EN UYIR THOZHAN EN UYIR THOZHAN
1989 150’ (121’) col/scope Tamil
d/sc Bharthirajaa pc B.R. Art Films p P. Jayaraj, S.P. Sivamani st P. Kalaimani c/dial B. Kannan co-lyr Gangai Amaran co-lyr/m Ilaiyaraja
lp Babu, Ramesh, Rama, Vadivukkarasi, Ranjan, Charlie, MLA Murugesh, Senapati, Ranganath, Jayapal, Sundaramurthy, Muthukumar, Master Prabhu, Satya, Srilatha, Ramila, Kunjaramma, Vijayapriya, Rajathi, Premalatha, Thenmozhi
A film blaming professional politicians for exploiting their well-meaning and dedicated party activists and officials. A party activist from the slums, Dharman (Babu), uncritically devoted to his leader, shelters a young girl, Chittu (Roma) who was jilted by her lover Thennavan (Ramesh). The two fall in love and, come election time, Dharman is assigned to work for the area’s party candidate Ponnambalam (Ranjan). In a bid to win the voters’ sympathy, the party boss and Ponnambalam have Dharman assassinated, blaming the murder on their political opponents. The ruse is successful and after the elections have been won, the party boss stages an elaborate public tribute to the faithful Dharman. The strident, fake-documentary effects further emphasise the film’s commentary on contemporary Tamil politics.
FLYING BIRD, THE
1989 90’ col English
d/co-s Vishnu Mathur p/co-s C.S. Lakshmi c K.K. Mahajan
lp Savithri Rajan
A beautifully crafted and meditative documentary portrait shot on 16mm of the 80-year-old Madras-based Savithri Rajan, a virtuoso veena. player who never performed in public. She was the disciple of the legendary musicians Tiger Varadachari and Veenai Dhanammal. The film is built around her music and family memories with K.K. Mahajan’s sensuous camera gliding through the spaces of her life or simply recording the aged but lively Rajan’s voice and music. Savithri Rajan’s extraordinary presence is the film’s focus, but Mathur manages to convey the complex interrelations between personal, familial, artistic and social rhythms of change, achieving the rare feat of doing justice to the accomplishments of the individual artist while at the same time suggesting how social elements constrained as well as nourished her life and her art.
GANASHATRU
aka An Enemy of the People
1989 99’ col Bengali
d/sc/m Satyajit Ray pc NFDC st Henrik Ibsen’s play c Barun Raha
lp Soumitra Chatterjee, Ruma Guha-Thakurta, Mamata Shankar, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Dipankar Dey, Subhendu Chatterjee, Manoj Mitra, Vishwa Guha-Thakurta, Rajaram Yagnik, Satya Bannerjee, Gobinda Mukherjee
Having suffered a heart attack, Ray returned to cinema, extensively assisted by his son Sandeep, with a short documentary on his father, Sukumar Ray (1987), and with this first of three features set in contemporary Bengal, addressing, like his earlier trilogy, the theme of corruption. For his first contemporary story since Jana Aranya (1975), Ray transposes the Ibsen play into the story of Dr Ashok Gupta (Soumitra Chatterjee) who protests when the holy water in a temple turns out to be contaminated by bad plumbing and produces a jaundice epidemic. The doctor meets with powerful opposition from the temple trustees and the villagers. The plot device of making the holy water in a temple the cause of disease evoked the rise of the Hindu religious right wing in Indian politics. The film is shot predominantly in close-ups and mid-shots and seems to bear the stamp of Ray’s continuing ill health.
GEETANJALI
1989 142’ col Telugu
d/s Mani Rathnam pc Bhagyalakshmi Ents dial Rajashri lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c P.C. Sriram m Ilaiyaraja
lp Nagarjuna, Girija, Vijayakumar, Vijayachander, Sumitra, Velu, Disco Shanthi, Chandramohan, Sowcar Janaki, Smita
Rathnam’s first Telugu film was the biggest hit of the year in Telugu as well as in Tamil (in a dubbed version, Idhayathe Thirudathe). It tells an unusual love story about a young collegiate gangster (Nagarjuna) who meets the wild Geetanjali (Girija). Both are terminally ill, he with leukaemia and she with heart disease. These afflictions appear to liberate the duo from social constraints. Most of the film is shot in exotic, fog-bound locations and includes several rock numbers (e.g. Om Namaha which uses an amplified heartbeat as background rhythm). The critic Tejaswini Niranjana (1991) points out that the heroine is the ‘new woman, the strong heroine, the inheritor of a refracted modernity in a context where feminity is once again being redefined [placing on her] the burden of saviour and teacher [w]ho has to be the one to provide support, when the hero in a similar situation [sings] sad songs. However, [s]he is allowed to take the initiative in the relationship because in spite of her shoulder-length hair she is ‘Indian’ and a signifier of the good modernity.’
