the tribals. The original Marathi play was criticised for its superficial depiction of the Bombay intelligentsia and the film does not really improve matters. Nihalani commented about the differences between the play and the film: ‘There is a major difference in the thrust. The play is concerned with the question of art versus life. The film goes a bit further and tries to see whether a person can have two contrary sets of morality: one as an artist and the other as a human being.

  SAARANSH

aka The Gist
1984 137’ col Hindi

d/st/co-sc/co-dial Mahesh Bhatt pc Rajshree Prod, co-sc Sujit Sen co-dial Amit Khanna lyr Vasant Dev c Adeep Tandon m Ajit Varman

lp Rohini Hattangadi, Anupam Kher, Soni Razdan, Madan Jain, Suhas Bhalekar, Nilu Phule

Bhatt follows his successful Arth (1982) with this expressionistic psychodrama about old age, fading idealism and political corruption. Old Pradhan (Kher, in his debut performance), a retired headmaster, and his wife Parvati (Hattangadi) learn that their son, studying in New York, has been mugged and killed. Pradhan goes through the trauma of bureaucratic corruption to receive his cremated son’s ashes at the airport. Their tenant Sujata (Razdan), a young actress, is in love with Vilas (Jain), whose father is the corrupt politician Chitre (Phule). When Sujata finds herself pregnant, Pradhan and Parvati believe that it is their son reborn and protect Sujata from Chitre’s threats. The problem of bureaucratic ineptitude is solved when Pradhan goes to meet a minister who turns out to be his former student and still retains his old teacher’s sense of integrity. In the end, the old couple are reconciled to the loss of their son. The film has an oppressive soundtrack, with heavy music and effects underlining the states of loneliness, fear and frustration.

  SHRAVANA BANTHU

1984 158’ col Kannada

d/st/co-sc Singeetham Srinivasa Rao pc Chandrakala Art Ents. p Ekamreshwararao co-sc/dial/lyr Chi. Udayashankar c S.V. Srikanth m M. Rangarao

lp Rajkumar, Srinath, Urvashi, Vishwanath, Uma Shivakumar, Leelavathi, K.S. Aswath, Thoogudeepa Srinivas, Shivaram, Umesh

Reincarnation plot with a dubiously ‘secular’ message. The singer Kumar (Rajkumar), on a pilgrimage to a temple he saw in his dreams, meets the spirit of his friend Vishwa (Srinath), unrequited from an earlier birth. The friend recalls their previous lives in which they had been in love with the same woman (Urvashi). She loved Kumar and Vishwa had ordered his men to kill his rival, unaware that this was his friend Kumar. Realising his mistake, he committed suicide and his spirit was condemned to wander until redemption had been achieved. The woman from their earlier life, now reborn as Mary, a Christian, is courted by Kumar with the assistance of the spirit. The two eventually marry after overcoming the resistance of Kumar’s caste-conscious father. This segment involves a comic turn when Kumar pretends to have lost his memory and become ‘Peter from Petersburg’.

  SITARA

aka A Star
1984 144’ col Telugu

d/s Vamsy pc Poornodaya Movie Creations p Edida Nageshwara Rao dial Sainath lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c M.V. Raghu m Ilaiyaraja.

lp Sudhakar, Suman, Sarath Babu, Sriram, Prabhakar Reddy, Bhanupriya, Chamundeshwari, Saroja, J.V. Somayajulu, ‘Sakshi’ Ranga Rao

Sexual fantasy in the Vishwanath style made by the producers of Sagara Sangamam (1983). The photographer Devadas (Sudhakar) offers shelter to a mysterious woman he names Sitara (Bhanupriya). She later becomes a film star and he her manager. Her secretiveness about her past is broken when she shows she is terrified by caged birds and cannot bear to work in an abandoned palace. It turns out that she used to live in that palace, a virtual prisoner of her impoverished but proud zamindar brother (Sarath Babu), until she was rescued by a group of travelling performers. At the end of the film, the cynical manager writes an unauthorised biography of Sitara and she once again has to abandon her home and seek her future elsewhere.

  SWATI

aka The Pearl
1984 144’ col Telugu

d/s Kranthi Kumar pc Shri Kranthi Chitra dial Ganesh Patro lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c Hari Anumolu m Chakravarty

lp Suhasini, K. Jaggaiah, Bhanuchander, P.L. Narayana, Sarath Babu, Rajendra Prasad, Subhalekha Sudhakar, Sharada, Samyuktha, Ramaprabha, Anuradha

Kranthi Kumar’s directorial debut is an episodic melodrama about an aggressive young woman, Swati (Suhasini), who looks after her divorced mother (Sharada) while defending herself against predatory males in the street. Having arranged her mother’s second marriage with an old widower (Jaggaiah), Swati has problems with her new stepsister. When one of Swati’s friends is raped, local gossip blames the victim’s husband for failing to prevent the attack and the couple commit suicide. In the end, Swati’s father turns up wanting to meet his former wife once more before his death. He is allowed only to see her from a distance, while she is not told that he is still alive. One of Tamil star Suhasini’s best-known Telugu films. The director remade the film in Hindi in 1986 with Shashi Kapoor, Sharmila Tagore and Madhuri Dixit, with a score by Laxmikant-Pyarelal.

  TARANG

aka Wages and Profit aka The Wave
1984 171’ col/scope Hindi

d/co-sc Kumar Shahani pc NFDC co-sc Roshan Shahani dial Vinay Shukla lyr Raghuvir Sahay, Gulzar c K.K. Mahajan m Vanraj Bhatia

lp Smita Patil, Amol Palekar, Shriram Lagoo, Girish Karnad, Om Puri, Jalal Agha, Rohini Hattangadi, Kawal Gandhiok, M.K. Raina, Sulabha Deshpande, Arvind Deshpande, Jayanti Patel

Made 12 years after Maya Darpan (1972), Shahani’s biggest film to date is an elaborately plotted melodrama precisely realising his theory of epic cinema. An industrial family headed by the patriarch Sethji (Lagoo) is split when his son-in-law Rahul (Palekar) falls out with the industrialist’s nephew Dinesh (Karnad). Sethji, who became rich as a war profiteer, regards ‘wealth creation’ as a goal in itself and ruthlessly administers his personal fiefdom accordingly. Rahul, regarded by the family as a mere caretaker until Sethji’s grandson is ready to take over, is a more modern ‘nationalist’ capitalist committed to developing indigenous technology and minimum welfare arrangements for his workers. Dinesh, on the other hand, acts (illegally) on behalf of transnational interests which stand to profit by destabilising India’s sovereignity. These conflicts are mirrored in ironically identical ways within the working class: the corrupt Patel (Patel) is a trade union leader presumably aligned to the Congress Party who sells out to the management; the worker Namdev (Puri) finds his more radical union leader Kalyan (A. Deshpande) equally inclined to opportunism while another worker. Abdul (Raina), believes the established forms of political struggle to be inadequate and joins a more extreme left group which is also betrayed by his erstwhile leader. The only figure transcending these mirrored divisions is the remarkable Janaki (Patil). Widowed when her activist husband is killed, her commitment to the nurturing of a progressive force is repeatedly exploited by different factions and conflicting ideologies: reduced to prostitution, she is manipulated by Rahul’s sexually frigid wife Hansa (Gandhiok) into becoming her husband’s mistress. The money she thus obtains from Rahul is used to support the working-class movement. Forced by Rahul to become his accomplice in a plot to kill his father-in-law, she is made the scapegoat when the family conflict escalates into virtual gang war. At the end, the film shifts into a mythic discourse and Janaki becomes the elusive voice of history. Accusing Rahul of trying to manipulate what he never understood, she claims the forces of change to be ‘faster than the fleeting wind’. This sequence replays lines from the Urvashi-Pururavas legend from the Rig Veda as analysed by the historian D.D. Kosambi in his book Myth And Reality (1962/1983). The film adheres to Kosambi’s view that in India, the epic has often been the most precise language available for history itself, and much of the plotting is informed by the structure of the Mahabharata. In a narrower sense, however, the film is also a definitive comment on India’s nationalist enterprise, and on the tradition of cinematic melodrama that saw itself, and its formal assimilations, as the cultural vanguard of a modernising nationstate.

Smita Patil and M.K. Raina in Tarang

  TASVEER APNI APNI

Their Own Faces
1984 66’ col Hindi

d/p/s Mrinal Sen pc Doordarshan c Sambit Bose

lp M.K. Raina, K.K. Raina, Shyamand Jalan

A minor work made for TV about an employee (K.K. Raina) who desperately tries to persuade the office manager (M.K. Raina) not to sack him. The story is interrupted by dialogues between the narrator (Jalan) and the character suggesting that we are all playthings in games beyond our control.

  THIRAKKIL ALPA SAMAYAM

1984 134’ col Malayalam

d P.G. Vishwambaran pc Vijaya and Vijaya st Kanam E.J. sc Pappanamcode dial Sharief lyr Chunakkara c C.E. Babu m Shyam

lp Madhu, Thilakan, Mammootty, Shankar, T.G. Ravi, Seema, Menaka, Shubha, Meena

Communal melodrama about a conflict of generation and class that also involves three religions. The Hindu Shankaran Nair falls out with his friend, the Muslim Khadir Haji, when the latter arranges a marriage between Nair’s daughter Sarala and her poor Christian lover Anthony (Mammootty). The ensuing battle, which splits the village, escalates when Haji pulls his daughter out of school and virtually forces her into an arranged marriage; the daughter eventually marries a man of her choice with the help of Sarala and Anthony. Playing a major role as a social force is Anthony’s working-class trade union of rickshaw-drivers, which helps re-establish amity.

  UTSAV

aka The Festival
1984 145’ col Hindi

d/co-sc Girish Karnad p Shashi Kapoor co-p Dharampriya Das pc Film Valas st Sudraka’s play Mrichchakatikam aka The Little Cart and Bhasa’s play Charudatta co-sc Krishna Basrur dial Sharad Joshi lyr Vasant Dev c Ashok Mehta m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Shashi Kapoor, Rekha, Anuradha, Shankar Nag, Shekhar Suman, Amjad Khan, Kunal Kapoor, Annu Kapoor, Neena Gupta, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Anupam Kher

An exuberant but unsuccessful picaresque film set in the 4th C., when Sudraka is supposed to have written one of the most famous plays in Indian history, a love story between the Brahmin merchant Charudatta (Suman) and the beautful courtesan Vasantsena (Rekha). Karnad also introduced Vatsyayana (Amjad Khan) as a voyeuristic lecher peeking into various brothel chambers to write his famous Kama Sutra. Vasantsena, a beautiful prostitute of Ujjain, runs away from the villain Samasthanaka (S. Kapoor), the libidinous brother-in-law of the king, and hides in the house of Charudatta, a music-lover, with whom she falls in love. She loses her golden necklace in Charudatta’s house and when it is stolen, Charudatta’s affair with the prostitute is exposed. Samasthanaka, who believes he killed Vasantsena when he tried to rape her, accuses Charudatta of the deed. When Charudatta is sentenced to hang for Vasantsena’s murder, she turns up, alive and well, to try to save her lover’s life. Just then, a horeseman arrives to declare that a new king has been crowned and has pardoned all prisoners. Charudatta is reunited with his wife while the populace turns on the villainous Samasthanaka. He drags himself to Vasantsena’s house who, this time, accepts him. Karnad uses the conventions of the Hindi movie to explore the rasas of Shringar (the erotic) and Hasya (the comic), on which India’s classical aesthetic theory of performance is based, and intended the film as a celebration of life and love. The location scenes, filmed in Karnataka and Bharatpur because of the traditional architectural styles available there, were completed by studio scenes shot in Bombay. Apparently a more explicitly erotic version of the film was created for the Western market. This expensive film was producer Shashi Kapoor’s last effort at an art-house production.

  AAKHRI RAASTA

1985 164’ col Hindi

d/st/sc K. Bhagyaraj pc Lakshmi Prod. p A. Poornachandra Rao dial Rahi Masoom Raza lyr Anand Bakshi c S. Gopal Reddy m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Amitabh Bachchan, Sridevi, Jayaprada, Om Shivpuri, Sadashiv Amrapurkar, Bharat Kapoor, Dalip Tahil

Action movie featuring Bachchan in a double role, adapted from Bhartirajaa’s Oru Kaithiyin Diary (1984) with Kamalahasan. David (Bachchan) is a loyal trade union worker and follower of the crooked politician Chaturvedi (Amrapurkar). The politician rapes and kills David’s wife Mary (Jayaprada) and frames David with the murder. Released from prison 24 years later and determined to avenge the injustice, David discovers that his son Vijay (Bachchan again), has become a police officer. The film features a number of encounters between the two as its main highlight as the policeman-son chases the criminal father and eventually arrests him, but David in his dying moments shoots the politician dead.

  AGNISNAN

aka Ordeal
1985 186’ col Assamese d/p/s Bhabendranath Saikia c Kamal Nayak lyr/m Tarun Goswami

lp Malaya Goswami, Biju Phukan, Arun Nath, Kashmiri Barua, Sanjib Hazarika, Ananda Mohan Bhagawati, Arun Guha-Thakurta, Nilu Chakraborty, Indra Bania, Ashok Deka

The Assamese physicist and writer Saikia used one of his own novels, set in 30s feudal-colonial Assam, for this extended film about a woman’s emancipation. The well-off and British-supported rice mill owner Mohikanta (Phukan) is married to the quiet Menoka (Goswami) and has four children by her. When Mohikanta takes a second wife, Kiran (Barua), and makes her pregnant, the angry Menoka starts a secret affair with the village thief, Madan, and becomes pregnant. Unaware of his double standards, Mohikanta feels betrayed and demands an explanation for Menoka’s refusal to have sexual relations with him ever since Kiran moved into their home. Menoka simply points out that since Mohikanta had expected her to put up with his infidelities, so he must accept hers. The final confrontation between husband and wife, set in the rice mill, provides an unusual ending to this tale about patriarchal hypocrisy as the initially submissive Menoka self-confidently affirms her right to fully equal status with her husband.

  AKALATHE AMBILI

1985 157’ col Malayalam

d Jesey pc Centaur Art Prod. s S.N. Swamy lyr M.D.R. c Vipin Das m Shyam

lp Mammootty, Mukesh, Manian Pillai Raju, Supriya Pathak, Rohini, Mala Aravindan, Santosh, Thilakan

Standard Mammootty adventure movie. He plays Ajayan, a successful businessman with a rags-to-riches background, in love with his secretary Ambili. His rival in love, Ashok, is kidnapped by their mutual enemies, but Ajayan rescues Ashok and eventually (in characteristic Mammootty style) sacrifices his own happiness for that of his friends.

  ANGADIKKAPURATHU

1985 155’ col Malayalam

d I.V. Sasi pc Jeyemje Arts s T. Damodaran lyr Bichu Thirumala m Sathyam

lp Mammootty, Mohanlal, Rehman, Mahalakshmi, Lily

Early instance of the fast-paced satires of director Sasi and writer Damodaran, also featuring the combined presence of Malayalam megastars Mammootty and Mohanlal. Babu (Mohanlal), a poor orphan, wins a rigged lottery ticket by accident, and encounters a new world of crime, double-dealing and dishonesty. He eventually realises that he has no use for the money, and prefers to get rid of it and return to his earlier lifestyle. Mammootty plays a political activist in a film liberally peopled with gangsters, crooked lawyers with dubious morals, drug addicts and (Sasi’s regular feature) cabaret dancers.

  ANKUSH

1985 149’ col Hindi

d/sc/co-dial N. Chandra pc Shilpa Movies st Debu Sen co-dial Sayyad Sultan lyr Abhilash c H. Lakshminarayan m Kuldeep Singh

lp Madan Jain, Nana Patekar, Arjun Chakraborty, Suhas Palshikar, Nisha Singh, Ashalata, Dinkar Kaushik, Mahavir Shah, Rabia Amin, Ravi Patwardhan, Master Bobby, Raja Bundela, Sayyed

Chandra’s debut film propagates the cause of the Hindu Shiv Sena, a link emphasised by the first major Hindi film of Nana Patekar. A gang of four educated but unemployed men are a law unto themselves. Reformed by a female guardian angel (Singh), the four briefly attempt an entrepreneurial life until the woman is raped by the very gang leader (and his masters) against whom the youths are fighting. Revenge is swift, as is their repentance, creating a cyclical story of violence and regret. The film unashamedly rehearses Bombay’s Shiv Sena ideologies: unemployment is the devil’s workshop, industry is controlled by ‘rootless outsiders’ (North Indians, mainly) who persecute and exploit ‘the natives’. The relentless violence culminates in the four thugs, presented as ‘heroes’, being martyred as they are hanged in a manner reminiscent of India’s nationalist freedom fighters.

  CHIDAMBARAM

1985 102’ col Malayalam

d/sc Govindan Aravindan pc Suryakanthi Film Makers st C.V. Shriraman c Shaji N. Karun m P. Devarajan

lp Gopi, Smita Patil, Srinivas, Mohan Das, Murali, Chandran Nair

Unfolding in exquisitely photographed poetic rhythms and coloured landscapes, this is the simple but cynical tale of Muniyandi (Srinivas), a labourer on the Indo-Swiss Mooraru farm in Kerala. He brings a wife, Shivagami (Patil), from the temple town of Chidambaram. She befriends Shankaran (Gopi), the estate manager and amateur photographer with a shady past. Their friendship transgresses the hypocritical but deeply felt behavioural codes the local men inherited from previous social formations: i.e. that women are to be denied what men are allowed to enjoy. The tragedy that ensues (Muniyandi’s suicide, Shankaran’s descent into alcoholism and Shivagami’s withering into a worn-out old woman) condenses the tensions between socio-economic change (as tractors and machinery invade the landscape) and people’s refusal to confront the corresponding need to change their mentality. The tension is, however, most graphically felt in the way Shivagami’s life-force is extended into the naturescape, which is shot around her with garish colour (e.g. purple flower-beds) suggesting that the very nature of Kerala’s beauty and fertility, as she represents it, has been irredeemably corrupted from within. The film then shifts to the equally oppressive cloisters of the Chidambaram temple, as Shankaran and Shivagami meet once more: he is there to purify himself through religious ritual while she is now employed to look after the footwear of devotees and tourists. The nihilist film ends with a rising crane shot as the camera can only avert its gaze and escape, tilting up along a temple wall towards an open sky.

  DEBSHISHU

aka The Child God
1985 100’ col Hindi

d/s/m Utpalendu Chakraborty pc NFDC c Soumendu Roy

lp Smita Patil, Sadhu Meher, Rohini Hattangadi, Om Puri, Shyamanand Jalan, Sushant Sanyal

Intended as an indictment of religious intolerance, the film is set on the frontier between West Bengal and Bihar. In a fairground, a child with three heads is exhibited as a miracle-performing child god. A poor peasant, Raghubir (Meher), and his wife Seeta (Patil) hope that the child will alleviate their suffering. However, Raghubir then discovers that the misshapen child was borne by his own wife who sold the infant for 30 rupees. Raghubir indignantly demands to be given half of that sum and, when he cannot get it, he beats Seeta in the hope that she will give birth to another misshapen child.