HATHYAR
1989 186’ col/scope Hindi
d/st J.P. Dutta p H.A. Nadiadwala dial O.P. Dutta lyr Hasan Kamal c Ishwar Bidri m Laxmikant-Pyarelal
lp Dharmendra, Rishi Kapoor, Sanjay Dutt, Amrita Singh, Sangeeta Bijlani, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Paresh Rawal
One of Sanjay Dutt’s early hits in his current loner mould. In distant Rajasthan, Avinash (Dutt) and Suman (Singh) are married as children. As they grow up, feudal clan rivalry between their families causes Avinash to leave his wife and to move to Bombay with his pacifist parents (Kharbanda and Rawal) where he becomes involved in gang violence. The fearsome Khushal Khan (Dharmendra), protector of Avinash’s family, has a weakness: his good younger brother Samiulla Khan (Kapoor) will not talk to him. Eventually, a third storyline emerges as the ‘real’ villain comes on the scene: a Tamil gangster (Rawal) who caused Khushal Khan to become a criminal. All the characters struggle to achieve a degree of control over their circumstances while the director undercuts their efforts by resorting to ‘mythic’, overpowering Bombay locations (N. Chandra and Mukul S. Anand territory) which nevertheless give the impression of being sets because of the patchy lighting, the overbearing soundtrack or the relentless shot-reverse-shot editing pattern.
INDRUDU CHANDRUDU
1989 158’ col Telugu
d Suresh Krishna pc Suresh Prod, p D. Rama Naidu st/dial Parachuri Bros, sc Kamalahasan lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy, Seetharama Sastry c P.S. Prakash m Ilaiyaraja
lp Kamalahasan, Vijayashanti, Srividya, Charan Raj, Jayalalitha, Maruthirao
City Mayor Rayudu (Kamalahasan) is killed by his secretary (Raj), who replaces him with a lookalike, Chandran (Kamalahasan again). The youth agrees mainly because the money will help pay for his ill mother’s treatment. Much of the film depends on the comedy situations that follow from Kamalahasan’s double role.
INNALE
aka Season
1989 137’ col/scope Malayalam
d/sc/dial P. Padmarajan pc ABR Prod p Ashraf, Rasheed st Vasanthi lyr Kaithapram c Venu m P.G. Ravindranath
lp Shobhana, Jayaram, Suresh Gopi, Srividya, Sudhakaran
Gauri (Shobhana), the sole survivor of a tragic bus accident, loses her memory. Admitted to a private nursing home, where she is diagnosed as suffering from ‘hysteric amnesia’, she falls for the doctor’s son Sarat (Jayaram). However Narendran (Gopi) arrives from the USA and, to the lovers’ consternation, claims to be her husband. When Gauri’s amnesia appears incurable and she still refuses to recognise Narendran, he returns to the US wishing the new couple well.
aka Time Addiction
1989 120’ col Bengali
d/co-p Amitabh Chakraborty co-p Mandira Mitra pc Ayonija Films dial Moinak Biswas c Shashikant Anantachari m Prasun Mitra
lp Somo Dev Basu, Badal Sircar, Jogesh Datta, Ranjabati Sircar, Rita Chakraborty, Sunil Mukherjee
Experimental feature debut by a young FTII graduate. The opening shot sets the tone, holding for nearly 10’ a static frame with an outstretched palm and occasional passers-by seen through a door in the distance. The film has four main characters, an artist-hero, his girlfriend, a garrulous and cynical avuncular figure (played by Badal Sircar), and a sound technician who records their conversation (and sometimes represents the film-maker). The occasional stretches of dialogue between the man and woman in a partially constructed building and in the zoo, or the rowdy drunken conversation in a bar, serves to heighten the surreal effects arrived at with immense Kali figures on Calcutta’s streets, clouds of smoke and ghostly figures wandering through cavernous 19th C. mansions. At the end of the film, in a dawn shot, the hero sets his works of art afire, and joins the other characters in a Dionysian dance. The highly theatrical film depends mainly on a rigorous symmetry of volumes and long duration shots that are either static or move in a slow track. Remarkably, the main set, the city of Calcutta, is physically drained of all human presence other than the actual actors. The presence of Badal Sircar, one of Bengal’s best-known playwrights (Evam Indrajeet) and proponent of a Grotowskian ‘Third Theatre’ concept, serves partially to contextualise the theatrical origins of the language.