  GHULAMI

1985 199’ col/scope Hindi

d/s J.P. Dutta pc Habib and Faruq Nadiadwala dial O.P. Dutta lyr Gulzar c Ishwar Bidri m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Dharmendra, Reena Roy, Smita Patil, Om Shivpuri, Mazhar Khan, Bharat Kapoor, Anita Raj, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Raza Murad, Mithun Chakraborty, Naseeruddin Shah

Violent ruralist melodrama about Rajput oppression in the desert of Rajasthan. The hero Ranjit Singh (Dharmendra), son of a Jat farmer, leads a popular rebellion against the corrupt zamindar (Shivpuri) and his three nephews. The hero is aided by a policeman (Kharbanda) whose son had been killed by the nephews, and an army officer from a Jat regiment (Chakraborty) who decides to use his military skills to defend his community from the rapacious Thakurs. On the side of the zamindar is his son-in-law, the police officer Sultan Singh (Shah). However, the cop’s wife Sumitra (Patil) is sympathetic to Ranjit Singh’s cause. The Jats’ objective is to capture and burn the account ledgers of the moneylending thakur community to free themselves from bonded labour. They eventually succeed though the hero dies, leaving his wife Moran (Reena Roy) and infant son to continue the struggle. Rajasthan’s arid desert landscape, its vultures and shots of the famous folk fair at Pushkar (a major tourist attraction) give the film both an exotic and a primitivist atmosphere. However, it went beyond poetic metaphor in several inflammatory scenes addressing the region’s charged communal situation. The scene where the hero’s mother rushes into the villain’s house to save her son without taking off her slippers, and is then humiliated by being forced to put the slippers on her head and walk out, led to riots in several small cities in Rajasthan.

  HAKIM BABU

1985 163’ col Oriya

d/sc Pranab Das p Amiya Patnaik st Bibhuti Patnaik dial Bijoy Mishra lyr Sibabrata Das c Rajan Kinagi m Saroj Patnaik

lp Ajit Das, Dolly (Bijoya) Jena, Bijoy Mohanty, Jaya, Jayi, Hemant Das, Sujata Anand

Sidhu Majhe, former bonded labourer and murdered and member of a ‘scheduled’ tribe, gets a much-covered job in the Indian Administrative Service following the government’s policy of ‘positive discrimination (better known as the Mandal Commission recommendations). In the process he is forced to marry a sophisticated urban woman and loses contact with his social origins. The loss is emphasised when members of his community are evicted from their land. The film was attacked for its anti-tribal and anti-reservation biases.

Hamara Shaher

  HAMARA SHAHER

aka Bombay Our City
1985 82’ col Hindi/Tamil/English/Marathi

d/p/s/co-c Anand Patwardhan co-c Vijay Khambati, Pervez Mehrwanji, Venugopal Thakker Hindi voice-over Deepa Arora, Rita Bhatia, Supriya Pathak, Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah, Rahul Varma

Patwardhan’s most acclaimed documentary, made on 16mm, tells of Bombay’s millions of pavement-dwellers. Throughout the early 80s there were several brutal efforts to evict families who lived in illegal tenements and on pavements although they provided the city with the casual (esp. construction) labour crucial to its economy. The film looks at the culture of Bombay’s elite, often contrasting what they say with the physical conditions in which they say it: the former municipal commissioner bemoans the lack of space in the city while his pet dog trots around his spacious garden; the Police Commissioner Julio Ribeiro, in a speech at the Advertising Club, talks about the poor as ‘low-quality, low-intelligence’ people. The pavement-dwellers work in the construction industry in the city’s expensive Nariman Point area on land reclaimed from the sea, while massing clouds on the horizon evoke the possibility of an unbalanced environment which may cause tidal waves to wash away their seaside huts. The film achieves epic dimensions in three remarkable sequences. Street urchins sell the Indian flag on a rainy Independence Day, keeping their precious commodities dry while the huge Gothic facade of the Victoria Terminus presides over a police march-past; in the thick of the monsoon, a child in one of the homeless families dies; a woman pavement-dweller’s angry outburst at the film-makers, all highlight the issues involved in the making of this type of documentaiy.

  IRAKAL

aka Victims
1985 142’ col Malayalam

d/s K.G. George pc M.S. Prod. p M. Sukumaran c Venu m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Ganesan, Srividya, Thilakan, Chandran Nair, Gopi, Ashokan, Nedumudi Venu, Venu Nagavalli, P.E. George

A ruthless rubber baron, Mathukutty (Thilakan), disregards the prevailing moral standards and spawns criminal sons as well as a sexually wayward daughter, Annie (Srividya). His son, called Baby (Ganesan), is a psychotic strangler using a nylon wire and is eventually brutally shot dead by his repentant father.

  JEEVANA CHAKRA

1985 157’ col Kannada

d/sc H.R. Bhargava pc Kalakrithi st Prabhakara Reddy dial/lyr Chi. Udayashankar c D.V. Rajaram m Rajan-Nagendra

lp Vishnuvardhan, Radhika, Vijayakashi, Saroja, Ramesh Bhatt, C.R. Simha, Sudhir, Chi. Udayashankar, Shankar Rao, Jayamalini, Anuradha, Janaki, Jayashree, Bharani, Sivaprakash, Suryakumar, BEML Somanna, Janardan, Ramdas

Melodrama about a loyal subaltern’s selfless service to his master. Ranga (Vishnuvardhan), a ‘rowdy’, is reformed by a woman (Radhika) who materialises out of nowhere in order to take charge of his life. Employed in a factory, Ranga demonstrates his loyalty by forming a pro-management union and persuading workers to discard their red flags, thus saving the company from bankruptcy. The proprietor dies, leaving his wealth as well as his wife and son to Ranga’s care. In old age, Ranga faces the resentment of the proprietor’s grown-up son as well as his own daughter’s ingratitude. When his own wife dies, he hands over his wealth to the proprietor’s son and leaves. The heroine’s relation to the hero is structured as resembling a female fan’s fantasy for her favourite star, not uncommon in star-centered films.

  KILIPPATTU

aka Song of the Parrot
1985 121’ col Malayalam d/sc Raghavan pc Revathy Chitra st/dial/lyr K.M. Raghavan Nambiar c Vipin Das m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Nedumudi Venu, Sukumaran, K.P. Ummar, Sabitha Anand, Balan K. Nair, Adoor Bhasi, Chandran Nair, Philomina, Manavalan Joseph

The prolific actor Raghavan’s directorial debut is set at festival time in a North Kerala village. The corpse of a young woman, presumed to be the temple-keeper’s daughter, is found in a well. A trade union activist is arrested and dies in police custody, after which the temple-keeper’s daughter turns up alive to everyone’s embarrassment. However, she is later killed and her body found in the well during the next festival. In an ending reminiscent of Nirmalayam (1973), the distraught temple-keeper frenziedly strikes himself with a sacred sword during the performance of his ritual duties.

  KLANTA APARANHA

aka Tired Afternoon
1985 93’ col Oriya

d/sc Manmohan Mahapatra pc Dynamic Studios st Nandlal Mahapatra c Ranajit Roy m Shantanu Mahapatra

lp Sachidananda Rath, Kanak Panigrahi, Madhukar, Kishori Devi, Master Sushil

Two parallel tragic love stories continue Mahapatra’s bleak portrayal of rural Orissa. Two local schoolteachers, Niru and Sandhya, see their respective marriage proposals break down. Niru is the daughter of the poor landowner Adikanta, who mortgages his land to raise the dowry for his daughter’s marriage to an urban youth; however, the dowry offered is not enough. Sandhya loves Ashok who moves to the city, but she cannot move with him since her family depends on her income for its survival. The best moments are with Niru’s ancient grandmother (Kishori Devi), esp. in the film’s most spontaneous sequence when she is presented with a pair of spectacles.

  MARD

1985 177’ col Hindi

d Manmohan Desai pc MKD Films, Aasia Films st Prayag Raj sc K.K. Shukla dial Inder Raj Anand lyr Rajinder Krishan c Peter Pereira m Annu Malik

lp Amitabh Bachchan, Amrita Singh, Nirupa Roy, Dara Singh, Prem Chopra

The son, Raju Tangewala (Bachchan), of a dispossessed rajah is given the name ‘Mard’, i.e. Man, and has it tattooed on his chest as a sign of virility. Mard rebels against the British who are presented as robbers and property developers, the favourite Hindi film villains of this period. In keeping with a characteristic Desai plot device, Raju is raised by foster-parents who, just before dying, inform their adopted son of his ‘real’ ancestry. The leather-clad daughter (Amrita Singh) of a doctor in the service of the British first whips the hero and then falls in love with him. The British villains are called Dyer and Simon, names still associated with the general responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (referred to in the film) and the leader of the Simon Commission. Desai juxtaposes these references with the more arbitrary introduction of Roman gladiators and Mexican bandits. Made immediately after Coolie (1983), marked by Bachchan’s near fatal accident, Mard went to unusual lengths to demonstrate the invincibility of the hero, invoking colonialism and feudal oppression to affirm that he whom the gods protect cannot be destroyed.

  MAYUI

1985 142’ col Telugu

d/co-sc Singeetham Srinivasa Rao pc Usha Kiron Movies st Usha Kiron Movies Unit co-sc/dial Ganesh Patro lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c A. Hari m S.P. Balasubramanyam

lp Sudha Chandran, Subhakar, P.L. Narayana, Y. Vijaya, Nirmala

Melodrama about a classical dancer who, after an accident, has a leg amputated. With an artificial leg known as the Jaipur foot, she returns to dancing and regains her earlier reputation. The film was promoted as a fictionalised version of the real-life story of its lead actress, Sudha Chandran. Other characters include a henpecked father, a cruel stepmother and a boyfriend who is the cause of the accident and promptly abandons Mayuri when she becomes a cripple, adding to her determination to regain her lost self-respect.

  MEENAMASATHILE SOORYAN

aka Midsummer Sun
1985 117’ col Malayalam

d/s Lenin Rajendran p C.G. Bhaskaran pc Sauhudra Chitra c Shaji N. Karun m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Gopi, Venu Nagavalli, Vijay Menon, Murali, Ravi, Shobhana

Told in flashback, this is the story of how four fine young men achieved communist political consciousness in a peasant rising against a villainous landlord in 1943 in Kerala. The men, played by Menon, Murali, Nagavalli and Ravi, receive the revolutionary word from the schoolteacher (Gopi) and spread the message among the ignorant villagers. They end up as revered heroes condemned to be hanged by the British for treason. When asked for their last wish, they all ask to see their beloved teacher once more. The story was adapted, without credit, from Niranjana’s epic novel Chirasmarane (1955). Director Rajendran later contested two general elections backed by the Kerala CPI(M), from whose viewpoint he tells this tale.

  MIRCH MASALA

aka Spices
1985 128’col Hindi

d Ketan Mehta pc NFDC st Chunilal Madia sc Hriday Lani, Tripurari Sharma lyr Babubhai Ranpura cjehangir Choudhury m Rajat Dholakia

lp Naseeruddin Shah, Smita Patil, Om Puri, Suresh Oberoi, Deepti Naval, Benjamin Gilani, Raj Babbar, Mohan Gokhale, Supriya Pathak, Dina Pathak, Ratna Pathak, Ram Gopal

Following its commercial release in New York this became Mehta’s best-known film outside India. Intended as an allegory of colonial oppression but presented as a sex-and-violence drama, the film is set in pre-Independence Saurashtra. The despotic tax collector Subedar (Shah), dressed in a way that evokes British 19th C. catchpenny prints and Daumier’s cartoons, imposes his rule on a village. All the villagers try to satisfy his every whim, except for the protesting schoolteacher (Gilani). The drama starts when the beautiful Sonbai (Patil) is to be surrendered to the lecherous Subedar. She takes refuge in the courtyard of a spice factory run entirely by women and is protected by an aged watchman (Om Puri) who closes the gates to Subedar’s men. Although made in Hindi, the film draws on Gujarati verbal and performative idioms. Mehta explicitly deployed stock literary melodrama characters, but these cliches from contemporary popular culture lack the historical resonance achieved by the more complex figures Mehta used in his extraordinary Bhavni Bhavai (1980).

  MUHURTAM AT 11.30

1985 138’ col Malayalam

d Joshi pc Saj Prod. s Kalloor Dennis lyr Poovachal Khader c N.A. Tara m Shyam

lp Mammootty, Ratheesh, Prathap Chandran, Saritha, Baby Shalini, Surekha, Lalitha, Lalu Alex, Kunjan, V.D. Rajappan, Jagathi Srikumar

Melodrama by one of Malayalam cinema’s foremost practitioners in the art. Love triangle featuring the good doctor Haridas (Mammootty), his new receptionist and ex-wife Indu and his rival (and Indu’s cousin) Jayan. The doctor believes that the child born to Indu is not his. Jayan dies of a heart attack, shortly after a major operation, followed by Indu: the doctor realises his suspicions were groundless, but is too late to prevent the tragedy.

  MUTHAL MARIYATHAI

aka A Matter of Honour aka Prime Honour
1985 161’ col Tamil

d/p/sc P. Bharathirajaa pc Manoj Creations st/dial R. Selvaraj lyr Vairamuthu c B. Kannan m Ilaiyaraja

lp Sivaji Ganesan, Radha, Vadivukkarasi, Ranjini, Sathyaraj, Janakaraj, Deepan, Veeraswamy, Aruna, Soorya, Ilavarasi, Ramanathan, Senapati, Muthaiah, Kanchana

A relentless melodrama told in flashback as the saintly landlord Malaichami (Ganesan) lies dying. Beset by a shrewish wife, Ponnatha (Vadivukkarasi), who cannot cook and who was pregnant by another man (Sathyaraj) when she married the hero, Malaichami falls in love with a fisherman’s young daughter, Kuyil (Radha). She kills Ponnatha’s lover and goes to jail, emerging under police escort to meet a dying Malaichami, who clings to life until she returns. A second tragic love story involves Malaichami’s evil son-in-law who is a rapist and a murderer. The ‘matter of honour’ that the title suggests was however Bharathirajaa’s first film with Ganesan, and it opens with a documentary homage to the star.

Aruna (left) and Sivaji Ganesan in Muthal Mariyathai

  NANAND BHOJAI

1985 161’ col Rajasthani d/sc Prabhakar Mandloi pc Kamal Kala Mandir st Ansuya Vyas dial Madhukar Mandloi, Kundan Kishore lyr B.L. Vyas c Arvind Dave m Jugalkishore-Tilakraj

lp Neelu, Dhiraj Kumar, Gouri, Sunil Pandey, Adi Irani, Satyen Kappoo, Shubha Khote, Ramesh Deo, Bharat Bhushan, Aruna Irani

Neo-traditionalist melodrama pivoting on the relationship between sisters-in-law, but also including brotherly and parental relations. Poonam (Neelu), with the financial help of her Muslim friend Rasool, marries Vijay (Dheraj) despite the evil machinations of her rejected suitor Rocky. When Vijay goes to look for work in the city, Vijay’s sister, manipulated by the villainous Rocky, persecutes the heroine. The familiar theme (esp. in Gujarati cinema: cf. Punatar’s bilingual of the same title, 1948) confirmed Rajasthani star Neelu’s image of ‘goodness’ in family melodramas (cf. Supattar Binani, 1981, and Bai Chali Sasariye, 1988). Made with mainly Bombay film actors and modelled on Hindi cinema except for some narrative emphases such as the approach to the dowry problem: in Hindi films, dowries are increasingly seen as anti-modern and assigned to oppressive feudalism, whereas it is a more urgent issue in Rajasthan.

  NANU NANNA HENDTHI

1985 145’ col Kannada

d/s D. Rajendra Babu pc Eshwari Prod. co-dial N.S. Rao co-dial/lyr Hamsalekha c R. Madhusudhan m Shankar-Ganesh

lp Ravichandran, Urvashi, Leelavathi, N.S. Rao, Umashree, Chandru, Somu, Krishnagowda, Anuradha

A fantasy scenario of a female fan’s encounter with her favourite hero (cf. Jeevana Chakra, 1985). A singing star (Ravichandran) claims to be married when renting a house and now has to produce a wife. A strange woman comes into his life and takes charge. Although her behaviour is eventually provided with a motivation, the nurturing role she adopts and the liberties she takes with him are mainly part of the genre’s fantasy structure designed to boost the male star’s image. The film, probably future composer Hamsalekha’s debut as songwriter, announces the megahit Premaloka (1987), also a collaboration with Ravichandran.

  NEW DELHI TIMES

1985 123’ col Hindi

d/co-st Ramesh Sharma pc P.K. Communications co-st K. Bikram Singh co-st/sc Gulzar c Subrata Mitra m Louis Banks

lp Shashi Kapoor, Sharmila Tagore, Om Puri, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, A.K. Hangal, Manohar Singh, M.K. Raina, Farrokh Mehta

A political thriller examining the links between crime and politics in a north Indian state. The editor of the English-language New Delhi Times, Vikas Pande (Kapoor) has to confront the politician Ajay Singh (Puri) who is associated with a powerful lobby of illicit liquor manufacturers. The trail of murders, sequestrations in insane asylums, beatings and the instigation of communal riots by political henchmen eventually leads to the corrupt chief minister, D.N. Trivedi. Made in the style of Costa-Gavras’s films and of Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976), the film is inspired by the case of the Indian Express whose editor Arun Shourie exposed the criminal links of Maharashtra’s chief minister, A.R. Antulay. The owner of the Indian Express, R.N. Goenka, is the figure evoked in the film by Vikas’s boss, the publisher Jagannath Poddar (M. Singh). The film faced official censorship when Doordarshan initially refused to broadcast it.

  PAROMA/PARAMA

1985 134’[B]/138’[H] col Bengali/Hindi

d/s Aparna Sen pc Usha Ents lyr Gulzar c Ashok Mehta m Bhaskar Chandavarkar

lp Raakhee, Sandhya Rani Chatterjee, Aparna Sen, Mukul Sharma, Dipankar De, Anil Chatterjee, Bharati Devi, Chitti Ghosal, Manas Mukherjee Jr, Arjun Guha-Thakurta

Sen followed up her directorial debut, 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981) with this story about a 40-year-old married woman, Parama (Raakhee) who falls in love with Rahul (Sharma), an expatriate photo-journalist working for glossy magazines who photographs her making her look glamorous. Their affair, and the invasion of the glamour machine into her life, becomes a problem when some of the photographs, earlier admired by the family, are published in a journal. Parama is rejected by her husband and has a mental breakdown. In the end, a doctor suggests prescribing psychiatric treatment and when Parama adamantly refuses any sense of guilt, her young daughter comes and gives her mother moral support. The film is notable mainly for its emancipatory thrust, undermined by a class-inflected sense of nostalgia for ‘belonging’, rather than for its cinematic qualities which are akin to the kitschy style of glossy consumer magazines. The Bengali version, shown in Calcutta amid much controversy, was successful; the Hindi version received a fitful release.

  RAM TERI GANGA MAILI

1985 178’ col/scope Hindi

d/st/ed Raj Kapoor pc RK Films and Studios p Randhir Kapoor co-sc/dial K.K. Singh co-sc Jyoti Swaroop, V.P. Sathe co-lyr/m Ravindra Jain co-lyr Hasrat Jaipuri, Ameer Qazalbaksh c Radhu Karmakar

lp Rajiv Kapoor, Mandakini, Divya Rana, Saeed Jaffrey, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Raza Murad

The last film Raj Kapoor directed (his elder son Randhir directed Henna which was released in 1991 under Raj Kapoor’s name). The son of the evil industrialist Jiwababu (Kharbanda), Naren (Rajiv Kapoor, Raj’s youngest son making his debut) falls for Ganga (Mandakini), a country girl from the mountains, but is forced by his family to abandon her when she becomes pregnant. Much of the rest of the film is an elaboration of the metaphor of the ‘purity’ of ‘Ganga’ - the Indian name of the holy Ganges river, originating in the girl’s native village and the setting for the narrative, Gangotri - who has been ‘soiled’ by the corrupted political leaders of modern India, exemplified mainly by Bhagwat Choudhury (Murad), a vile politician whose daughter Radha (Rana) is to marry Naren. Ganga, now an abandoned single mother, falls prey to a brothel madam who tries to sell her and a temple priest who tries to rape her. In Varanasi she is sold to a ‘kotha’ and, eventually, is bought by Choudhury to be his mistress. The final reunion of the lead couple takes place with the support of Naren’s canny Uncle Kunjbehari (Jaffrey). Kapoor’s obsessive preoccupation with the soiling of ‘pure’ womanhood extends his 70s explorations of the same theme (cf. Satyam Shivam Sundaram, 1978).

Mandakini in Ram Teri Ganga Maili

  SAGAR

aka Saagar
1985 215’ col/scope Hindi

d Ramesh Sippy pc United Producers, Sippy Films p G.P. Sippy s/lyr Javed Akhtar c S.M. Anwar m R.D. Burman

lp Rishi Kapoor, Kamalahasan, Dimple Kapadia, Nadira, Saeed Jaffrey, Madhur Jaffrey, A.K. Hangal, Shafi Inamdar

Sippy pays homage to Raj Kapoor’s Bobby (1973) in recasting its famous teenaged lead pair while celebrating Dimple Kapadia’s return to films. Set in a coastal fishing community, Raja (Kamalahasan) loves childhood sweetheart Mona (Kapadia), but she falls for Ravi (Kapoor), heir to the industrial house controlled by his autocratic grandmother (M. Jaffrey, noted author of Indian cookbooks). The family’s trawler business is set to ruin the fisherfolk, mapping a love triangle onto class differences. In the end, Raja sacrifices himself. Kamalahasan, in his last major film appearance in a Bombay-production, often quotes Chaplin in a tragi-comic performance.

  SAMANDARAM

aka Parallel
1985 117’ col Malayalam d/sc John C. Shankaramangalam pc Sudarshan st Ms M. Shankaramangalam c Prabhat Parida, Santosh Sivan m Jerry Amaldev

lp Soorya, Babu Namboodiri, Sai Das, Balan K. Nair, T.R.K. Menon, Mathews, Leela Panicker

A film by the dean of the FTII warning against student romances. The university student Susan notices disturbing signs of cowardice in her boyfriend Jose but marries him anyway. He turns into a brutal business executive and a wife-beater. The husband’s deterioration is further emphasised in contrast with communist radical Mohan, Susan’s former hero. After suffering her husband’s brutalities as long as she can bear, she finally plucks up the courage to leave him on Christmas Eve.

  SINDHU BHAIRAVI

1985 159’ col Tamil

d/s K. Balachander p Rajam Balachander, V. Natarajan pc Kavithalaya Prod. lyr Vairamuthu c Raghunatha Reddy m Ilaiyaraja

lp Sivakumar, Delhi Ganesh, Janakaraj, T.S. Raghavendran, Prathap Pothan, Suhasini, Sulakshana, Manimala, Sivachandran, Indira, Meera

Musical melodrama in the genre of Dasari Narayana Rao’s Megha Sandesam (1982) and K. Vishwanath’s revivalist stories advocating ‘traditional’ notions of ‘classical’ artistry. The classical singer J.K. Balaganapathi (Sivakumar) falls in love with Sindhu (Suhasini in one of her best known screen roles), a folk-music teacher. His barren wife Bhairavi (Sulakshana) attempts suicide and he renounces his affair, only to seek refuge in drink, which entails degrading scenes such as a forced strip tease and the singing of non-classical folk songs in exchange for alcohol. Bhairavi then sacrifices herself for the sake of her husband’s music and asks Sindhu to help save the artist. Nevertheless, the film follows the convention of passing off male infantilism as evidence of a commitment to ‘traditional values’. Women sacrificing themselves for the sake of an immature man’s singing ability can be seen, against the grain of the film, as raising critical questions about arrogantly patriarchal fantasies, mainly through the performances of the two main female protagonists.

  THINKALAZHCHA NALLA DIVASAM

aka Monday the Good Day
1985 126’ col Malayalam d/s P. Padmarajan pc Sunitha Prod, c Vasant Kumar m Shyam

lp Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Mammootty, Karamana Janardanan Nair, Sasangan, Srividya, Unnimary, Ashokan, Kukku Parameswaran, Madhavi, Achakunhu

A family gathers in its spacious ancestral home to celebrate their lonely mother’s (Ponnamma) 60th birthday. Jealousies and rivalries erupt focusing on who will inherit the house. The old mother is placed in an institution for geriatrics and dies, leaving the next generation guilt-ridden, but her grandchildren nevertheless appreciate living in the big house.

  TRIKAAL

aka Past, Present and Future
1985 137’ col Hindi

d/sc Shyam Benegal p Lalit M. Bijlani, Freni M. Variava pc Blaze Film Ents dial Shama Zaidi lyr Ila Arun c Ashok Mehta m Vanraj Bhatia

lp Leela Naidu, Naseeruddin Shah, Neena Gupta, Anita Kanwar, Dalip Tahil, Soni Razdan, Sushama Prakash, K.K. Raina, Keith Stevenson, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Maqsoom Alie, Sabira Merchant

Ruiz Pereira (Shah) returns to his native Goa and visits the old mansion where he spent his youth. The film nostalgically evokes in flashback the hybrid Portuguese-Indian colonial world in terms of adolescent passions and complicated wedding arrangements. Intended as a Bergman-like saga of a family, using extensive quotations from his filmmaking style including candle-lit sequences as the entire family sits down to a festive dinner. Goa’s best-known pop singer Remo Fernandes wrote the number Panch vorsam in Konkani for this film, but it was actually used in an adapted Hindi version.

  YATHRA

1985 124’ col Malayalam

d/sc/c Balu Mahendra pc Prakkat Films st/dial John Paul lyr O.N.V. Kurup m Ilaiyaraja

lp Mammootty, Shobhana, Adoor Bhasi, Thilakan, Kunjan

Tragic love story between a forest officer (Mammootty) and village belle Tulsi (Shobhana). Arrested for the murder of his best friend, a crime he did not commit, the forest officer goes to jail while freeing his fiancee from any commitment to their planned marriage. However, when he is finally released she is waiting for him. Apparently inspired partly by Alan Parker’s Midnight Express (1978), Yoji Yamada’s Shiawase No Kiiroi Hankuchi [Yellow Handkerchief of Happiness] (1978) and The Sound of Music (1965) the love story reinforces much of the fatalism often associated with Mammootty’s screen persona.

  AMMA ARIYAN

aka Report to Mother
1986 115’ b&w Malayalam d/s John Abraham pc Odessa Movies c Venu m Sunitha

lp Joy Mathew, Maji Venkitesh, Nilambur Balan, Harinarayanan, Kunhulakshmi Amma, Itingal Narayani, Nazim, Ramachandran Mokeri, Kallai Balan, Thomas, Venu C. Menon

Abraham’s last and most complex film is told in the form of an open letter from a son, Purushan (Mathew), to his mother (Kunhulakshmi) while interweaving fact and fiction with fragments of memory. Purushan sets out for Delhi with his friend Paru (Venkitesh), who is researching a thesis on Durga, the mother goddess, a figure traditionally though ambiguously representing the cohesive forces of nature. Along the way they find a hanged man (Harinarayan) who seems hauntingly familiar, a suicide. Reconstructing the identity of the corpse takes Purushan, and a growing body of young men who all have a stake in the youth’s history, from the northern highlands of Kerala to Southern Cochin and ends with a re-evaluation of a generation’s radical past. Along the way, Abraham filmed an actual quarry workers’ strike, echoing Kerala’s troubled 70s, and manages to endow both the journey and the central character with broader historical resonances in a manner reminiscent of the director’s master, Ritwik Ghatak’s Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (1974): a style full of irony and with a free-wheelingly innovative approach to sound and to narrative structures. The first production of the Odessa group, it was made entirely through raising funds from public contributions, supported by the Kerala State Film Development Corporation. Abraham’s death, shortly after the film was made, elevated it to cult status while also merging together the fate of the director with that of the main protagonist, both strongly inflected with Christian themes of innocence and martyrdom.

  ANJUMAN

1986 140’ col Hindi

d/s Muzaffar Ali p Shobha M. Doctor c Ishan Arya m Khayyam

lp Shabana Azmi, Farouque Shaikh, Rohini Hattangadi, Shaukat Kaifi, Mushtaq Khan

Social melodrama about the plight of chikanembroiderers in decaying Lucknow, the setting of Ali’s Umrao Jaan (1981). The sensitive Anjuman (Azmi) does chikan work to augment her extended family’s income. She is courted by a phoney poet, Banke Nawab (Khan), who has control over the chikan workers, but she falls in love with her wealthy but weak neighbour Sajjid (Shaikh). Encouraged by her doctor friend Suchitra Sharma (Hattangadi), Anjuman demands fair treatment for the chikan workers but the pressure on her to marry the exploitative Banke grows. She finally says ‘No’ during the wedding ceremony and has to face the wrath of Banke who incites a riot among the Muslims in the town. Anjuman then becomes a feminist labour activist and earns the admiration of her beloved Sajjid.

  AVANAZHI

1986 156’ col/scope Malayalam

d I.V. Sasi pc Saj Prod. s T. Damodaran c V. Jayaram m Shyam

lp Mammootty, Geetha, Nalini, Seema, Captain Raju, Paravoor Bharathan, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, Janardhanan, Jagannath Varma, Sukumaran, Sattar

Sasi’s demented melodrama repeating his theme of corruption in Kerala politics (cf. Eenadu, 1982; Vartha, 1986), and seminal text determining Mammootty’s screen persona. He plays the police inspector Balaram, who is personally honest but not opposed in principle to corruption. Framed for the murder of the student Unni, who died in police custody, Balaram loses his girlfriend Usha (Nalini) and faces the enduring hostility of Unni’s sister Radha (Seema). The film’s key villain is the businessman and politician Vincent, whose partner, the corrupt lawyer Jayachandran, happens to be Usha’s new husband. Completing the key ensemble is the prostitute Seeta (Geetha), who was forced by the bad guys into prostitution and now lives with Balaram. In a relentless series of brutal encounters, personal vendettas merge with political rivalries. In the end, the true killer of the student turns out to be the politically influential murderer Sathyaraj (Captain Raju). Balaram hunts him down, and in the process becomes responsible for the killing of the pregnant Seeta. The most notable aspect of the film is its view of corruption as something that has seeped into every aspect of Kerala society, to a point where even the film is unable to restrict its subject-matter. The hero is presented throughout as essentially unpleasant, who warns Usha not to take up a job as university lecturer, and later refuses to acknowledge having fathered Seeta’s child. The film’s plot in both instances vindicates the hero’s stand (e.g. when Usha is attacked by a student) without making any effort to render it in any way morally palatable. Sasi’s usual alternative is an enormous excess of plot, as the complicated roles of different characters merge and interconnect to the point of vertigo. Like his other films, here too there are no neat endings, as the hero’s arrest (repeating an enhanced version of Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, 1971) leaves the futures of most of the characters largely unresolved.

EK PAL

aka A Moment

1986 135’ col Hindi

d/co-p/co-sc Kalpana Lajmi pc Atma Ram Films co-p/m Bhupen Hazarika st Maitreyi Devi co-sc/dial/lyr Gulzar c K.K. Mahajan

lp Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Farouque Shaikh, Shriram Lagoo, Dina Pathak, Sreela Majumdar

Kalpana Lajmi’s directorial debut tells a story of extramarital sex in the tea gardens of Assam. Priyam (Azmi), married to the staid but loving Ved (Shah), has an affair with her former boyfriend Jeet (Shaikh) while her husband is away. She becomes pregnant. Having already had one miscarriage, she is determined to keep the baby despite her boyfriend’s protests. On his return, Ved eventually accepts both his unfaithful wife and her baby. Lajmi explained that she set the story in Assam to link the heroine’s innocence and later loneliness with the environment, but the easier if less sympathetic explanation is reviewer Aloknanda Datta’s (in Splice, July 1986) suggestion that the gardens merely provide an exotic backdrop. Famous Assamese singer-composer Hazarika contributes some fine compositions, overcoming the mandatory emphasis on regional folk-music in films set in exotic locales.

GANDHINAGAR 2ND STREET

1986 137’ col Malayalam

d/s Sathyan Andhikkad pc Casino Prod. lyr Bichu Thirumala c Bipin Mohan m Shyam Mohanlal, Srinivasan, Seema, Mammootty, Karthika, Thilakan

Mohanlal comedy and one of Andhikkad’s biggest hits. The simpleton Sethu (Mohanlal) finds employment as a security guard, hired by a street neighbourhood. The first part of the film is a straightforward sit-com as his friend Madhavan (Srinivasan) masquerades as a thief to raise Sethu’s stock with his employers; the plan misfires and Madhavan gets a sound thrashing. Things take a more serious turn as Sethu’s former girlfriend Maya (Karthika) moves into one of the houses on the street with her police chief father (Thilakan). The lovers had parted when Sethu tried to seduce Maya, following misguided advice that the best way to get her father to agree to their marriage was to get her pregnant first. Sethu makes an enemy of the entire neighbourhood when he uses violence to rescue Maya from the unwanted attentions of one of the street denizens. He is protected by the schoolteacher Nirmala (Seema), leading to allegations of an illicit sexual relationship between them. However, her husband (Mammootty) arrives from the Gulf, and sorts everything out. The plot somewhat gratuitously reveals Maya at the end to be a widow, whose husband died a week after their wedding. It does so mainly to allow the film to end on a tragic note, as Sethu too leaves for the Gulf unable to make concrete promises to his reconciled girl. The film is dominated by Mohanlal’s energetic performance and the comic dialogue (interspersing Hindi with Malayalam). Sequels with the same characters were Nadodikattu (1987) and Pattana Praveshanam (1988), both by Andhikkad.

GENESIS

1986 109’ col Hindi

d/co-p/sc Mrinal Sen pc Scarabee Films (Paris), Mrinal Sen Prod. (Calcutta), Les Films de la Dreve (Brussels), Cactus Films (Zurich) co-pc Film Four (London), SSR (Berne) co-p Marie Pascale Osterrieth, Palaniappan Ramasamy, Eliane Stutterheim, Jean-Jacques Andrien co-sc Mohit Chattopadhay st Samaresh Bose dial Surendra P. Singh, Umashankar Pathik c Carlo Varini m Ravi Shankar

lp Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, M.K. Raina

Whereas Sen’s best work derived much strength from being rooted in a specific time and place, giving historical resonances to the particular shapes of the conflicts he depicted, this international co-production mostly financed by European television channels is set in a purely symbolic and timeless space: some ruins in the middle of a desert. A farmer (Shah) and a weaver (Puri) exchange their products for goods provided by a regularly passing trader (Raina). A woman (Azmi) arrives, focusing the two men’s desires but also urging them to obtain more recompense from the trader. After a visit to a village fair (exuberantly shot with telling details reminiscent of Sen’s earlier work) the two men become more acquisitive and jealousies break out over the now pregnant woman who simply ups and leaves. As the two men fight each other, the trader’s men attack and enslave the workers again. The film closes with shots of bulldozers and modern machinery clearing the ground. Sen’s timeless parable about the genesis of capitalism, although acted with conviction by the cast, suffers from its abstraction, transforming the characters into stereotypes and reducing the complexities of history to simplified generalities. G. Chakravorty Spivak (1993) provides a postcolonial reading of the film.

KARMA

1986 193’ col/scope Hindi

d Subhash Ghai pc Mukta Arts lyr Anand Bakshi m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Dilip Kumar, Nutan, Dara Singh, Anupam Kher, Jackie Shroff, Naseeruddin Shah, Anil Kapoor, Tom Alter, Poonam Dhillon, Sridevi, Shakti Kapoor

Dirty Dozen (1967) - style film invoking ‘terrorists’ backed by ‘neighbouring’ states. Rana Vishnu Pratap Singh (Kumar) is a benevolent warden of a jail who feels that people become criminals either because they are forced into crime by a corrupt society (in which case they should get a second chance) or through greed (which is unpardonable). His main hatred is reserved for Dr Dang (Kher), head of the Black Star Organisation, a group of international terrorists. The obstreperous Dang arranges to bomb the jail, killing inmates, and during his escape bid Dang massacres Rana’s family, except for his wife Seeta (Nutan), who goes dumb with shock, and his youngest son. Rana is put in charge of a special anti-terrorist squad comprising murderers condemned to death: Baiju Thakur (Shroff), Khairu (Shah) and Johnny (A. Kapoor). Rana trains them at a border post in the farmhouse of the former criminal Dharma (Dara Singh). The relationship between the condemned men and their leader forms the bulk of the film, interspersed with love affairs, until the quartet eventually overwhelms the villain’s heavily guarded military retreat.

LOVE AND GOD

1986 141’ col Urdu

d K. Asif p K.C. Bokadia, Akhtar Asif s Wajahat Mirza lyr Kumar Barabankvi, Asad Bhopali c R.D. Mathur m Naushad

lp Nimmi, Sanjeev Kumar, Simi Garewal, Jayant, Agha, Nasir Hussain, Pran

This often-filmed Arab love legend of Laila and her lover, released in 1986, could have been Asif’s most formally ambitious film had it been completed during his lifetime. As with his Mughal-e-Azam (1960) and in keeping with his grandiose film style, it was in the making for over a decade. When Guru Dutt, who played the lead, died in 1964, the film had to be reshot with Sanjeev Kumar in the lead. When the director died as well, the film was abandoned, then revived by his widow, Akhtar Asif, and finally released in incomplete form. The composer Naushad contributes songs such as Hame kuch raahein khuda de de, Yeh nadanon ki duniya hai yeh diwanon ki mehfil hai. Cameraman R.D. Mathur, formerly of Bombay Talkies, developed his baroque style almost exclusively for Asif’s period epics: his camera moves over elaborate desert vistas and complicated sets, including a bravura tracking crane shot lasting almost ten minutes when Qais is rejected by Laila and leaves, the whole town turning out to witness his departure.

MALAYA MARUTHA

aka A Morning Melody

1986 180’ col/scope Kannada

d/sc Lalitha Ravi pc Sastry Movies p C.V. Sastry st/dial/co-lyr Chi. Udayashankar co-lyr Valampuri Somanathan c B. Purshottam Gopinath m Vijayabhaskar

lp Vishnuvardhan, Madhavi, Saritha, N. Shivaram, Dinesh, Umesh Kulkarni, Kodai Lakshminarayana, Jari Venkatram, Gopalakrishna, Jayamalini, Aswathnarayana, R.K. Suryanarayana, Veenavaruni

A revivalist melodrama in which the artistic soul of a music guru, killed in a road accident, migrates into the aspiring, but hopeless, musician Vishwa (Vishnuvardhan), turning him into a virtuoso capable of realising the guru’s dreams. Vishwa is torn between the guru’s daughter Sharada (Saritha) and Girija (Madhavi), a popular dancer whose father (Dinesh) exploits Vishwa’s talent. Vishwa embarks on building a music college with Sharada’s help. Girija donates all her money to the cause, but when Vishwa loses his voice, Sharada teaches him to regain it. An interesting twist to the story is that since Vishwa is the extension of Sharada’s father, his relationship with her has incestuous overtones, which the film displaces by suggesting she might be a goddess and having Vishwa marry the self-sacrificing Girija.