MAHISAGARNE AARE
1989 148’ col Gujarati
d/s/lyr Girish Manukant pc R.J. Pics p Ramjibhai J. Patel c Latif Mangal m Dhiraj Dhanak
lp Ranjit Raj, Sneha, Malay Chakraborty, Mahua Chakraborty, Phiroze Irani
A conventional love story between Phoolkunwar and Kisan forms the framing device for a special effects-derived action movie. The evil Malubha persuades the heroine’s step-mother to destroy the marriage which symbolically held together the financial merger of two elite feudal families. The cast demonstrates the growing influence of non-Gujarati actors in the cinema of this region.
MAI
1989 ?’ col Bhojpuri
d/co-sc Rajkumar Sharma pc Shiv Ganga Prod. st Ashok Sinha co-sc Narayan Bhandari dial Shiv Munjal lyr Shaktikishore Dubey c Surjeet Cheema m Ram Babu
lp Padma Khanna, Sheila David, Pankaj Sharma, Vijay Khare, Hari Shukla, Brijkishore, Narayan Bhandari, Shraddha Sinha
Bhojpuri hit melodrama invoking a Gorky-type mother figure in the village of Karitpur in Central India. She and her family, notably her younger brother-in-law Kundan and her sister-in-law Radha, come up against the evil violence of the young local zamindar who tries to appropriate the village land. One-time Hindi actress Padma Khanna, now a major Bhojpuri star, plays the lead.
MAINE PYAR KIYA
aka I Have Fallen in Love aka When Love Calls 1989 192’ col/scope Hindi
d/sc Sooraj Barjatya pc Rajshri Prod.
st S.M. Ahale lyr Asad Bhopali, Dev Kohli
c Arvind Laad m Ram-Lakshman
lp Salman Khan, Bhagyashree, Alok Nath, Rajiv Verma, Rima Lagoo, Ajit Vachhani, Harish Patel, Deep Dhillon, Huma Khan, Pervin Dastur, Mohnish Behl, Laxmikant Berde
A typical, very successful rich-boy/poor-girl romance launching the career of 90s star Salman Khan as a teenage hero. The hero, Prem (Khan), falls in love with Suman (Bhagyashree). Obstacles are provided by Krishen (Vachhani), Prem’s businessman father who is also Suman’s guardian. Suman is the daughter of a village motor-mechanic (Nath), which evokes suggestions of class as well as city/country divisions in the love story which initiated the now-popular convention of the slow fade-out on the embrace of the couple’s fathers. The film’s novelty is due mainly to its adoption of advertising imagery: rich, saturated colour effects constantly emphasising surface, trendy costumes (the cooks wear red-check coats), green fields full of footballs, mountainsides of red apples, neon signs, ice falling into glasses of Coke, a heroine with fluffy toys and a leather-jacketed hero who loves motor-bikes, posters of American pop icons (including a poster of Salman Khan himself). The soundtrack, which uses an ‘I love you’ refrain throughout the film, includes the hit song Kabutar ja ja with a carrier pigeon hitching a ride in a car to convey a love letter. The film’s songs broke all sales records. It was dubbed into several languages e.g. Inapravugal (Malayalam, 1991).