MASSEY SAHIB

1986 124’ col Hindi

d/sc/co-dial Pradip Krishen p Ravi Malik pc NFDC co-dial Raghuvir Yadav c R.K. Bose m Vanraj Bhatia

lp Raghuvir Yadav, Barry John, Arundhati Roy, Jacqueline Garewal, Sudhir Kulkarni, Virendra Saxena, Madan Lal, Francis King, Lalloo Ram, Hemant Mishra, Vasant Joglekar, James Ure, David Maurice

Satirical comment on colonial India set in 1929 and featuring a government clerk named Francis Massey (Yadav). Because of his constant interactions with the British, Massey fancies himself to be just like an Englishman. However, he has to deploy extreme financial ingenuity to keep the wolf from the door. When Massey’s boss Charles Adam (Barry John) lacks the funds to complete his dream project of building a road through the forest, Massey manages to get the scheme finished through financial skullduggery, persuasion and threats. To his surprise, an unofficial road tax he levies is considered to be corruption by the very boss who had condoned Massey’s earlier shenanigans. Frustrated and humiliated, Massey attacks and kills his old friend Banaji when the latter refuses to help. Massey is arrested for murder and Adam advises him to plead guilty to accidental manslaughter, but Massey refuses, assuming that his colonial associations will get him off the hook. Krishen’s feature debut reveals many technical inadequacies, but Yadav’s fine performance inaugurated a screen image he has maintained ever since.

MOUNA RAGAM

aka Silent Raga

1986 145’ col Tamil

d/s Mani Rathnam pc Sujatha Prod. p G. Venkateswaran lyr Vali c P.C. Sriram m Ilaiyaraja

lp Mohan, Revathi, Karthik, Kanchana, Vani, Kamala Kamesh, Kalaichelvi, Shakila, Sonia, V.K. Ramaswamy, R. Shankaran, Bhaskar, Rani Patel, Suresh

Rathnam’s art-house melodrama just prior to his big-budget breakthrough hit Nayakan (1987). Divya (Revathi) is unable to resign herself to a forced marriage living in Delhi with Chandra Kumar (Mohan). She recalls, in flashback, her carefree days with her first boyfriend, the gansgter Manmohan (Karthik), who was shot dead in front of a temple even as she waited inside to many him. She seeks a divorce, but as the law requires the couple to stay together for a year, they decide to live separately in the same house. After she has nursed her husband back to health following a murderous attack by an employee, the couple decide to stay together. The film inaugurates the Tamil love story genre set outside the state, associated with the director (cf. Roja, 1992), also featuring camerawork typically associated with Rathnam and Sriram: frontal and profile close-ups, set against long shots with fuzzy foreground. Not to be confused with Ambili’s Malayalam Mouna Ragam (1983).

NAKHAKSHATHANGAL

1986 140’ col Malayalam

d Hariharan pc Gayathri Cinema p Gayathri Parvathi s M.T. Vasudevan Nair lyr O.N.V. Kurup c Shaji N. Karun m Ravi

lp Vineeth, Monisha, Saleena, Jagannatha Varma, Thilakan, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Jayachandran

The poor orphan Ramu (Vineeth), accompanied by his tyrannical uncle, visits the temple town of Guruvayoor where he falls in love with Gouri (Monisha). Ramu runs away to live near Gouri’s village, where she works as a maid for a rich but generous lawyer. The lawyer pays for Ramu’s education and employs him as his assistant. However, Lakshmi (Saleena), the lawyer’s deaf-mute daughter, falls in love with Ramu. Unable to resolve what he sees as the conflicting demands of love and obligation, Ramu kills himself. The film, noted for its popular music and the presence of the singer Jayachandran, also featured the screen debuts of two University Art Festival discoveries, Vineeth and Monisha.

NAMUKKU PARKKAN MUNTHIRI THOPPUKAL

1986 137’ col Malayalam

d/sc/dial P. Padmarajan pc Ragom Movies p Mani Malliath st K.K. Sudhakaran lyr O.N.V. Kurup m Johnson

lp Mohanlal, Shari, Thilakan, Vineeth, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Omana

Two Malayali Christian families settled near Mysore in Karnataka provide the setting for this tragic romance in verse, evoking the biblical ‘Song of Solomon’. Solomon (Mohanlal) falls in love with Sofia (Shari), the illegitimate daughter of a nurse now married to an alcoholic railway mechanic (Thilakan). The lovers declaim verse riddled with biblical references as they drive around in a tanker lorry. Sofia’s stepfather, priding himself for having married a single parent, is determined to get Sofia to marry his junior colleague and drinking partner. However, when Sofia’s mother agrees to a marriage proposal from Solomon’s family, the stepfather rapes Sofia and, at the end of the film, he is seen dragging her, still wearing her white bridal dress, towards his vineyards.

OOMAI VIZHIGAL

aka The Dumb Eyes

1986 176’ col/scope Tamil

d R. Aravindraj pc Thirai Chirpi s/p/lyr Aabavanan c A. Rameshkumar m Manoj Gyan

lp Vijayakanth, Jaishankar, Karthik, Chandrasekhar, Arunpandian, Kokila, Saritha, Ilavarasi, Srividya

An exploitative expose film by a group of film students using hand-held camera, emphatic lighting and location sound techniques. A man with good political and criminal connections kills women who come and picnic near his mansion. After much bloodletting, the villains are eliminated by an honest cop and a fearless newspaper editor (Jaishankar) as the cop pumps his bullets, in slow motion, into the slasher’s body. The gory film is leavened with song and dance numbers and references to violent incidents of Tamil Nadu political life: e.g. the storming of the newspaper office. A song, sung by the editor, later became famous as it was used at political and trade union demonstrations, and later became the theme song for the Tamil Eelam. The film’s major impact however was to introduce alumni of the Madras Film Institute into the mainstream Tamil film industry.

ORIDATHU

aka Somewhere aka And There Was a Village

1986 112’ col Malayalam

d/s G. Aravindan pc Suryakanti Film Makers c Shaji N. Karun

lp Nedumudi Venu, Srinivasan, Thilakan, Vineeth, Krishnankutty Nair, Surendra Babu, Kunhandi, Chandran Nair, Soorya, Sitara

Set in the 50s in a remote part of Travancore Cochin, the story tells of a village, rather like the one in Aravindan’s Thampu (1978), threatened by electrification. Although the absurdities and the small-minded hypocrisies of village life are depicted with humour, the film produces a strange impression since the conclusion it reaches, that life is better without electricity, also condemns the very existence of cinema as a legitimate means of expression. The key to the film can be found in Aravindan’s statement that in the small village where he was born there was no electricity until he was ten years old, and that he felt nostalgic for those pre-pubertal times marked by the memory of people moving about with torches.

PANCHAGNI

aka Five Fires

1986 141’ col Malayalam

d T. Hariharan p G.P. Vijay Kumar, M.G. Gopinath pc Seven Arts Films s M.T. Vasudevan Nair c Shaji N. Karun m Ravi

lp Geetha, Mohanlal, Nadia Moidu, Thilakan

As in the romantic socialist realism of Meenamasathile Sooryan (1985), this film extols the virtues of radical political activists but, contraiy to Rajendran’s film, Hariharan exploits the unpleasant aspects of revolutionary violence. The central figure is Indira (Geetha), imprisoned for murder and on hunger strike. Allowed to visit her dying mother, a former activist in the Independence struggle, on a two-week pass, she encounters unmitigated hostility from some members of her family although her old mother welcomes her warmly. Persecuted by the villagers as well as by the police, Indira eventually turns to a journalist, Rashid (Mohanlal), to unburden herself, recounting the circumstances of her crime. In the politically turbulent 60s in Kerala, she had been a welfare officer who had led a group which hacked to death a particularly vicious landowner. Later, when she is released, she shoots the husband of her best friend for participating in a brutal gang rape of a servant girl. Then she calmly awaits being imprisoned again. The film was a commercial hit.

PANDAVAPURAM

1986 93’ col Malayalam

d/p/co-sc G.S. Panicker pc Neo Films st/co-sc Sethu c Diwakar Menon m Mohan

lp Jamila, Appu, James, Master Deepak

Based on Sethu’s magic-realist novel adapted by the author to the screen, the film refuses to make clear distinctions between quasi-realist, fantastic and symbolic registers of fiction. It tells of a woman teacher in her 30s, Devi (Jamila), whose young son keeps asking questions about his absent father. Devi often loses herself in fantasies which appear to come true. She spends much time on the station platform of the small village, awaiting the arrival of a man from Pandavapuram (it is left unclear whether such a place exists). Someone turns up called Jaran (Appu), meaning ‘lover’. Jaran claims to know her and to want to renew their friendship. As the villagers, and especially Devi’s friend Unni (James), put pressure on Jaran to leave, Devi locks him in her house. One night, dressed in red, she frenziedly rapes him claiming to be the avenging goddess Durga. The morning after, Jaran vanishes and everybody claims no such man ever arrived in the village. Devi then recommences her ritual of waiting on the station platform.

PAPORI

1986 144’ col Assamese

d/sc Jahnu Barua pc Patkai Films st Heu-En Barua c Binod Pradhan m Satya Barua, P.P. Vaidyanathan

lp Biju Phukan, Gopi Desai, Sushil Goswami, Dulal Roy, Runjun, Amulya Kakoti

Grim melodrama set in the context of the All-Assam Students’ Union agitations during the 1983 elections, a familiar setting for mainstream Assamese cinema of the period (cf. Hem Bora’s Sankalpa, 1986). Papori’s (Desai) husband Binod (Goswami) is falsely arrested for murder. Her daughter is in hospital, where she eventually dies. Papori’s only support, a police inspector (Phukan), finds the true murderer but cannot arrest him because the killer enjoys political protection. Papori is raped by a smuggler, her husband is convicted of murder and only an arbitrarily added epilogue, claiming that the husband is eventually freed and the good inspector promoted, brings a glimmer of relief. In his later Halodiya Choraye Baodhan Khaye (1987), Barua again weaves contemporary political events into a melodramatic plot.

PHERA

aka The Return

1986 94’ col Bengali

d/sc/p Buddhadev Dasgupta st Narendranath Mitra c Dhrubajyoti Basu m Jyotish Dasgupta

lp Subrata Nandy, Alaknanda Dutt, Alaknanda Dasgupta, Aniket Sengupta, Sunil Mukherjee, Devika Mukherjee, Biplab Chatterjee, Kamu Mukherjee, Pradeep Sen

The story of Sasanka (Nandy), a lonely, misanthropic playwright who finds his talent for writing, producing and starring in Bengali jatra theatre waning. His wife Jamuna (D. Mukherjee) leaves the crotchety artist and only his servant Rashu (S. Mukherjee) keeps him company. Into his dessicated environment comes his widowed sister-in-law Saraju (A. Dutt) and her small son Kanu (A. Sengupta). Sexual desire and the friendship of the child restore Sasanka’s creative powers.

RAO SAHEB

1986 123’ col Hindi

d/s Vijaya Mehta p Pahlaj Bajaj st Jaywant Dalvi c Adeep Tandon m Bhaskar Chandavarkar

lp Anupam Kher, Vijaya Mehta, Nilu Phule, Tanvi, Mangesh Kulkarni

Based on the popular play Barrister (1977) by Dalvi, Mehta’s film is set in the 20s in a small Maharashtrian town. Rao Saheb (Kher), an English-educated but orthodox barrister, lives with his elder brother and his widowed but vivacious aunt Mausi (Mehta) in an old mansion. Mausi befriends the equally lively young bride living next door, Radhika (Tanvi), who also becomes a widow. Radhika rebels against her bigoted father’s attempt to make her conform to the orthodox Brahmin rituals imposed on widows and she becomes a close friend of Rao Saheb. However, he cannot break free from Brahmin custom and many her. Instead, unable to act according to his convictions, he goes insane while Radhika resigns herself to the cruel existence of a Brahmin widow. The (like all Mehta’s cinema) stagey film evokes the plight of progressive liberals who support reform movements regarding widow remarriage but are themselves unable to overcome the social and moral pressures exerted by orthodox traditions.

SAMSARAM ATHU MINSARAM

aka Married Life is like Electricity

1986 145’ col Tamil

d/s Visu pc AVM Prod, p M. Saravanan, M. Balasubramanyam lyr Vairamuthu c N. Balakrishnan m Shankar-Ganesh

lp Visu, Raghuvaran, Chandrasekhar, Manorama, Laxmi, Ilavarasi, Madhuri, Kamala Kamesh, Delhi Ganesh

Visu’s caste-conscious urban middle-class family drama. Here he plays Ammaiyappa Mudaliar, a salaried employee with a wife, a daughter and three sons, making for four couples in a single household. The daughter, who aspires to a measure of freedom in her marriage, is contrasted with an obediently traditional daughter-in-law (Laxmi). The story approves of Christian-Hindu marriage, clearly features caste identities (e.g. the trouble-shooter figure of the servant Kannamma, played brilliantly by Manorama) and refuses to hide reactionary family ideologies under a progressive cloak. Manorama, the legendary Tamil comedienne, had debuted in the 1950s and has reputedly done over a thousand Tamil films. This film was remade in Hindi as Sansar (T. Rama Rao, 1987) with Aruna Irani in the role. The major hit extended the AVM studio’s successes into the 80s.

SULTANAT

1986 153’ col/scope Hindi

d/s Mukul S. Anand pc Kapleshwar Films, Arjun Hingorani dial Kadar Khan lyr Anjaan, Hasan Kamal c Pravin Bhatt m Kalyanji-Anandji

lp Dharmendra, Sunny Deol, Amrish Puri, Sridevi, Shakti Kapoor, Tom Alter, Karan Kapoor, Dalip Tahil, Juhi Chawla, Padma Khanna

Spectacular Arabian Nights revenge fantasy set in a vaguely identifiable Middle East and deploying the exoticism associated with Spielberg’s adventure films. The shah’s General Khalid (Dharmendra) thwarts the coup for the throne attempted by Razaulli (Puri). Razaulli kidnaps Khalid and his pregnant wife on their way to the hospital. Khalid’s wife dies in childbirth and Razaulli proclaims Khalid’s son as his own, swapping the infant for his stillborn daughter. Khalid remarries and has another son, Samir (Karan Kapoor), whom he sends abroad vowing never to set eyes on him until Khalid has avenged the death of his first wife. Razaulli’s secretly adopted son Sultan (Deol) grows up and falls in love with the shah’s daughter, Princess Yasmin (Sridevi). In a complicated denouement, Khalid kills Razaulli and recalls Samir; Shakkir, an ambitious vassal, kills the shah and intercepts the returning Samir and emprisons him. Khalid is taken prisoner by Sultan and they engage in a bloody duel till Razaulli’s wife tells them that Khalid is Sultan’s real father. Khalid, Sultan and Samir then kill Shakkir. Only then can Khalid die in peace surrounded by his sons. Anand does not shrink from spectacular anachronisms which have become his trademark (cf. his Khuda Gawah, 1992), as he mixes contemporary scenes into this commercially unsuccessful period movie tale.

SUSMAN

aka The Essence

1986 140’ col Hindi

d/p Shyam Benegal pc Association of Co-operatives and Apex Society of Handloom, Sahyadri Films sc Shama Zaidi c Ashok Mehta m Sharang Dev, Vanraj Bhatia

lp Om Puri, Shabana Azmi, Neena Gupta, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, K.K. Raina, Annu Kapoor, Harish Patel, Mohan Agashe, Ila Arun

A tribute to the ‘Ikat’ handloom weavers of Pochampally in AP. The film tells of Ramulu (Puri), a master of silk weaving, his family and their tribulations with the co-operative they work in. The drama is sparked off by internal rivalries and the arrival of a government official, a woman (Gupta) looking for items to send to an exhibition in Paris. Complications are provided by Ramulu, who secretly uses some of his allotted silk to make a wedding sari for his daughter, leading to his temporary disgrace. The contrast between artisanal craftsmanship and mass-production techniques is illustrated by the life of Ramulu’s son-in-law, who moves away from the family and finds work in a textile factory. The moral of the story is underlined in an interview between a French journalist and Ramulu, the latter trying to explain that a craftsman pours the essence of his soul into his craft. Unlike e.g. Mani Kaul (cf. Mati Manas, 1984) whose 80s work is also animated by similar concerns for dying craft traditions, Benegal’s cinema makes no effort to mediate, demystify or even understand the nature of that ‘essence’. Produced, like his earlier Manthan (1976), by a marketing co-operative, the film also capitalised on a specifically 80s orientalism brought about by the several Festivals of India and trade fairs of traditional craft in Europe and the USSR.

TABARANA KATHE

aka Tabara’s Tale

1986 179’ col Kannada

d/sc Girish Kasaravalli pc Apoorva Chitra dial Poornachandra Tejasvi from his short story c Madhu Ambat m L. Vaidyanathan

lp Charuhasan, Nalina Murthy, Krishnamurthy, Jayaram, Master Santosh

Kasaravalli’s multiple-point-of-view melodrama tells the story of Tabara (Charuhasan), a low-ranking worker in a municipal office who espouses colonial views despite his obvious pride in his job in a post-Independence government. Tabara gets into financial trouble when his honesty causes enmity among the coffee planters, and his pension is held up because he has not remitted some taxes that he was supposed to have collected. His wife falls ill and his ‘case’ becomes a mere file number in a bureaucratic office. The film is narrated from different points of view: the colonial point of view, the bureaucratic one, the view of those who believe Tabara to be mentally deranged and, mainly, the view of the orphan Babu through whose eyes the steel and concrete urban future is presented. Although primarily told in a realist idiom, at times (e.g. the shots of Bangalore and in the municipal office) the camerawork anticipates the surrealism of the sequel, Mane/Ek Ghar (1989).

THALAVATTAM

1986 147’ col Malayalam

d/s Priyadarshan pc Seven Arts Prod.

lyr Poovachal Khader, Pantalam Sudhakaran c S. Kumar m Raghukumar, Rajamani, Johnson

lp Mohanlal, Karthika, Nedumudi Venu, M.G. Soman

Priyadarshan’s highly adapted version of Asit Sen’s Deep Jweley Jai (1959) and Khamoshi (1969) following also in the wake of Milos Forman’s successful One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). Mentally deranged hero Vinu (Mohanlal) is admitted to an asylum, where he is befriended by one of the doctors (Venu) who happens to be a childhood buddy. Heroine Savithri (Karthika), also employed in the hospital, falls for the hero in the process of curing him. However, Savithri’s tyrannical father (Soman), who owns the asylum, cruelly performs a lobotomy operation on the hero because he fears for his daughter’s future. Like all Priyadarshan films, this one too works extensively with flashbacks, using the various drastic shock treatments meted out to the hero as an excuse for some psychedelic musical effects.

UPPU

aka Salt

1986 115’ col Malayalam

d Pavithran pc Eranadan Films s/p K.M.A. Rahim c Madhu Ambat m Saratchandra Marathe

lp P.T. Kumhumohammad, Vijayan Kottarathil, C.V. Sriraman, Madhavan, Jayalalitha, Sadiq, Renu Nair, Bharati, Valsala Menon, Mullenezhi

The wealthy Meleri Moosa (Kottarathil) ruins himself with obsessive litigation. With his daughter Amina (Jayalalitha) and her husband Abu (Kunhumohammad), Meleri crosses the Bharathapuzha river to settle in a new area. There, the wealthy Moidutty Mudalali (Madhavan), with the benediction of the local kazi (religious leader, played by Sriraman), sends his own wife away, lays claim to Amina and marries her, ignoring Abu’s protests. Twenty years later, Amina lives alone in a tomb-like mansion while her father happily indulges in civil litigation cases. In addition, her son leads a dissolute life and her daughter elopes with the chauffeur. Scenarist Rahim claimed the film to be a critique of the controversial Muslim personal law in India.

VARTHA

1986 163’ col/scope Malayalam

d I.V. Sasi pc Grihalakshmi Prod.

s T. Damodaran lyr Bichu Thirumala c Jayanan Vincent m A.T. Ummar, Johnson

lp Mammootty, Mohanlal, Seema, Rehman, Nalini

The fearless newspaper editor Madhavan Kutty (Mammootty) takes on Kerala’s corrupt political establishment in order to vindicate his sweetheart Radha (Seema), the district collector accused of illegal practices. The villain is the owner of the Manikyam financial group, who appears to control the state’s entire bureaucratic and political apparatus. Personal rivalries weave into political conflict as Manikyam implicates Radha’s kid brother Unni in a smuggling operation. Eventually, when all legal means fail, the editor, the kid brother and Vasu (Mohanlal), a reformed gangster formerly in Manikyam’s employ, establish a secret hideout where they assemble the documents that would appear to indict virtually everybody in power of criminal conspiracies. The film’s dramatic and wholly unexpected end has all the good guys gunned down by corrupt cops, making the fight for justice a virtually hopeless cause.

ANANTARAM

aka Monologue

1987 125’ col Malayalam

d/s Adoor Gopalakrishnan

p K. Ravindranathan Nair pc General Pics c Ravi Varma m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Ashokan, Mammootty, Shobhana, Balan K. Nair, Bahadur, Vempayan, Sooraj, Sudheesh, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Chandran Nair

Mammootty (right) in Anantaram

Gopalakrishnan’s experiment with subjective storytelling. The film centres on a young man Ajayan (Ashokan) who narrates two stories about himself in the first person. He was abandoned by his mother, raised by a doctor, and proved himself a consistent misfit. Much of his fantasy, into which the ‘reality’ of his second story merges, revolves around the figure of his foster-brother’s (Mammootty) wife (Shobhana). The film marks a major shift from the director’s previous Mukha Mukham (1984) which, despite its critical depiction of politics, retained Gopalakrishnan’s commitment to developing a tradition of Kerala melodrama. Anantaram is much more cynical, descending into a subjectivity bordering on the paranoid. Gopalakrishnan says that the film attempts to ‘relate an experience’, nothing more, of a ‘state of intense despair and angst’.

ANTARJALI JATRA/MAHAYATRA

aka The Voyage Beyond

1987 140’[B]/123’[H] col Bengali/Hindi

d/sc/c/m Gautam Ghose p Ravi Malik, Debashish Majumdar pc NFDC st Kamal Kumar Majumdar’s novel Antarjali Jatra (1960)

lp Shatrughan Sinha, Promode Ganguly, Robi Ghosh, Mohan Agashe, Shampa Ghosh, Basanta Choudhury, Sajal Roy Choudhury, Kalyan Chatterjee

In 1829, in the context of various reform movements associated with Raja Rammohan Roy, sati (the widow immolating herself on her husband’s funeral pyre) was outlawed by the British. The film, based on the noted Bengali writer Kamal Kumar Majumdar’s best-known fiction, is set after that date and addresses the cruelty of a patriarchal practice which continues even today. The Brahmin Seetaram (Ganguly) is dying and an astrologer (Robi Ghosh) assures the dying man and his relatives of finding happiness after death on condition that his wife commits sati on his death. The villagers defy the law and persuade an impoverished Brahmin (Choudhury) to marry his daughter Yashobati (Shampa Ghosh) to the dying man so that she may commit Sati. The only dissident is Baiju (Sinha), a drunken Untouchable who tends to the cremation grounds. Baiju persuades Yashobati to flee. In the end, on a moonlit night, Baiju tries to kill old Seetaram. The superstitious Yashobati tries to prevent the deed and the two struggle on the muddy banks of the Ganges. The struggle changes into lovemaking but the river in spate eventually carries away both Seetaram and Yashobati. The film’s end sums up a major controversy surrounding Ghosh’s filming of a difficult text. Yashobati’s death, which in effect constitutes the act of sati, is shown as a combination of accident and desire, further contrasting her ‘holy’ condition with Baiju’s traditionless bestialism. Much of this is revealed in the original novel through broken syntax, interior monologue and a dense, graphic style of disjointed phrases, from which Ghosh assembled something like a coherent story. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1992) contrasts the book with the film, suggesting that Majumdar’s novel ‘takes as understood a fully formed ideological subject (and thus) a question that can only be asked by us, as Hindus, of ourselves. This text is exactly not for the outsider who wants to enter with nothing but general knowledge, to have her ignorance sanctioned’. The film, on the other hand, ‘shatters this project by staging the burning ghat as a realistic referent carrying a realistic amount of local colour, a stage for a broadly conceived psychodrama played out by easily grasped stock characters.’ She accuses the film of being ‘an abdication of the responsibility of the national artist, trafficking in national identity (in the name of woman) for international consumption’. Ghosh used another, and equally difficult, literary text for his next film Padma Nadir Majhi (1992), this time by Manik Bandyopadhyay.

CHINNA THAMBI PERIYA THAMBI

1987 145’(124’) col Tamil

d/sc/dial Manivannan pc Chamba Creations st Shanmughapriyam lyr Vairamuthu, Gangai Amaran, Sivakumar c A. Sabhapathy m Gangai Amaran

lp Sathyaraj, Prabhu, Nadia, Sudha Chandran, Nizhalgal Ravi, Vijayan, V.M. John, Thirupur Ishwar, S. Varalakshmi

Melodrama about good and evil in a country/city conflict. The brothers (Prabhu and Satyaraj) live in a village. They are deliberately insulted by their haughty urban cousin Kavitha (Nadia) who is to marry the villain, a rich, America-returned millionaire. When Kavitha’s parents die, creditors take all her wealth and her fiance now refuses to marry her. She is forced to find a job in the factory of the villain (Ravi) who tries to make her his mistress. Both brothers love their cousin (by Indian convention, one of them should have married her) and try to court her. When one of the twins is charged with theft by the villain, the other kills him and goes to jail, from where he emerges white-haired to see the other twin married to the cousin. The film reiterates, in the words of a Deep Focus review, the conventional commitment to relationships of a ‘familiar and communal nature as against secular relationships between individuals’.

DANCE RAJA DANCE

1987 140’ col Kannada

d/p/s Dwarkeesh pc Dwarkeesh Chitra dial/co-lyr Chi. Udayashankar co-lyr R.N. Jayagopal c R. Deviprasad m Vijayanand

lp Vinodraj, Divya, Sangeeta, Srinath, Sundarraj, Devaraj, Kirtiraj, Ravikiran, Master Ravi Shankar, Narasimhraju, Ratnakar, Chetan Ramarao, Sundaresh Singh, Negro Jani

An attempt at a Hollywood-type dance movie (mediated by the B. Subhash style, cf. Dance Dance, 1987) interspersed with more conventional melodrama. The villain J.K. (Devaraj) kills the popular leader of a music band (Srinath) and tries to rape the band-leader’s wife. The film shifts into a second generation as the band-leader’s widow brings up her son Raja (Vinodraj) and a music manager (Sundarraj) makes him into a rock star. The villain’s daughter (Divya) is the film’s female lead, while Uncle Andrew, a former drummer and now a legless beggar, seeks revenge against J.K. Among the film’s highlights is Raja being forced to dance on broken glass to save his mother’s life, a distant echo of Pakeezah (1971). Others include Raja’s somewhat inept breakdance numbers.

DONGA MOGUDU

1987 168’ col Telugu

d/sc A. Kodandarami Reddy pc Maheshwari Movies p S.P. Venkanna Babu st Yandamuri Veerendranath dial Satyanand lyr Kosaraju Raghavaiah Choudhury, Seetharama Sastry, Rajashri c H. Loksingh m Chakravarthy

lp Chiranjeevi, Madhavi, Radhika, Bhanupriya, Ravu Gopala Rao, Giribabu, Charan Raj, Allu Ramalingaiah, Gollapudi Maruthi Rao, Ranganath, Jayanthi, Rajasulochana, ‘Sutti’ Velu

Telugu star Chiranjeevi plays the double role of the industrialist Ravi Teja and the stuntman Nagaraju. The industrialist’s major problem is his snobbish and uncaring wife Lalita (Madhavi). The stuntman supports his sister (Jayanthi) who believes her husband (Ranganath) and daughter (Bhanupriya) to be dead. The two lookalikes meet accidentally, but later exchange roles when Ravi Teja wants to go on a holiday with his secretary. Ravi Teja is accused of having murdered his secretary, but Nagaraju eventually solves all the problems, including the one with Teja’s wife whom he beats into submission. The most successful Chiranjeevi effort at multiple roles (cf. also Mugguru Monagallu, 1994, where he played a triple role). The film was later remade as Rowdy Alludu (1991).

GURU DAKSHINA

1987?’ col Bengali

d/sc Anjan Choudhury p/st Bhabesh Kundu c Girish Padidhar m Bappi Lahiri

lp Tapas Paul, Ranjit Mullick, Shatabdi Roy, Kali Bannerjee, Shaktimala Barua, Soumitra Bannerjee, Bhabesh Kundu, Ishani Bannerjee

Major hit by the most successful Bengali director of the 80s. The poor Jayanta (Paul) loves Rupa, the rich daughter of the local zamindar, but is also indebted to his music teacher. When Jayanta upstages Rupa in a music contest, the zamindar uses his financial hold over the music teacher to extract a promise that Jayanta will never sing again. Eventually, when Jayanta shows he wants to keep his promise come what may, the zamindar relents and allows his daughter to marry Jayanta. The film borrows from a bawdy latter-day version of the folk jatra with its often lewd speech (an idiom associated particularly with this director), cueing the editing to the dialogue. Lahiri departed from his usual electronic rock score and composed several hits in a ‘classical’ style.

HALODIYA CHORAYE BAODHAN KHAYE

aka The Catastrophe

1987 120’ col Assamese

d/sc Jahnu Barua pc Patkai Films st Hemen Borgohain c Anup Jotwani m Satya Barua

lp Indra Bania, Purnima Pathak Saikia, Badal Das, Hemen Choudhury, Pabitra Kumar Dekha

A happy, innocent farmer (Bania) is conned out of his landholding by an evil landlord. Forced to sell his cattle and to make innumerable trips to sort out bureaucratic problems, the farmer eventually meets that ultimate rarity, a ‘good’ bureaucrat who helps him get his land back. This story is set amid the din and cacophony of Assamese politics, leading at one point to the protagonist literally going berserk. Barua’s best-known film, renowned for Bania’s performance.

MR INDIA

1987 179’ col/scope Hindi

d Shekhar Kapur pc Narsimha Ents st/dial/lyr Javed Akhtar c Baba Azmi m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Anil Kapoor, Sridevi, Amrish Puri, Sharat Saxena, Bob Christo, Ashok Kumar, Satish Kaushik

Shekhar Kapur’s biggest movie tells an ‘invisible man’ story. One of Indian film’s most exotic villains yet, the blond dictator Mogambo (Puri, resembling Marty Feldman in Nazi uniform) is defeated by a common-man hero (Kapoor) who can render himself invisible. The film moves through a series of sketches: break-dancing kids, heroine Sridevi playing a journalist while performing her famous Hawa Hawaii routine (quoted in Salaam Bombay, 1988) and her popular Chaplin imitation.

NADODIKATTU

1987 158’ col Malayalam

d Sathyan Andhikkad pc Casino st Siddique-Lal sc/dial Srinivasan lyr Yusuf Ali Kacheri c Vipin Mohan m Shyam

lp Mohanlal, Srinivasan, Shobhana, Thilakan, Innocent, Mamu Koya

The first of a crazy comedy series featuring the enterprising down-but-not-out friends Ramdas (Mohanlal) and Vijayan (Srinivasan). The two friends attack each other constantly while getting into a series of tragi-comic scrapes: they lose their jobs as peons and then come to grief as they try to start a dairy business. They finally give all their money, as well as all they can borrow, to a shifty employment agent who promises them jobs in the Gulf but dumps them in Madras. Things end happily when their misadventures unintentionally lead the police to arrest a major smuggling ring, after which they are rewarded with jobs in the police department. The well-known filmmaker I.V. Sasi and his actress-wife Seema appear briefly as themselves. The enormous success of this comedy spawned two sequels, Pattana Praveshanam (1988) and Akkareakkareakkare (1990).

NAYAKAN

aka Hero

1987 155’ col Tamil

d/s Mani Rathnam pc Sujatha Films, Mukta Films dial Balakumaran co-lyr Pulamai Pithan c P.C. Sriram co-lyr/m Ilaiyaraja

lp Kamalahasan, Saranya, M.V. Vasudeva Rao, Janakaraj, Delhi Ganesh, Karthika, Nizhalgal Ravi, Tinnu Anand, Nasser, Vijayan

Rathnam’s controversial breakthrough film is a version of The Godfather (1972), based on the life of the Bombay gangster Varadarajan Mudaliar, played by Kamalahasan (at times explicitly imitating Brando). Seeing his father, a trade union activist, brutally murdered by the police in Tuticorin, the son runs away to Bombay and becomes Velu Naicker, the ruthless Godfather with a Robin Hood streak in the Dharavi slums, assisted by Ganesh in the Robert Duval role. Velu becomes Bombay’s minority Tamil population’s ‘Nayakan’ (hero/star/leader) and saviour. His daughter Charu (Karthika) walks out and marries the assistant chief of police. Velu is eventually shot by a mentally retarded youth (Anand) he had taken into his care. Although Kamalahasan’s performance was widely lauded, critics like K. Hariharan noted that the degree to which the star monopolises the film made ‘other characters seem either underdeveloped or perfunctory’. The cinematography takes its cue from Gordon Willis while Thotha Tharani’s art direction follows the conventions of Hollywood gangster films and concentrates on cars and decors. However, the film is more than a Hollywood pastiche: it draws on 30 years of Tamil Nadu’s star/politician images (including the spotless, all-white uniform of the Tamil politician, chewing betel-leaf) and directly plays to Tamil people’s anti-Hindi feelings when Velu, beaten up, gives the hugely popular reply in Tamil to a Hindi-speaking Bombay cop: ‘If I ever hit you, you will die.’ The latter half of the film virtually abandons Bombay as a location in favour of studio interiors and goes to Madras for the climax. The success of the film was crucial to Mani Rathnam’s career, establishing him as the leading Tamil director of his time.

ORU MAYMASAPPULARAYIL

1987 151’ col Malayalam

d/sc V.R. Gopinath p Alex Kadavil st Ranjith c Santosh Sivan m Ravindran

lp Sari, Balachandra Menon, Nedumudi Venu, Ashokan, Murali

Gopinath’s 2nd film tells of two men who try to understand why a woman (Sari) threw herself under a train: the cricket star (Ashokan) she loved believes that marrying her was a bad career move. As in his first feature, Greeshamam (1980), the men are still incapable of forming a relationship with a living woman but this time, by the end of the film, they have gained some understanding of a dead one.

ORE ORU GRAMATHILE

aka Once Upon a Time in a Village

1987 138’ col Tamil

d K. Jyothi Pandian pc Aries Enterprises p S. Rangarajan s/lyr Vali c Ranga m Ilaiyaraja

lp Laxmi, Poornam Vishwanathan, Delhi Ganesh, Arundhati, Nizhalgal Ravi, Beena Chakravarthy, V.K. Ramaswamy, Senthil Charlie

Controversial anti-government film in the tradition of the DMK propaganda melodrama, evoked e.g. in the opening cyclone scenes recalling Thyagabhoomi (1939). Produced in association with the publishers of Madras’s mainstream daily The Hindu, the film anticipates the attacks on the government’s positive discrimination policy in favour of ‘scheduled’ castes, better known as Mandal Commission Recommendations, which helped bring down the Janata Dal government (1990). The impoverished upper-caste Brahmin woman Karupayi (Laxmi) masquerades as a low-caste Harijan in order to receive a good education and a good job. She is blackmailed by a tramp-like figure and eventually arrested and brought to court. As in the DMK genre, the trial becomes the place to expound the pros and cons of the policy and for the heroine to make her fervent plea that it is unfair to ask talented upper-caste people to suffer so that low-caste people may get decent jobs. In addition, the script places feminist ideas in its heroine’s speech to bolster its elitist message. The film uses several folk-music tunes as part of the rural drama and has a convincing performance by Laxmi. It was briefly banned but the Supreme Court eventually cleared it for public screening.

PESTONJEE

1987 110’ col Hindi

d/co-sc Vijaya Mehta pc NFDC

st/co-sc B.K. Karanjia c A.K. Bir m Vanraj Bhatia

lp Anupam Kher, Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Kiran Thakur Singh Kher

Melodrama about two old Parsee friends, the extrovert Pesi (A. Kher) and the shy Piroj (Shah), both in love with Jeroo (Azmi). Pesi marries Jeroo and also draws close to the widowed lawyer Soona (K. Kher). Piroj is transferred away from Bombay for five years and returns to find Jeroo had a miscarriage and that Pesi now prefers Soona’s company. When Pesi dies, his funeral is paid for by Soona who has borne him a son. Based on a short story by Karanjia written in the early 50s, the film is set among the Bombay Parsees. The acting, speech, decor and much of the storyline adheres to popular perceptions of a community often caricatured as idiosyncratic. The film often slips into flashbacks, usually from Piroj’s point of view.

PRATIGHAAT

1987 164’ col Hindi

d/ed/co-sc N. Chandra pc Usha Kiron Movies p A. Rama Rao, Ramoji Rao st/co-sc T. Krishna dial Jalees lyr/m Ravindra Jain c H. Laxmi Narayan

lp Sujata Mehta, Arvind Kumar, Charan Raj, Rohini Hattangadi, Mohan Bhandari, Ashok Saraf, K. Srinivasa Rao, A. Rama Rao, Nana Patekar

Continuing on a more ambitious scale his contributions to lumpenised political activity in India (cf. Ankush, 1985), Chandra pits a violent criminal-political gang against a small group of morally upright citizens in the fictional town of Dharampura. The bad guys are led by the dreaded gangster Kali Prasad (Charan Raj), who runs his own court and police with the help of a crooked lawyer (Saraf). On the side of the good is the young college lecturer Laxmi (Mehta), the fiery Durga (Hattangadi) whose husband was killed by Kali, and former policeman Karamveer (Patekar), who goes mad when his wife is raped by the gangster. Laxmi is stripped in public by Kali, after which - having reformed her unruly students - she contests a local election with their help in an effort to defeat the villain. Kali wins the election through booth capturing and terror. In the end Laxmi kills the gangster in a public gathering, using his election symbol of the axe, invoking in the process the legend of Parashuram.