MANE/EK GHAR
1989 137’ col Kannada/Hindi
d/sc Girish Kasaravalli pc Apoorva Chitra
c S. Ramchandra m L. Vaidyanathan
lp Naseeruddin Shah, Deepti Naval, Rohini Hattangadi, Mico Chandru, B.S. Achar
Rajanna (Shah) and Geeta (Naval) move into their newly rented house, a badly built room in a compound also housing a noisy motor-mechanic’s shop, allowing no sleep. The couple seek the help of Geeta’s aunt (Hattangadi), who knows a senior police officer. When the mechanic’s shop is closed down, it is replaced by the policeman’s nephew’s equally noisy video games parlour. Rajanna works in a factory building large earth-moving vehicles: in the end, when the couple decide to move into a slum, these vehicles are seen in a slum-clearance drive led by the police. The film lavishly deploys surreally symbolic images: a giant four-poster bed in a small room, colour continuities between tractors, large metal drums in the street and the haldi (saffron) which the couple put on the walls to keep pests away, the yawning vehicles in the garage and the destructive imagery of the video games. Kasaravalli’s first explicitly urban film.
MARHI DA DEEVA/DEEP
aka The Lamp of the Tomb
1989 115’ col Punjabi/Hindi
d/sc Surinder Singh pc NFDC, Doordarshan st Gurdial Singh c Anil Sehgal m Mohinderjit Singh
lp Raj Babbar, Deepti Naval, Kanwaljeet, Parikshit Sahni, Asha Sharma, Pankaj Kapoor
Deepti Naval and Raj Babbar in Marhi Da Deeva
The first Punjabi art-house film is a melodrama about feudalism based on a popular novel, also adapted to the stage, by Gurdial Singh. The story chronicles the shift from feudal sharecropping to capitalist farming over two generations of the region’s rural elite. Hero Jagsir, the son of the sharecropper Thola, is treated as a brother by landlord Dharam Singh. The landlord’s son, however, does not continue this family tradition. As Jagsir’s mother belongs to a nomad caste (preventing the son, by custom, from ever marrying), the hero’s love for the bride of the impotent barber Nika is fraught with problems. Symbolically, the building of Jagsir’s father’s tomb (also a means of marking out the land that rightfully belongs to the family) and then of his own tomb precedes Jagsir’s physical deterioration and death. Insightful links between masculinity and land ownership provide a good example of how melodrama can address difficult political realities.
MATHILUKAL
aka The Walls
1989 119’ col Malayalam
d/p/sc Adoor Gopalakrishnan pc Doordarshan st Vaikom Mohammed Basheer c Ravi Varma m Vijayabhaskar
lp Mammootty, Thilakan, Murali, Ravi Vallathol, Karamana Janardanan Nair, Srinath, Babu Namboodiri, Jagannath Varma, Vempayan, Aziz, P.C. Soman
Based on an autobiographical novelette by the well-known Kerala writer Basheer, this is a love story, set in a prison cell the 40s, between the imprisoned Basheer (Mammootty) and a woman from the neighbouring prison compound. They are separated by a high wall so that they never see each other and have to devise ingenious ways of communicating. Produced for TV, the story is played out in confined spaces with a sense of claustrophobia and suppressed violence which enhances the emotional impact of the moving love story.
MAZHAVIL KAVADI
1989 143’ col Malayalam
d Sathyan Andhikkad pc Kokers Films p Siyad Koker s Raghunath Paleri lyr Kaithapram
c Vipin Mohan m Johnson
lp Jayaram, Sitara, Urvashi, Innocent
Velayudhankutty (Jayaram) loves Ammini (Sitara) and she being his ‘murappennu’ - his uncle’s daughter and therefore by custom his bride-to-be, all should have been well, except that the Uncle (Innocent) has different plans for his daughter. The comedy tells how poor Velayudhan goes to Palani in Tamil Nadu and becomes a barber tonsuring the heads of thousands of pilgrims, which prompts him to write home claiming to have become the ‘head cleaner’ in a large electronics factory. Anandavalli (Urvashi), his employer’s daughter, falls for him but sportingly steps aside to enable the happy ending to take place.
MUDDULA MAMAIAH
1989 142’ col Telugu
d/sc Kodi Ramakrishna pc Bhargav Arts Prod. p S. Gopala Reddy st Vasu dial Ganesh Patro lyr C. Narayana Reddy, Vennelakanti c K.S. Hari m K.V. Mahadevan
lp Balkrishna, Vijayashanti, Seeta, Eeshwara Rao, Gollapudi Maruti Rao, Ravikiran, Raja Krishnamurthy, Aahuti Prasad, Ananta Raj, Master Amit
Hugely successful film casting Balkrishna in the role of Raju, the village pickpocket who also fights on behalf of the community against feudal oppression. Raju’s city-educated sister Lakshmi (Seeta) returns to the village and challenges the authority of the local landlord, Raja Rao. The landlord’s son marries Lakshmi, later abandons her and kills her shortly after she delivers a baby. The baby is raised (Master Amit) by the heroine Radha (Vijayshanti), while the hero, Raju, kills his brother-in-law, goes to jail, and returns to demolish the evil landlord. The film was remade by K.C. Bokadia with Amitabh Bachchan (Aaj Ka Arjun, 1990).