PREMALOKA

1987 154’ col/scope Kannada

d/p/st/sc V. Ravichandran pc Sri Eswari Prod. c R. Madhusudhan dial/lyr/m Hamsalekha

lp V. Ravichandran, Julie (Juhi Chawla), Ambareesh, Prabhakar, Srinath, Lokesh, K. Vijaya, Urvashi, Jayachitra, Leelavathi

The actor Ravichandran’s directorial debut was a big hit bringing disco and rock music into Kannada film. A rich but timid young man (Ravichandran), oppressed by dominating parents, is transformed when he falls in love with an independent-minded university colleague (Chawla). Composer Hamsalekha established himself with a series of major hit songs e.g. Nimbeyanta hudugi bantu nodu nee nodu. The film introduced Juhi Chawla, who later became the emblem of the teen love-and-rock formula with the Aamir Khan hit Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988).

PURUSHARTHAM

aka Purge

1987 111’ col Malayalam

d/sc/dial K.R. Mohanan p P.T.K. Mohammed st C.V. Sriraman’s Irikkapindam c Madhu Ambat m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Sujata Mehta, Adoor Bhasi, Madampu Kunjukuttan, Jebin George, Dr Rama, Rana Muttalali, Bhargaviyamma, Baby Nandita

After his directorial debut with Ashwathama (1978), Mohanan had to wait almost a decade for his 2nd feature to be finished. It tells of an upper-class widow, Bhadra Vasudev (Mehta), who, with her son (George), returns to her dead husband’s village to perform the ritual that will free her from the turbulent corpse that seems to persecute her and whose death she may have caused. The husband was an urban middle-class executive. The story unfolds from her son Vineet’s point-of-view as he becomes progressively estranged from his mother, ending up throwing sacrificial rice balls at her and her new friend Ninan (Muttalali). The title refers to the four purusharthas, the goals of mankind according to Hindu ethical philosophy.

PUSHPAK/PUSHPAKA VIMANA/PESUM PADUM

aka The Love Chariot

1987 131’ col Wordless (Hindi/Kannada/Tamil)

d/s/co-p Singeetham Srinivasa Rao
co-p Srinagar Nagaraj pc Mandakini Chitra c B.C. Gowri Shankar m L. Vaidyanathan

lp Kamalahasan, Amala, Tinnu Anand, Samir Khakhar, K.S. Ramesh, Loknath, Prathap Pothan, P.L. Narayana, Farida Jalal, Ramya

Apparently taking its cue from Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie (1976), this wordless comedy helped change Kamalahasan’s screen image. An unemployed youth (Kamalahasan) sees a drunken man (Khakhar) with a fancy hotel’s room key dangling from his pocket. The youth kidnaps the drunk and ties him up in his own tenement room, making elaborate arrangements to allow his prisoner to perform his daily toilet (he cuts a hole in the prisoner’s chair and gift-wraps the excrement). The youth then checks into the hotel where he immediately becomes the target of a hoodlum (Anand) who tries to murder him with knife-shaped ice cubes (when the ice melts, the murder weapon would vanish).

RUTHUBHEDAM

aka Hrithubhedam aka Change of Seasons

1987 126’ col Malayalam

d Prathap Pothan p Verghese Abraham s M.T. Vasudevan Nair c Ashok Kumar lyr Thakazhy Shankaranarayanan m Shyam

lp Balachandra Menon, Nedumudi Venu, Murali, Shankaradi, Vineeth, Geetha, Monisha, Manimala

Echoing aspects of Gopalakrishnan’s Elippathayam (1981), Vasudevan Nair’s script tells of the decline of a family of former Nair rent collectors as various members give way to greed and other weaknesses. The dramatic trigger is provided by a government compensation payment for confiscated forest lands, and the rapacious members of the family go to extraordinary lengths to appropriate as much compensation money as they can get by means both fair and foul. The story is told mainly through the eyes of a poor village lad, Keshu, returning from the city. The well-known director, B. Menon, can here be seen as an actor.

SACRIFICE OF BABULAL BHUIYA, THE

aka Babulal Bhuiya Ki Qurbani

1987 63’ col Oriya

d Manjira Dutta pc Media Workshop c Ranjan Palit

A poetic documentary about the tribals around Bihar’s Mailgora collieries who survive by recycling the pits’ coal slurry. In February 1981, Babulal Bhuiya, one of the workers, was shot dead by the Industrial Security Force. The film goes into the circumstances of his death via covering Communist Party rallies in the area. Much of the story is intercut with painterly shots on the body of an anonymous male worker in the quarry.

SWATHI THIRUNAL

1987 133’ col/scope Malayalam

d/co-s Lenin Rajendran p G.P. Vijay Kumar pc Seven Arts Films co-s Varaham Balakrishnan c Madhu Ambat m M.B. Srinivasan

lp Anant Nag, Srividya, Ambika, Ranjini, Nedumudi Venu

Biographical fantasy about Swathi Thirunal, best-known of the 19th C. Travancore kings. The British treaty (1795) established Travancore as an independent state figureheaded by its royalty. As with e.g. the Mysore state and other capitals of former rulers reduced to ceremonial function, this period saw a major revival of classical music and performing arts. However, Swathi Thirunal’s reign has received special attention, as a relatively uncomplicated era preceding Travancore’s decline into the 20th- C. rule of the despotic Diwan C.P. Ramaswamy Aiyer against whom the 1940s communist uprising was directed. The big-budget CinemaScope film, by a director noted for his CPI(M) sympathies, appropriates what it presents as a ‘golden age’ in Travancore history. Its resemblance to G.V. Iyer’s Hamsa Geethe (1975) in this regard is further heightened by the presence of leading man Nag, whose naturalist underplaying of the king contrasts with the elaborate period decor. After establishing the king’s credentials as lover and patron of art and music, and as staunch anti-imperialist, the film devolves into a love story with the Tanjore dancer Sugandhavalli (Srividya). The escalating political crisis is represented by the arrival of a new general, and ends with the king’s death.

SWAYAMKRUSHI

1987 164’ col Telugu

d/s K. Vishwanath pc Poornodaya Movie Creations p Edida Nageshwara Rao lyr C. Narayana Reddy, Seethatama Sastry c H. Loksingh m Ramesh Naidu

lp Chiranjeevi, Vijayashanti, Sumalatha, Bannerjee, Charan Raj, P.L. Narayana, Master Arjun, Master Suresh

Elaborate melodrama with Chiranjeevi as the illiterate cobbler who raises his dead sister’s son Chinna (Arjun/Suresh) while also financing the education of the orphaned Sharada (Sumalatha). When Sharada marries, Sambaiah’s lover Ganga (Vijayashanti) is sterilised so that nothing will interfere with Chinna’s growth. Ganga assists Sambaiah in becoming enormously wealthy, but this causes several problems: Chinna’s biological father Govind (Raj) teams up with Sharada’s no-good husband Bhaskar (Bannerjee) to make a series of demands on Sambaiah and to claim Chinna’s guardianship. Eventually, Chinna rebels against his father and both he and Sambaiah return to the latter’s modest original profession of cobbler. The film was a critical success, notably for recasting action star Chiranjeevi in an unusual role, which also constituted his influential effort to transform his screen image by entering what is known in Telugu cinema as the ‘class film’. Less than two years after the formation of the Dalit Mahasabha in A.P. (1985), the film posits a conservative resolution to an important political movement in its evacuation of all caste conflict in favour of a fictional conflict between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Dalits.

TAMAS

aka Darkness

1987 297’ col Hindi

d/sc/co-c Govind Nihalani pc Blaze Ents st Bhishm Sahni’s novel co-c V.K. Murthy m Vanraj Bhatia

lp Om Puri, Deepa Sahi, Dina Pathak, Bhishm Sahni, Amrish Puri, Uttara Baokar, Surekha Sikri, Saeed Jaffrey, Ila Arun, K.K. Raina

Nihalani’s controversial five-hour TV series deals with the Partition of India and led to major communal confrontations when the Hindu BJP organisations threatened to set TV stations afire and caused rioting in Hyderabad and Bombay. Based on one of Hindi author Bhishm Sahni’s best-known recent novels, the epic tale is seen mainly through the eyes of a tanner named Nathu (Om Puri) and his pregnant wife Karmo (Sahi). An effort to cause a communal conflict (one of the commonest strategies is to place a dead pig in a mosque) escalates into the pre-1947 conflagration throughout Punjab. The film effectively lumps together the activities of all the various political groups involved, including the British colonial powers and Hindu as well as Muslim communal fronts, which it contrasts with individual expressions of human concern that serve sometimes to dilute a notoriously complex historical episode into no more than a conflict between common good and politically motivated bad.

Tamas

THORANAM

1987 103’ col Malayalam

d/s Joseph Madapally p V. Rajan c Ravi Varma m P. Devarajan

lp Nedumudi Venu, Soman, Janardhanan, Jamuna, Kunjandi

Directorial debut of a journalist and novelist with a film about a crippled soldier who settles in a village in Kerala. He adopts a little Muslim boy and befriends a woman (Jamuna) relentlessly pursued by misfortune. The old soldier’s benevolence is misconstrued by the villagers but the woman repays his kindness and a kind of family situation is maintained.

VEDHAM PUDITHU

aka New Vedas

1987 144’ col Tamil

d/sc P. Bharathirajaa pc Janani Art Creations st/dial K. Kannan from his play Jatikal Illayadi Papa lyr Vairamuthu c B. Kannan m Devendran

lp Sathyaraj, Saritha, Raja, Nizhalgal Ravi, Charuhasan, Amala, Master Dasarathi, Janakaraj, Veeraraghavan, Srilatha

Melodrama supposedly critiquing Tamil Brahminism and a major censorship case when the Madras Tamil Brahmins’ Association’s call to have it banned was apparently supported by the then-President of India, R. Venkatraman. Balu Thevar (Satyaraj), a non-Brahmin atheist and the village chief, has a feud with the Brahmin Neelkanth Sastry (Charuhasan) who teaches the Vedas, including their erotic descriptions in Shankara, to Thevar’s son Sankara Pandi (Raja), the latter also being in love with Sastry’s daughter Vaidehi (Amala). Pandi gets killed, as does Sastry. Vaidehi pretends to be dead, and escapes, allowing another character to emerge: a widowed forest ranger (Ravi) who confionts the girl’s Brahmin suitor (Janakaraj) as well as the film’s villain. Bharathirajaa’s practice of setting a love story in the context of village ritual yields an unusually violent story in a film purporting to merge humanist values into religious ritual.

VEEDU

aka The House aka Home and the World

1987 110’ col Tamil

d/sc/c Balu Mahendra p Kala Das pc Shri Kala Int. st Ahila Balu Mahendra m Ilaiyaraja

lp Archana, Bhanuchander, M.A. Chokkalinga Bhagavathar, Sathya, Indu

Released in the International Year of Shelter, the film tells of Sudha (Archana), a government clerk in Madras, who lives with her sister and grandfather Murugesan (Bhagavathar), a retired music teacher. They look for a new home and are advised to build one instead. Helped by her friend Gopi (Bhanuchander), she encounters harassment, corruption and obstruction wherever she turns until, in the end, the Water Authority appropriates her new house and she is last seen in a freeze-frame seeking redress through the courts. The director claimed it to be a true story, inspired by the experiences of his mother. As his own cinematographer, Mahendra uses hand-held techniques and atmospheric source lighting to great effect. There are no song and dance sequences but the movie lovingly shows the old man singing beloved Tamil songs. The music is taken largely from Ilaiyaraja’s album How to Name It. Archana’s and especially Bhagavathar’s performances stand out, while the overly emphatic figure of building worker Mangatha strikes a false note.

AGNI NAKSHATRAM

1988 146’ col Tamil

d/s Mani Rathnam pc Sujatha Prod. p G. Venkateshwaran lyr Vali c P.C. Sriram m Ilaiyaraja

lp Karthik, Prabhu, Amala, Nirosha, G. Umapathi, Janakaraj, V.K. Ramaswamy, Jayachitra, Sumitra, Vijayakumar, Tara

Rathnam’s hit follow-up to Nayakan (1987) is a music video-type fantasy with rapid cutting, hazy images and flared lights. It also boasts one of the most sexually explicit song picturisations to date: the camera slithers along, peeking at a woman autoerotically engaged in an indoor swimming pool. The plot involves two half-brothers, one a cop (Prabhu) and the other a streetwise hood (Karthik), the two mothers (Jayachitra, Sumitra), and the shared father (Vijaykumar) who runs separate family establishments for them. The end, adapted from the Godfather (1972) hospital sequence, has the two brothers uniting to reinforce, literally, the law of the father (who is a Judge). After the unsatisfactory conflict between the brothers, one realises, in the critic K. Hariharan’s words, ‘that the real hero of the film is actually behind the camera [p]ulling out every gimmick available in the ad-man’s repertoire’

APARAN

1988 115’ col Malayalam

d/s P. Padmarajan pc Supriya International c Venu m Johnson

lp Jayaram, Shobhana, Parvathi, Jalaja, Madhu, Soman

A story of mistaken identity: an innocuous good guy (Jayaram) is mistaken for a gangster boss who may well have been his twin brother. Most Western versions of this plot e.g. featuring Jerry Lewis or Fernandel, explore the situation’s comic potential. However, Padmarajan sees the plot as a psychological drama.

ARYAN

1988 181’ col Malayalam

d Priyadarshan pc Cheers s T. Damodaran c S. Kumar m Raghukumar

lp Mohanlal, Ramya Krishna, Goga Kapoor, Balan K. Nair, Shobhana

Vendetta movie featuring wronged upper-caste Brahmins in the context of the Mandal Commission’s advocacy of employment rights for lower-caste people. The stereotypically honest Namboodiri (i.e. upper-caste) youth Devanarayan (Mohanlal) is forced by poverty to live in bad and distant Bombay where he makes a living as a member of a Muslim crime gang. He returns home with a girl (Ramya) all set to restore the lost honour of his family. However, non-Brahmin rogues prevent this ambition from being realized, providing numerous occasions for the fimmakers to vilify non-Hindu and lower-caste people, culminating in a virulent courtroom denunciation of such inferior specimens of humanity.

AVALE NANNA HENDTHI

1988 145’ col Kannada

co-d/co-sc S. Umesh co-d/st/co-sc/p K. Prabhakar pc Vijay Films dial/lyr/m Hamsalekha c Mallikarjuna

lp Kashinath, Bhavya, Mukhyamantri Chandru, N.S. Rao, Gora Bhima Rao, Thyagaraja Urs, Tara, Kaminidharan, Lalithamma, K.N. Bharati, Raviraj

Comedy that sometimes verges on the tragic, notable mainly for Kashinath’s wry, self-deprecating humour. Vishwanath (Kashinath) falls in love, but he first has to arrange his sister’s marriage in the traditional manner, which includes the iniquitous dowry system. A series of tragedies later, his greedy mother as well as his sister’s in-laws are reformed in a sharp critique of the dowry system.

AYARTHI THOLLAYIRATHI IRUPATHONNU

aka 1921

1988 197’ col/scope Malayalam

d I.V. Sasi p Mohammed Mannil pc Mannil Films s T. Damodaran c V. Jayaram m Shyam

lp Mammootty, Madhu, K.P. Ummar, Suresh Gopi, Bahadur, Parvathy, Jagannath Varma, Janardhanan, T.G. Ravi, Seema, Balan K. Nair, Tom Alter, Rohini, Bhaskaran, Urvashi

Designed as an action melodrama blockbuster to follow the successful Eenadu (1982). The film addresses the 1921 Moplah rebellion when poor peasants, mostly Muslim, rose against the landowning aristocrats, mostly Hindu, while the British operated their characteristic divide-and-rule policy after the defeat of Tipu Sultan. The historical and political contexts of the rising are treated in terms of a catalogue of cartoon-like cliches and stirring nationalist speeches. The meat of the movie is in the rapes, battles and other nastiness perpetrated upon the innocent. The film-makers explicitly stated their wish not to support nor to contradict any possible interpretation of the historical events to which they allude.

BAI CHALI SASARIYE

1988 151’ col Rajasthani

d/sc/co-dial Mohansingh Rathod pc Sundar Films st Keshav Rathod co-dial Mahendra Singh Jodha co-dial/co-lyr Kundan Kishore co-lyr Diwakar c Chandu Desai m O.P. Vyas

lp Alankar, Neelu, Gnan Shivpuri, Priyanka, Ramesh Tiwari, Bhairavi Shah, Devyani Thakkar, Prahlad Pawar, Lalita Pawar, Jagdeep

Rajasthani star Neelu reprises her familiar role as a virtuous victim in a neo-traditionalist melodrama. Lakshmi’s (Neelu) mother dies giving birth to her; when her millionaire father remarries, she is raised like an outsider in her own family. Her only support (in an unusual twist) is her stepbrother, who assumes the familial responsibility in arranging her marriage. However, her misfortunes continue as her in-laws heap more suffering on her and eventually cause her death. The film purported to be against feudalism and superstition.

BANNADA VESHA

1988 110’col Kannada

d/s Girish Kasaravalli pc Doordarshan (Bangalore) c G.S. Bhaskar m B.V. Karanth

lp Sridhar, Smitha Kasaravalli, A.B. Jayaram, Narayana Bhatt, Shantamma, Loknath, Shankar

Folk-theatre-derived melodrama set in the famed Karnataka tradition of the Yakshagana, a variant of the Kathakali style involving complicated make-up and rigorous dance codes, patronised mainly by temples which invite groups to perform for worship and to raise revenue. The central character, Shambhu (Shankar), a member of such a group, is a traumatised and guilt-ridden figure usually relegated to minor roles but with the driving ambition of playing the male lead by displacing the arrogant Sheshappa. When he is allowed to play the demonic Jhunjhutti, he pretends to be possessed by the demon and uses his new-found reputation to start an alternate theatre group sponsored by the financially ailing Kapileshwara temple. His performative limitations, and the secondary problems caused by his having to live a fake identity, intensify his emotional crises and the film ends on a tragic note after he is revealed to be a fraud. Kasaravalli’s stylised idiom, the film’s most attractive aspect, is restricted to the performances while routine realism prevails in the rest of the story.

CHITHRAM

1988 171’ col Malayalam

d/s Priyadarshan pc Shirdi Sai Creations p P.K.R. Pillai lyr Shibu Chakravarty c S. Kumar m Kannoor Rajan, Johnson

lp Mohanlal, Nedumudi Venu, Ranjini, Raju, Srinivasan

Along with Kilukkam, the same year, Mohanlal established his collaborations with director Priyadarshan as among the most infallible in the commercial Malayalam cinema. When Kalyani’s (Ranjini) rich father returns from abroad on a brief holiday to settle the inheritance of his property, Kalyani’s uncle (Venu) hires a thief and con man, Vishnu (Mohanlal), to masquerade as her husband. The reason for this impersonation is to keep the father’s property from falling into the hands of a bunch of baddies (Srinivasan, Raju) who run the estate. Most of the film exploits the several comic possibilities of a spirited woman and a crazy hero being forced to pretend to be married. The story takes a tragic turn when Mohanlal is revealed as a murderer facing a death sentence, and he tells his tale in flashback. He had killed his deaf-mute girlfriend Revathi, when he mistook her Naxalite brother as being her lover. His child by Revathi was put into an orphanage when he was arrested. At the end, Vishnu and Kalyani, having fallen in love, are parted by the law, as he goes off to his death sentence while she is saddled with the responsibility of raising his orphaned child. The film adheres to the sometimes inexplicable tendency, for viewers unfamiliar with its generic codes, of 80s Kerala melodrama to end in tragedy.