NAZAR
aka The Gaze
1989 124’ col Hindi
d/p Mani Kaul pc Infrakino st Dostoevsky’s The Meek Creature sc Sharmistha Mohanty c Piyush Shah m D. Wood, Vikram Joglekar
lp Shekhar Kapur, Shambhavi, Surekha Sikri
Kaul’s first fiction film since Duvidha in 1973 is based on both Dostoevsky’s story and Bresson’s version of it, Une Femme douce (1969). Set in Bombay but effacing its geographic location, the film starts, like Bresson’s film, with the suicide of a young bride (Shambhavi, the director’s daughter). Then we learn of her marriage to a middle-aged antique dealer (Kapur) and her growing estrangement. The only other major character in the film is the heroine’s impoverished relative (Sikri), initially a go-between before the couple’s marriage, and later a crucial third figure from whose perspective the disintegrating marriage can be viewed. The major part of the film chronicles the young wife’s alienation, as she first resists and then succumbs to the order of things in a world in which her place is determined regardless of her efforts to intervene. This aspect of the narrative is elaborated in terms of an orchestration of cinematic space, including the construction of ‘virtual’, unsuspected spaces within the frame. This device makes the narrative space itself dramatic, as claustrophobic situations are juxtaposed with ‘a reality’ within which spaces can suddenly acquire extra dimensions. The fragmented dialogue, often functioning as an interiorised soliloquy, is counterpointed by the extraordinary use of the camera’s focalisations which at times take the place of editing. Kaul continued his exploration of Dostoevsky with a vastly enlarged canvas in Idiot (1991).
ORU VADAKKAN VEERAGATH
aka A Northern Ballad
1989 168’ col Malayalam
d T. Hariharan pc Grihalakshmi Pics.
s M.T. Vasudevan Nair lyr K. Jayakumar, Kaithapram c K. Ramchandra Babu mus Ravi
lp Mammootty, Suresh Gopi, Balan K. Nair, Madhavi, Captain Raju, Geetha, Sanjay, Prashant
Critically acclaimed and commercially successful adaptation of Kerala’s well-known legend, set in the 16th century, of the brave Aromalunni, his beautiful sister Unniyarcha and their poor adopted relative Chandu. Scenarist Nair filled in the story’s ‘silences’ and emphasised important, but traditionally marginalised, characters, making Chandu (Mammootty) a misunderstood victim of jealousy and betrayal. Aromal (Gopi) is transformed into a brash, arrogant and devious warrior, less skillful than Chandu but promoted because of his caste pedigree. When Aromal dies accidentally in a fight, Chandu is accused of treachery. Unniyarcha (Madhavi) is shown as a fickle woman with a flexible notion of morality who repeatedly betrays Chandu. In flashback, Chandu narrates the facts omitted from the public version to a young woman in a closed arena, while Unniyarcha’s sons wait outside to challenge him to a duel. One of the most expensive Malayalam films to date, it is famous for its reconstruction of the famed martial arts form of kalaripayattu and for Mammootty’s remarkable performance (which the actor regards as his best film work). Following on from his novel Randaamoozham, the film continues Nair’s efforts to make the silences in our epics ‘speak’ the caste and kinship aspects traditionally glossed over in the narration.