DAASI

aka Bonded Woman

1988 94’ col Telugu

d/s/m B. Narasinga Rao pc Little India c A.K. Bir

lp Archana, Roopa, Bhopal Reddy, Sidappa Naidu, Shilpa

Political melodrama set in the 20s addressing the practice of purchasing slave girls, often given as dowry in a marriage, by zamindar families under the rule of the Nizam of Hyderabad. Kamakshi (Archana), a daasi bonded to Jayasimha Rao, becomes pregnant by her owner. At the command of the zamindar’s self-indulgent and childless wife, Kamakshi is forced to have an abortion. The film uses a neo-expressionist style e.g. the dark servants’ quarters, the drumbeats announcing the pregnancy of the landlord’s sister counterpointed with the daasi’s screams as the midwife terminates her pregnancy, etc.

EK DIN ACHANAK

aka Suddenly One Day

1988 105’ col Hindi

d/sc Mrinal Sen pc NFDC, Doordarshan st Ramapada Choudhury c K.K. Mahajan m Jyotishka Dasgupta

lp Shriram Lagoo, Uttara Baokar, Shabana Azmi, Aparna Sen, Roopa Ganguly, Anjan Chakraborty, Anil Chatterjee, Manohar Singh, Lily Chakraborty, Anjan Dutt

Closely echoing the plot of Kharij (1982), Sen tells of a retired professor (Lagoo) who suddenly disappears. His wife, children and friends start to worry when he does not return and wait months for him. Their memories, as each tries to reconstruct their view of the man, provide the film with a patchwork of fragments building into a composite but never quite coherent picture of the professor. Some critics saw it as Sen’s most autobiographical film.

IDU NAMMA ALU

1988 166’ col Tamil

d Balakumaran pc Saranya Cine Arts s/m K. Bhagyaraj lyr Vali, Pulamaipithan, Muthulingam c K. Rajpreeth

lp K. Bhagyaraj, Shobhana, Manorama, J.V.V. Somayajulu, Kumarimuthu

Gopalasami (Bhagyaraj), an unemployed graduate and son of a barber, pretends to be a brahmin when he becomes the tenant of conservative temple priest Srinivasa Sastry (Somayajulu). He falls for the priest’s daughter Banu (Shobhana) and they marry. At the marriage the arrival of Gopalasami’s parents exposes his true caste identity and he, as well as his wife, are evicted by the priest. In the end Banu solves the problem, and Gopalasami is readmitted into the brahmin household after he saves Sastry from a suicide attempt. Credited to the novelist Balakumaran, the comedy belongs to the established actor-director Bhagyaraj.

IN WHICH ANNIE GIVES IT THOSE ONES

1988 112’ col English

d Pradip Krishen pc Grapevine Media s Arundhati Roy c Rajesh Joshi

lp Arjun Raina, Arundhati Roy, Rituraj, Roshan Seth, Isaac Thomas, Divya Seth, Idres Malik, Moses Uboh, Himani Shivpuri

TV film comedy about college life in Delhi. Set in an architecture college, the hero, Anand Grover aka Annie keeps failing his exams because he made fun of his college head. Nevertheless he retains his idealist vision of planting fruit trees to prevent people defecating near railway lines. Other characters are Annie’s Ugandan room-mate and the outrageously dressed Radha. In the end, Annie manages to pass his exams thanks to a trick played by the students. The film suggests the hero goes on to become the head of the department.

KADAL THEERATHU

aka On the Seashore

1988 83’ col Malayalam

d/p/sc T. Rajeevnath pc Rasika Films

st O.V. Vijayan c Santosh Sivan m G. Aravindan, Kavalam Narayana Panicker

lp Amir Abbas, Leelamma Verghese, Gopalakrishnan

With stylised images and the familiar flashback structure, Rajeevnath uses the writer and cartoonist Vijayan’s story to show the journey and the memories of a father, Vellayiappan (Gopalakrishnan), on his way to the coast to visit his imprisoned son Kandunni, condemned to death for killing a gangsterish landlord.

KHAIDI NO. 786

1988 ? col Telugu

d/sc Vijaya Bapineedu pc Shyam Prasad Arts p Maganti Ravindranath Choudhury st Shyam Prasad Arts Unit dial G. Satyamurthy lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy, Bhuvana Chandra c H. Loksingh m Raj-Koti

lp Chiranjeevi, Bhanupriya, Satyanarayana, Nutan Prasad, Kota Srinivasa Rao, Mohan Babu, Nirmala, Allu Ramalingaiah, Smita

Gopi (Chiranjeevi), orphaned when his parents were killed by a maternal Uncle, Suryachandra Rao (Rao), becomes a police constable. He quits his job to assault a cruel cop who abuses a poor, hunger-striking teacher. Accused of trying to rape the villain’s arrogant, city-bred daughter Radha (Bhanupriya), who whips him in public, he forces her to marry him in order to teach her a lesson (cf. Alluda Majaaka, 1995, for the common theme of ‘marriage as punishment’ for a woman). Having ‘tamed’ her, he is next framed for a murder, another common narrative device in Chiranjeevi films. In the latter story, the corrupt cop Achaiah (Babu) feeds the villain to crocodiles to forestall a confession. The hero is eventually freed when the police overhear Achaiah boasting about his deeds.

KHAYAL GATHA

aka Khayal Saga

1988 103’ col Hindi

d/s Kumar Shahani pc Madhya Pradesh Film Dev. Corp., Bombay Cinematograph dial Ashmaki Acharya, Kamal Swaroop c K.K. Mahajan m supervision Roshan Shahani

lp Mita Vasisth, Birju Maharaj, Alaknanda Samarth, Rajat Kapoor, Navjot Hansra, Mangal Dhillon

Rather than imbuing stories about contemporary conditions with epic dimensions (cf. Maya Darpan, 1972; Tarang, 1984), Shahani here addresses the epic forms directly in a film about the Khayal, a form of classical music established in the 18th C., based on the earlier Dhrupad which it then adapted, mobilising elements of other classical and folk literatures and music. For Shahani, the crucial relevance of this music to the cinema resides in its theory of the shruti, the subdivisions between given notes in a raga which eventually yield a continuous scale and prove that you can only name approximations, never absolutes’ (1986). By emphasising sequence rather than discrete notes or the rhythmic cycle, musical elaboration could be based on improvisation so that, like jazz or other musical forms emerging from oppression, it was able to resist all efforts at encoding while remaining free to assimilate the widest range of musical elements from as far as Central Asia, Turkey and Persia. The film merges the history of the Khayal form with several legends associated with it: e.g. the legends of Rani Rupmati (Vasisht) and Baaz Bahadur (Dhillon), Heer-Ranjha, Nala-Damayanti and others (some invented for the film). These legends are then worked into some of the key figurations determining the Khayal narrative, such as the nayika and the object of the address, and the sakhi. A music student (Kapoor) moves through these epochs and legends. The result is a visually stunning narration condensing legend, history and poetry, emphasising hybridity in all cultural practices. The key musical contributions are by some of the foremost musicians from the Gwalior gharana, the oldest of the several that exist, including Krishnarao Shankar Pandit, Sharatchandra Arolkar, Jal Balaporia and Neela Bhagwat. Shahani also uses the dance of Birju Maharaj, India’s top Kathak dancer.

Meeta Vasisth and Pushpamala in Khayal Gatha

KILUKKAM

1988 ? col Malayalam

d/sc Priyadarshan pc Goodknight Films p R. Mohan st/dial Venu Nagavalli lyr Bichu Thirumala c S. Kumar m S.P. Venkatesh

lp Mohanlal, Jagathi Srikumar, Revathi, Thilakan, Innocent

Priyadarshan’s follow-up to his successful Chithram (1988). Two down-and-out friends, the tourist guide Jojy (Mohanlal) and the photographer Nischal (Jagathy), encounter Nandini (Revathi) whom they recognise from an advertisement offering a reward for finding her. They discover that she is trying to escape from her tormentor and is in search of her father. After scenes of romance and some remarkable song picturisations, interrupted by Nischal’s comically inept attempt to turn her in, Jojy defeats the terrifying villain, a Hindi-speaking Muslim (often presented as the height of evil in Priyadarshan films) and wins the girl. Among the film’s best moments are the comic scenes between the retired Judge Nambiar, played by the veteran Malayalam character actor Thilakan, and his bungling servant Kittunni (Innocent). Priyadarshan remade the film in Hindi as Muskurahat (1992), with less success.

KOLAHAL

aka The Turmoil

1988 118’ col Assamese

d/p/s Bhabendranath Saikia c Kamal Nayak m Mukul Barua

lp Runu Devi Thakur, Arun Nath, Bibhu Ranjan Choudhury

Realist melodrama based on an original radio play by the director. The child Moti keeps himself and his mother from starvation by stealing rice from trucks. His mother Kiran tries to work in a warehouse with a little support from her neighbours. Moti is killed when a truck capsizes and the driver tries to bribe Kiran’s mother with a sack of rice marked by the blood of her son. When later she discovers that her long-absent husband is living with another woman in the city, she succumbs to the advances of Badal, the truck-cleaner.

MANU UNCLE

1988 123’ col Malayalam

d/sc Dennis Joseph pc Jubily Prod p Joy Thomas st/dial/lyr Shibu Chakravarthy c Jayanan Vincent m Shyam

lp Mammootty, Soman, Pratapchandran, Suresh Gopi, Kuriatchan, Sandheep, Anoop, Kareem, Mohanlal

Children’s adventure story adapting the ‘kids on vacation’ plot still associated amongst Indian children with Enid Blyton and Margaret Bhatty. Four school children trail a gang of museum thieves. On the way, they take part in bicycle chases, befriend a runaway delinquent and have a lavish lunch paid for by Malayalam superstar Mohanlal, in a brief guest appearance. In the end the kids overwhelm the gangsters’ hideout and fight it out with cricket balls and a little help from their beloved Manu Uncle (Mammootty), a scientist and secret agent. Suresh Gopi, as the bungling police chief, dominates the climax.

MARATTAM

aka Masquerade aka Faces and Masks

1988 90’ col Malayalam

d G. Aravindan pc Doordarshan s/lyr Kavalam Narayana Panicker based on his own play c Shaji N. Karun

lp Sadanandan Krishnamurthy, Kalamdalam Keshavan, Urmila Unni, Krishnankutty Nair

Panicker’s one-act play deals with the relation of identification between an actor and his or her role. Aravindan put the stress on the relations between the viewer and the actor/role dualities. The action takes place on the eve of the last act of the Kathakali piece Keechakavadham (The Killing of Keechaka). The events surrounding the performance uncannily echo events in the play. One character even claims to have killed the lead actor of the play because he detested the character the man portrayed. However, the three different accounts that are presented of the same plot are never resolved or reconciled with each other. Each version is accompanied by a different style of folk-music: the tune and rhythm of southern Kerala’s thampuran pattu, the pulluvan pattu and the ayappan pattu. The performers were drawn from the theatre and from Kathakali. In southern India, with its plethora of politicians using their film images to acquire inordinate wealth and power, Aravindan’s TV film bears on an eminently sensitive political as well as aesthetic issue.

OM DAR-B-DAR

1988 101’col Hindi

d/p/s/lyr Kamal Swaroop pc NFDC c Ashwani Kaul, Milind Ranade m Rajat Dholakia

lp Anita Kanwar, Gopi Desai, Lalit Tiwari, Aditya Lakhia, Bhairav Chandra Sharma, Lakshminarayan Shastri, Ramesh Mathur, Manish Gupta, Peter Morris

One of the most unusual independent films of the 80s, Kamal Swaroop’s debut briefly suggested the possibility of an avant-garde. Set in a mythical small town in Rajasthan, akin to the Jhumri Talaiya whence stem the largest number of requests for film music singles addressed All India Radio’s commercial channel, the film tells of a boy, Om, growing into adolescence (Manish Gupta plays the young Om, Aditya Lakhia the older boy). The son of a fortune teller (Shastri) and the younger brother of Gayatri (Desai), Om’s major problem is that, riddled with guilt about his voyeurism, he believes himself to be responsible for everything that happens around him. Gayatri is courted by Jagdish (Tiwari) as she dreams of a future that would allow her to ride a bicycle or to sit in the men’s section of a movie theatre. Many of Om’s fantasies about sexuality and death are graphically realised in remarkable song sequences: a science teacher dissecting a frog expands into the Felliniesque Rana Tigrina number, or the moonwalk on a terrace on the night that Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. This double-edged satire acquires a further dimension with the entry of Phoolkumari (Kanwar), whose sexuality sends out beguiling and horrifying messages evoking, for Jagdish, the world of cheap Hindi novelettes. Then war is declared as the Diwali firecrackers become real explosions, the father’s (Shastri) diamonds hoarded for black-market purposes are lost on the sethji’s property where they are swallowed by frogs. In the end, Om atones by enacting the traditional legend of Brahma’s descent to earth, the origin of the Pushkar fair which today is a major tourist attraction in Rajasthan. Om learns the art of breathing underwater and turns into a tourist exhibit. The jerky, fast-moving and witty film proceeds by way of symbolic imagery including tadpoles, skeletons and fantasies derived from Hindi movies, advertising, television and the popular Hindi novel. The music and soundtracks are remarkably inventive (e.g. the transformation of Come September into the number A-a-a mohabbat humsafar ho jaye).

ORU CBI DIARY KURUPPU

1988 137’ col Malayalam

d K. Madhu pc Sunitha Prod, p M. Mani s S.N. Swamy c Vipin Das m Shyam

lp Mammootty, Urvashi, Suresh Gopi, Janardhanan, Sukumaran

Among the best known (with Avanazhi, 1986) of Mammootty’s cop movies. Omana, the daughter-in-law of prominent businessman Ouseph, dies under mysterious conditions. The officer investigating the crime is transferred when he rejects the official conclusion of suicide. Omana’s father and sister (Urvashi) petition the Supreme Court, which orders the CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation) to re-examine the case. CBI officer Sethuraman (Mammootty), with crack lieutenants Vikram and Harry, unearths the truth. Much of the film deals with the illegal financial activities of Ouseph and his gang, their extensive political contacts and their control over the local police (who consistently oppose the CBI officers). The end, however, develops from a relatively less explored aspect of the script: Omana’s sexual oppression in an all-male household. The criminal is revealed as one of Ouseph’s henchmen, and the pretence of suicide is meant to cover up a rape.

PADAMUDRA

1988 144’ col Malayalam

d/s R. Sukumaran pc Noble Pics. p Augustin Elanjipilli lyr Kuttappanakku Hari, Edamon Thankappan c Saloo George m Vidyadharan

lp Mohanlal, Nedumudi Venu, Seema, Urvashi, Sitara, Master Sreekumar

Existential fable designed to show off Mohanlal’s acting skills. He plays both a part-time theyyam dancer and travelling salesman as well as his guilt-ridden son. The son eventually ‘ascends’ into insanity. The film works with numerous allusions to both biblical and folk sources as it investigates the meaning of fatherhood, the youth’s main problem. Noted for George’s camerawork and for Mohanlal’s repeated efforts to extend his performative abilities to dance (cf. also Kamalathalam, 1992).

PIRAVI

aka Birth

1988 110’ col Malayalam

d/co-sc Shaji N. Karun pc Filmfolk co-sc/st S. Jayachandran Nair co-sc Raghu c Sunny Joseph m Mohan Sitara, Aravindan

lp Premji, Archana, Lakshmiamma, C.V. Sriraman, Mullenezhi, Chandran Nair

A visually engrossing yet austere directorial debut by Kerala’s leading cinematographer. The plot is taken from actuality and concerns a frail but dogged old man, Chakyar (Premji), who obsessively searches for his vanished son, Raghu, venturing even into bewildering Trivandrum to seek an audience with the Home Minister. The man’s daughter learns that her brother probably died in police custody after being tortured, but she cannot bear to tell her father who continues to hope and to search. However, the old man’s grip on reality is slipping fast and he begins dreaming that his son is with him. The story is based on the disappearance of Rajan, a Naxalite sympathiser, during the Emergency. Rajan’s father later sued the Congress-I Government. The film’s force comes from its skilful orchestration of time and space into fascinating rhythmical patterns interacting with land and cityscapes, drawing the viewer into the father’s obsessive search in everyday, indifferent surroundings. It is also highly mystical, and deflects a major real-life incident with direct political repercussions into a brand of orientalist fatalism.

QAYAMAT SE QAYAMAT TAK

1988 162’ col/scope Urdu

d Mansoor Khan p/s Nasir Hussain lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri c Kiran Deohans m Anand-Milind

lp Aamir Khan, Juhi Chawla, Ravinder Kapoor, Goga Kapoor, Dalip Tahil, Aloknath, Asha Sharma, Reema Lagoo, Beena, Ajit Vachhani, Raj Zutshi

The biggest box-office hit of 1988 relaunched its producer/writer (and some sources claim also director), and gave new life to glossy teen romances shot in advertising styles (cf. Maine Pyar Kiya, 1989). It also established the 90s star Aamir Khan. The film combines a Romeo and Juliet theme with the standard Nasir Hussain pop musical. Raj (Khan) and Rashmi (Chawla) fall in love, defying a major ancestral conflict between their families. They elope and create a kind of utopia in an abandoned temple on an isolated mountain, living on love, fresh air and burnt food. Having to buy provisions in a nearby town (the ‘real’ world), they are betrayed and die. The film presents the act of falling in love as an illusory individuation, but perhaps the only form of culturally acceptable rebellion available. Its strongly neo-traditional thrust is underlined by Khan’s nostalgic evocation of classic Nasir Hussain heroes (e.g. Shammi Kapoor, Dev Anand), in the teenage hero’s dilemma: whether to follow the idolised father, incarnated in the film’s hit song Papa kehte hain, or to follow a different heroic vocation and fall in love. The film rapidly became a cult, fondly referred to by teenagers as ‘QSQT’. Khan starred again in the follow-up, Dil (1990).

RAAKH

1988 153’ col Hindi

d/st/co-sc Aditya Bhattacharya pc Emotion Pics, Second Image Ents co-sc/dial Nuzhat Khan c Santosh Sivan m Ranjit Barot

lp Aamir Khan, Pankaj Kapoor, Supriya Pathak, Naina Balsavar, Homi Wadia, Chandu Parkhi

Aamir Khan’s first starring role prior to his breakthrough with Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak later in the year. The story, told in flashback, focuses on a young man whose interior monologue accompanies the film. The hero (Khan) helplessly watches his girlfriend (Pathak) being gang-raped. To refurbish his male pride (the woman’s suffering is trivialised in the film), he spends the rest of the film, aided by a good cop (Kapoor), avenging the slighting of his manhood by the gangster and his henchmen responsible for the rape. The revenge story is presented as a fatalist meditation on ‘meaning of life’. Using closeups, flashing lights and throbbing music (composed by the rock drummer Ranjit Barot) under the dialogue, the film tries to induce the viewer to wallow in the choreography of violence.

RANADHEERA

1988 153’ col Kannada

d/p/s Ravichandran pc Eswari Prod. dial/lyr/m Hamsalekha c R. Madhusudhan

lp Ravichandran, Umashree, Anant Nag, Khushboo, Lokesh, Jaijagadish, Master Manjunath

Complicated crime narrative dedicated mainly to star/director Ravichandran’s self-promotion. The confrontation between the gangster Ranadheera (Ravichandran) and the Police Inspector General (Lokesh), as well as a love story featuring the Police Chief’s daughter (Khushboo), both of which lead to the reform of the hero, form the main plot. The film, however, works with several other ‘reflexive’ devices, including references to Ravichandran’s earlier hit Premaloka (1987), direct address to the audience and a scene in which the hero narrates the film to school children.