PARINDA
1989 154’ col/scope Hindi
d/p/st Vidhu Vinod Chopra pc Vidhu Vinod Chopra Films sc Shivkumar dial Imtiaz Hussain lyr Khursheed Hallauri c Binod Pradhan m R.D. Burman
lp Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff, Madhuri Dixit, Nana Patekar, Anupam Kher, Kader Khan, Suresh Oberoi, Tom Alter
Chopra’s biggest mainstream movie, known mainly for his thrillers (Sazaaye Maut, 1981; Khamosh, 1985) and the famous Pepsi commercial announcing the multinational’s entry into India. A spectacular, lyrical opening introduces the viewer to Bombay in this postmodern variation of the Hindi crime movie. With low-angle tracking shots and swiftly changing volumes in the image, the film tells of a mentally unbalanced villain, Anna (Patekar) and his henchman Kishen (Shroff) who supports his innocent brother Karan (Kapoor). Karan is used as a bait to trap the cop (Kher) and is eventually killed on his wedding night. Elder brother Kishen, until then divided between his responsibilities to his brother and to Anna, finally turns against his employer and sets him on fire. The film flopped but was critically acclaimed for its soundtrack, its use of CinemaScope and for Patekar’s streetwise performance.
1989 128’ col Gujarati
d Pervez Mehrwanji pc NFDC st/co-sc Cyrus Mistry co-sc Jill Misquitta c Navroze Contractor m Vanraj Bhatia
lp Ruby Patel, Hosi Vasunia, Kurush Deboo, Sharad Smart, Zenobia Shroff, Roshan Tirandaz
The only feature by Pervez Mehrwanji, a noted documentary and TV director who died shortly afterwards, is a melodrama set among Bombay’s minority Parsee community. Percy (Deboo) is an awkward youth dominated by his mother (Patel) and emasculated by the memory of a gross, pleasure-loving father (Vasunia). Employed by a small pharmaceutical business, he is tormented by a lumpenised Maharashtrian (through whom the film refers to Maharashtra’s Hindu Shiv Sena Party). When the hero causes the other man to be sacked, he is beaten up on the street. He finds some solace for his loneliness by joining a motley bunch of Western classical music enthusiasts. The film intercuts his actual experiences with his dreams and fantasies, the last one (in which he resurrects a dead school friend, Dara) urging him to jettison his pervasive sense of guilt. The two realities are separated and merged mainly via Contractor’s masterful camerawork. The film has several well-known actors from Bombay’s Parsee theatre and deploys the characteristic self-mocking idiom of Parsee popular plays.
PURAPPAD
1989 158’ col Malayalam
d Joshi pc MAK Prod, st Poulose sc/dial John Paul lyr O.N.V. Kurup c Vipin Das m Ouseppachan
lp Mammootty, Saikumar, Parvathi, Sitara, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, Innocent, Balan K. Nair, Jagathi Srikumar, P.E. George, Adoor Bhawani
Big budget film with a massive cast chronicling the journey of an entire village, uprooted by a bursting dam, to a hilly terrain 160 km away. Starting with the depiction of a communal riot between Hindus and Muslims, the film repeatedly proclaims its anti-sectarian message exemplified by the principal character Vishwam (Mammootty). Locations and studio settings are both used effectively, esp. the hilly landscape where the villagers resettle, but the film’s scale, both technical and rhetorical, sometimes leads to a loss of directorial control.
RAM LAKHAN
1989 186’ col Hindi
d/st Subhash Ghai p Ashok Ghai pc Suneha Arts sc Ram Kelkar lyr Anand Bakshi c Ashok Mehta m Laxmikant-Pyarelal
lp Raakhee, Jackie Shroff, Anil Kapoor, Amrish Puri, Gulshan Grover, Madhuri Dixit, Dimple Kapadia, Paresh Rawal, Annu Kapoor, Anupam Kher, Saeed Jaffrey, Satish Kaushik, Raza Murad, Sonika Gill, Dalip Tahil
A family feud mixed with large-scale villainy. Thakur Pratap Singh is killed by his own cousin and his family loses its ancestral home. His wife Sharda (Raakhee) swears that she will immerse his ashes in the Ganges only when her sons Ram (Shroff) and Lakhan (Anil Kapoor) have avenged their father. Ram becomes an honest cop, Lakhan a corrupt one who wants to get rich quick. Both have totally different notions of revenge. Lakhan eventually repents when his mother almost destroys his house accusing him of betraying his primary duty, to avenge his father. The story refers to the Ramayana via the names of the brothers (Ram and Lakshman) and labelling the villains ‘a set of Ravanas’. Sharda, dressed in black whenever she confronts the villains, refers to the myth of the female black cobra who avenges the death of her mate. The film was a big success.