RIHAEE

1988 158’ col Hindi

d/s Aruna Raje pc Gaahimedia dial Suraj Sanim lyr Babu Rangpura, Suraj c S.R.K. Moorthy m Sharang Dev

lp Hema Malini, Naseeruddin Shah, Vinod Khanna, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Ila Arun

First solo feature by Aruna Raje whose previous films were co-directed with Vikas Desai and signed jointly as Aruna-Vikas. It is set in a Rajasthan village where the men migrate to Bombay to seek work (and visit prostitutes) while their wives at home become victims of rapacious outsiders like Mansukh (Shah). Mansukh seduces the virtuous Taku (Malini) who becomes pregnant. When her husband (Khanna) returns, she informs him of her decision to defy the village elders’ diktat and to have her child. The husband supports her against a group of villagers determined forcibly to terminate her pregnancy. Addressing the still unexplored theme of female sexuality, the film allows itself to be derailed into a conventional morality tale.

RUDRAVEENA

1988 170’ col Telugu

d/s K. Balachander pc Anjana Prod. p K. Nagendra Babu dial Ganesh Patro lyr Seetharama Sastry c P. Raghunanda Reddy m Ilaiyaraja

lp Chiranjeevi, Shobhana, Gemini Ganesh, P.L. Narayana, Brahmanandam, Satyanarayana

Reformist Chiranjeevi movie addressing caste in a calculated effort to achieve greater critical respectability for the star (cf. Swayamkrushi, 1987; Apathbandhavudu, 1992). The Brahmin Suryam (Chiranjeevi) is trained in music by his father, the reputed Carnatic musician Ganapathi Sastry (Ganesh). However, the father believes that music constitutes an end in itself, while the son is committed to uplifting the masses. Suryam falls for the Dalit woman Lalitha (Shobhana), but his father’s disapproval forces him to leave home. Suryam becomes a political figure leading campaigns advocating prohibition and starts local cooperative movements. The father is betrayed by his new disciple, who demands to learn a rare raga as a dowry for marrying his daughter. The end has the Prime Minister of the country publicly congratulating Suryam for his actions while the father recants and publicly acknowledges that his son’s ideals were the better ones. The film was awarded the ‘Nargis Dutt National Integration’ award from the national film jury.

SANGLIANA

1988 141’ col Kannada

d/co-p/st P. Nanjundappa pc Pushpagiri Films co-p J. Rameshlal, S.V. Ganesh, M.R. Kashinath sc K.V. Raju dial Ku. Nagabhushan
co-lyr/m Hamsalekha co-lyr Doddarange Gowda, Manohar c Mallikarjuna

lp Ambareesh, Shankar Nag, Bhavya, Tara, Srinath, Vajramuni, Devaraj, Sudhir, Master Manjunath, Disco Shanti, Lohiteshwara, Doddanna, Lakshman, K.V. Manjaiah, Gayatri Prabhakar, S. Varalakshmi, Pratibha

Although the film’s title refers to a famous real life Police Chief in Bangalore, T.S. Sangliana, the film bears no relation to actual events. Shankar Nag plays the cop assigned to bust a notorious gang. After several successful raids and a series of disguises, the plot thickens when Sangliana is charged with inhuman behaviour. The film’s villain Vikram (Devaraj) is a criminal backed by his politician father (Vajramuni), while the voice of morality is provided by honest journalist Mahesh, whose daughter (Bhavya) is the film’s female lead. Mainly a vehicle for action hero Nag, whose star-entry is enhanced by an unusual and relatively autonomous narrative device when fellow megastar Ambarish first appears pretending to be Sangliana.

TEZAAB

1988 173’ col/scope Hindi

d/s/p N. Chandra pc Aarti Ents Bombay, N. Chandra Prod, lyr Javed Akhtar c Baba Azmi m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Anil Kapoor, Chunky Pandey, Madhuri Dixit, Anupam Kher, Kiran Kumar, Suresh Oberoi, Mandakini, Annu Kapoor

Chandra, the maker of the Shiv Sena propaganda film Ankush (1985), had his first hit with this Bombay low-life crime movie. Munna (Anil Kapoor) is in love with the dancer Mohini (Dixit). Mohini’s father (Kher) is an alcoholic gambler who lives off his daughter’s earnings. To prevent the lovers marrying, he helps Lotiya Khan (Kumar), a criminal hostile to Munna. Lotiya Khan’s brother tries to rape Munna’s sister and Munna kills him, earning himself a year in jail. On his release, Munna is persecuted by Lotiya Khan, Mohini’s father and the police. Forced by his bail conditions to remain outside Bombay’s city limits, Munna becomes a noted criminal. Mohini’s father and Lotiya Khan quarrel and Mohini is kidnapped by Khan. Munna rescues her and defeats the villains. Most of the film is told in flashback, narrating the romance between Munna and Mohini and the violence it engenders (the film is subtitled ‘A violent love story’). The main title, meaning ‘Acid’, refers to the way Mohini’s father disfigures his wife and causes her to commit suicide, threatening to assault his daughter in the same way. Chandra places much of the action in recognisable parts of the city. However, the film’s spectacular opening sequence at a rock concert, featuring the hit song Ek do teen showing Mohini’s kidnap by a bunch of motor-cyclists weaving through the crowded streets, is shot in a studio and presents a fantasy version of New York’s Times Square. The fanatic communalism evident in Chandra’s Ankush is echoed here: the hero, identified as a Maharashtrian, disposes of several ‘outside’ thugs suggesting that ‘local’ Maharashtrian criminals are revered by the people who dislike outsiders interfering with their home-grown racketeers.

YATEEM

1988 173’ col/scope Hindi

d/s J.P. Dutta pc Bikramjeet Films, Dharmendra dial O.P. Dutta lyr Hasan Kamal m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Sunny Deol, Farha, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Amrish Puri, Sujata Mehta, Danny Denzongpa, Dina Pathak

Dutta returned to his favourite Rajasthan desert locale with camerawork placing people in huge spaces for this revivalist tale of a policeman, Shivkumar Yadav (Kharbanda). Responsible for the death of Krishna’s bandit parents, he adopts the boy (Deol) who goes to a police academy and returns home a commissioned officer to find his foster-father remarried. Yadav’s new wife Chanchal (Sujata Mehta) mistreats her stepdaughter Gauri (Farha), Krishna’s lover, while lusting for Krishna and having an affair with a junior officer, Girivar Mathur (Denzongpa). Rejected by Krishna, Chanchal accuses him of attempted rape and has him jailed. Krishna escapes and lives as a fugitive with Gauri until he is captured by a bandit. Escaping again, Gauri gives birth to a child which forces Krishna to surrender to his foster father. Earlier, Chanchal had been shot by Girivar, who blamed Yadav for the killing and is later killed himself by Krishna. Yadav dies protecting Krishna who then kills the bandits.

AJALA KOKAI

1989 ? col Assamese

d/s Bibhan Barua (aka Dwibon Barua) p Dulu Saikia c Dindayal Bajaria m Ramen Barua

lp Thaneshwar Sarma, Mridula Barua, Maushumi Debi, Tulsi Das, Bibhuti Bhattacharya, Sadhan Hazarika, Bijoya Devi, Jayanta Das

Story of a simple but wise man who gets branded as a simpleton by the people around him. Made by one of Assam’s better known ‘mainstream’ directors committed to popularising quality cinema among local audiences.

ALICINTE ANVESHANAM

aka Alice’s Search, aka The Search of Alice

1989 122’ col Malayalam

d/s T.V. Chandran pc Neo Vision, NFDC c Sunny Joseph m Ouseppachan

lp Jalaja, Ravindranath, Nedumudi Venu, C.V. Sriraman, Nilambur Balan, P.T.K. Mohammed

Set in a northern Kerala Catholic milieu, the film tells of a college lecturer’s wife, Alice (Jalaja), who searches for her vanished husband and slowly discovers disturbing aspects of the man’s life including his descent from his earlier radicalism into ‘bourgeois’ degeneracy. In the end, she abandons the search and decides to take responsibility for her own life. Third and best-known film by former actor (Kabani Nadi Chuvannappol, 1975) and assistant to Abraham and Backer.

ANDHA DIGANTA

1989 ? col Oriya

d Manmohan Mahapatra s Prakash Patra m Ajoy Ghosh

lp Arun Nanda, Jaya Swamy, Manimala Devi, Sarat Pujari Rural melodrama by the master of the genre in Oriya. The film tells of the travails of its protagonist Radha, battling her past and a hostile society, to carve out a dignified life for herself.

ANKUSHAM

1989 139’ col Telugu

d/sc Kodi Ramakrishna pc M.S. Art Movies p M. Shyamaprasad Reddy st M.S. Art Movies Unit lyr Mallemala c K.S. Hari m K. Satyam

lp Rajasekhar, Jeevitha, M.S. Reddy, G. Rami Reddy, Gopi, Baby Mohan

Major hit pioneering Kodi Ramakrishna’s vendetta series of honest man-against-corrupt-system (cf. Shatruvu, 1990). The honest cop (Rajasekhar) tries to bring a crook (Rami Reddy) to justice, but the criminal - in an extended set of encounters - kills the cop’s pregnant wife (Jeevitha). Both the hero and villain die in the end, but the hero manages to save his former teacher and Chief Minister of the State, played by the film’s producer and scenarist, Reddy aka Mallemala. Rajasekhar’s voice was dubbed by Saikumar, a regular feature for this particular star.

APOOVA SAHODARARGAL

aka Appu Raja

1989 157’ col Tamil

d Singeetham Srinivasa Rao pc Rajkamal International p/sc Kamalahasan st Panchu Arunachalam dial ‘Crazy’ Mohan c P.C. Sriram lyr Vali m Ilaiyaraja

lp Kamalahasan, Jaishankar, Nagesh, Nasser, Delhi Ganesh, Janakaraj, Mouli, Roopini, Gauthami, Manorama, Srividya

A successful remake of the familiar story with Kamalahasan in a sensational triple role following in Lon Chaney’s footsteps as he physically transforms himself into a dwarf. In a prelude shot in an Italo-Western style reminiscent of Sholay’s (1975, Inspector Sedupathi (Kamalahasan) captures and publicly humiliates four villains. On their release, they murder Sedupathi and try to poison his pregnant wife, who manages to escape with the twins she eventually bears. Chased by the villains, the mother and a female friend escape with one child each, believing the others to have been killed. The real mother and her son Appu, a dwarf (Kamalahasan), join a circus where he has a Chaplinesque romance with the manager’s daughter. Learning the truth about his past, Appu tracks down the four villains and kills three of them. The killings are attributed to a certain Raja (Kamalahasan again) who turns out to be the missing twin now working as a garage mechanic and the lover of the remaining villain’s daughter. Raja, pursued by the police, is rescued by Appu and happy ending consists of the twins murdering the last villain.

ATTAKU YAMUDU AMMAYIKI MOGUDU

1989 140’ col Telugu

d/sc A. Kodandarami Reddy pc Geeta Arts p Allu Aravind dial Satyanand lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy, Bhuvana Chandra c H. Loksingh m Chakravarthy

lp Chiranjeevi, Vijayashanti, Vanisree, Ravu Gopala Rao, Giribabu, Allu Ramalingaiah, Satyanarayana

Kalyan (Chiranjeevi) marries Rekha (Vijayashanti) but comes up against her arrogant and dominating mother-in-law Chamundeshwari Devi (Vanisree). Most of the plot deals with complicated familial tribulations and ends with the hero getting even with his mother-in-law, whom he eventually rescues and humanises when her evil accomplices frame her for murder. The enormous success of the film led to both Chiranjeevi and Vanisree repeating aspects of their roles in several later films, also spawning a new genre of ‘mother-in-law’ films in which class antagonisms are often played out with a lower-class son-in-law (cf. Alluda Majaaka, 1995).

BAGH BAHADUR

aka The Tiger Dancer, The Tigerman

1989 91’col Hindi

d/p/sc Buddhadev Dasgupta pc Doordarshan st Prafulla Roy c Venu m Shantanu Mahapatra

lp Pawan Malhotra, Archana, M.V. Vasudeva Rao, Biplab Chatterjee, Rajeshwari Roy Choudhury, Masood Akhtar

Inspired by the atmosphere of folk-tales, the film tells of Ghunuram (Malhotra), a quarry worker who returns to his native village of Nonpura to participate in its annual festival as the celebrated Tiger Dancer and to marry Radha (Archana), the daughter of the drummer Sibal (Rao, referring to his earlier role in Chomana Dudi, 1975). However, Ghunuram’s dance is eclipsed by a real-life leopard show staged by a circus. In addition, Archana falls in love with a circus performer. In desperation and encouraged by Sibal’s drumming, Ghunuram enters the leopard’s cage and challenges it to a duel, which he loses.

BANANI

aka The Forest

1989 108’ col Assamese

d Jahnu Barua pc Purbanchal Film Co-op s Sushil Goswami c Anoop Jotwani m Satya Barua, Prasanta Bordoloi

lp Mridula Barua, Sushil Goswami, Bishnu Kharghoria, Golap Datta, Lakshmi Sinha, Munim Sharma, Jyoti Bhattacharya, Shasanka Debo Phukan

With this ecological drama, Assam’s leading director Jahnu Barua continues exploring the conflict between corrupt state politics and a determined individual (cf. Halodiya Choraye Baodhan Khaye, 1987). The forest ranger (Goswami) confronts illegal timber merchants and contractors on behalf of impoverished tribals. The honest ranger’s activities get him into trouble and he is constantly transferred from one post to another, to the annoyance of his wife who wants him to settle down and look after their ailing child. Eventually she supports her husband’s fight and the tribals realise they need weapons to defend themselves against rapacious outsiders. The film’s simple plot is interrupted by long didactic speeches.

BATWARA

1989 201’ col/scope Hindi

d/s J.P. Dutta pc 786 Aftab Pics dial O.P. Dutta lyr Hasan Kamal c Ishwar Bidri m Laxmikant-Pyarelal

lp Dharmendra, Vinod Khanna, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Vijayendra Ghatge, Neena Gupta, Dimple Kapadia, Shammi Kapoor, Asha Parekh, Poonam Dhillon, Mohsin Khan, Amrish Puri, Amrita Singh

Amitabh Bachchan’s celebrated baritone introduces in voice-over the film’s political context: new laws limiting land ownership introduced after Independence threaten the zamindar class. One of them, Bade Thakur (Kapoor), has a son, Vikram Singh aka Vicky (Khanna) who is friendly with Sumer Singh (Dharmendra), a member of the hated Jat community. Vicky’s younger brother, the arrogant Devan (Ghatge), is killed by irate villagers and Vicky in turn murders several villagers, including the brother of Sumer’s girlfriend (Dimple). The friends turn into mortal enemies as Sumer becomes the farmers’ leader. Both Sumer and Vicky are sought by the police, especially by Rajendra Pratap Singh (Khan), a principled officer despite being the youngest son of Bade Thakur. Rajendra Pratap’s disdain for caste differences irks his junior officer Hanumant Singh (Puri), who plans to kill him. The film continues J.P. Dutta’s concern with Rajastan’s communal and caste wars, the feudal lifestyle of the zamindars, their scant respect for human life and the image of a powerful, charismatic leader who unites the people against the oppressive thakurs. The visuals are replete with horses racing across the desert, camels, palaces, elaborate costumes, sand-dunes, ravines and the mandatory vultures.

BHOOKHA

1989 ? col Oriya

d Sabhyasachi Mahapatra pc NFDC/Doordarshan s/c Satish Kumar m Kapila Prasad

lp Sarat, Swati Roy, Sadhu Meher

Rural melodrama featuring a community of impoverished Dalits from the Bajania community, known for their popular traditional music. The community faces famine, and competition from an urban musical band threatens their livelihood. The film emphasises their music, asa means of their self-expression and their effort to comprehend their historically oppressed conditions.

CHANDNI

1989 186’ col Hindi

d Yash Chopra pc Yash Raj Films st Kamna Chandra sc Unmesh Kalba, Arun Kashyap lyr Anand Bakshi c Manmohan Singh m Shiv-Hari

lp Vinod Khanna, Rishi Kapoor, Sridevi, Waheeda Rehman, Anupam Kher, Mita Vasisht

Yash Chopra returns to his familiar brand of romances (cf. Silsila, 1981) in exotic locations with this tale of Chandni (Sridevi). She is seen and for a large part of the film, also imagined - only through the eyes of her lover Rohit (Kapoor), who decorates the walls of his room with the countless snapshots he takes of her. Later, while showering his beloved with flowers from a helicopter, he falls and is partially paralysed, prompting him to break off the relationship. However, his sexually charged fantasies of Chandni eventually rekindle his desire to live. After an expensive operation in a hospital abroad, he is cured and re-enters Chandni’s life just when she is about to marry her boss, Lalit (Khanna). The film and its marketing campaign revolve entirely around Sridevi, confirming her as India’s top female star. Arguably, the whole film can be seen as an extended advertisement promoting Sridevi as the Indian film consumers’ ideal fantasy of womanhood, including the popular song by Lata Mangeshkar, Mere haathon main nau nau churiyan.

CHHANDANEER

aka The Nest of Rhythm

1989 130’ col Bengali

d/s/m Utpalendu Chakraborty pc Abhishek Prod, c Girish Padidhar

lp Anjana Bannerjee, Dipak Sarkar, Madhabi Chakraborty, Satya Bannerjee, Anup Kumar, Sreela Majumdar, Gyanesh Mukherjee, Ratna Ghoshal, Kanika Majumdar

A classical dance film focusing on the performance skills of Anjana Bannerjee who plays the central character, Seema, an internationally acclaimed Bharat Natyam dancer with a comfortable middle-class background. Rejecting the man her parents chose as her husband, she marries a wonderful but blind musician, Anyan, and they stage shows together. However, to earn more money, Anyan compromises his talent and works for pop singers and commercial film producers, causing Seema to walk out on him so as to remain devoted to the purity of her classical dance tradition.

DASHARATHAM

1989 154’ col Malayalam

d Sibi Malayil pc Saga Films st/sc/dial A.K. Lohitadas lyr Ouppachan Vabar c Venu m Johnson

lp Mohanlal, Rekha, Muralee, Karamana Janardanan Nair, Sukumari, Nedumudi Venu, Sukumaran

The rich bachelor Rajiv Menon (Mohanlal) resolves to stay single when his mother deserts his father. However, when a friend (Venu) brings his family over for the vacation, Rajiv discovers that he likes the company of children and asks his friend to let him adopt one of his. When the friend refuses, Rajiv, wanting to avoid marriage at all costs, advertises for a womb that he might artificially inseminate. Annie (Rekha) agrees to mother a child, mainly to pay for the medical expenses of her paralysed sportsman-husband. However, when the baby is born, she refuses to hand it over, although her now recovered and jealous husband insists that she do so. Annie now has a trilemma as she has to face her husband’s feelings, her responsibilities to the child and her contract with Rajiv. Eventually Rajiv surrenders his rights to the child. The often witty situations and fine performances do not compensate for the oppressive representations of a woman’s ‘duty’ and ‘instinct’.