SALIM LANGDE PE MAT RO
aka Don’t Cry for Salim the Lame
1989 111’ col Hindi
d/s Saeed Akhtar Mirza pc NFDC c Virendra Saini m Sharang Dev
lp Pawan Malhotra, Makarand Deshpande, Ashutosh Gowarikar, Vikram Gokhale, Surekha Sikri
Mirza’s investigation (‘My own self, split 500 times’) of what it means to be a Muslim in a working-class Bombay neighbourhood controlled by criminals. Set in Bombay’s Do Tanki area, the film features Salim, a petty thief, in a world peopled by policemen, smugglers and an assortment of crooks. Salim’s father still suffers the after-effects of Bombay’s famous textile strike (1982) and his mother earns some money as an outworker sewing, but Salim has to support both of them as well as his sister Anees. He reforms after meeting Aslam, Anees’s poor but educated suitor, but is eventually killed in a fatalistic ending. Despite the film’s technical excellence, the presentation of a doomed hero via a quasi-documentry, street-level realism makes the film a voyeuristic experience allowing viewers to feel sorry for the unfortunates in their city.
SANDHYA RAGAM
aka The Evening Raga
1989 100’ col Tamil
d/p/s/c Balu Mahendra pc Doordarshan m L. Vaidyanathan
lp Archana, Chokkalinga Bhagavathar, Santhanam Rajalakshmi
Emotional yet humorous tale of an old Company drama actor (Bhagavathar) who leaves his village after his wife’s death and goes to live with his nephew in Madras. To spare his nephew the extra cost, he then moves into a home for the aged before being reunited with his nephew’s family. As old age is akin to early childhood, the old man forms a special relationship with the child of the house and causes major problems of adjustment for the adults. A member of a well-known Boy’s Company theatre group, the 83-year-old Bhagavathar came out of retirement to play the lead in only his second film appearance (cf. Veedu, 1987).
SATI
1989 140’ col Bengali
d/co-s Aparna Sen pc NFDC co-s Arun Bannerjee c Ashok Mehta m Chidananda Das Gupta
lp Shabana Azmi, Kali Bannerjee, Pradip Mukherjee, Arindam Ganguly, Ketaki Dutta, Shakuntala Barua, Arun Bannerjee, Ajit Bannerjee, Bimal Dev, Manu Mukherjee, Dipankar Raha, Ratna Ghoshal
Primitivist melodrama set prior to 1829 when sati (a woman’s religiously enforced immolation on her husbands funeral pyre) was made illegal by the British. Uma (Azmi), a mute and orphaned young Brahmin woman, is saddled with an ominous horoscope and is given in marriage to a tree. Seduced by a local schoolteacher, Uma becomes pregnant and is ostracised by the villagers. One night, while sheltering from a storm under her tree, lightning strikes them and she is found in the morning, blood on her forehead like bridal vermillion. The tree, the only sign of real virility in a society of cowardly superstition, protected its bride.
SHIVA
1989 145’ col Telugu
d/s Ram Gopal Varma pc Annapurna Cine Studios p Venkat Akkineni, Y. Surendra dial T. Bharani lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy, Seetharama Sastry c S. Gopal Reddy m Ilaiyaraja
lp Nagarjuna, Amala, Raghuvaran, T. Bharani, Murali Mohan, Chinna, Chakravarthy, Kota Srinivasa Rao
Varma’s Telugu hit telling the story of a young college student who gets involved with gang rivalry and eventually becomes a crusader for justice. Shiva (Nagarjuna) gets the better of college bully J.D. (Chakravarthy) and has to confront the villainies of the dreaded gangster Bhavani (Raghuvaran). In a spectacular finale Shiva kills Bhavani. The cult movie, emphasising expressionist lighting and camerawork, also proved successful in its Hindi version, which departed in one detail from the original: the hero’s wife, played by Amala, is killed, rather than his niece. The hit was sometimes seen as an autobiographical account of the director’s experiences in engineering college in Vijaywada.
SIDDHESHWARI
1989 123’ col/b&w Hindi
d/p/s Mani Kaul pc Infrakino Film Prod, Films Division c Piyush Shah
lp Mita Vasisth, Ranjana Srivastava, Shravani Mukherjee, Mohor Biswas, Narayan Mishra, Anoop Mishra, Raman Shankar Pandy, Malviya, Manmohan Chibber
Kaul continues his interest in a cinema in between fiction and documentary with this magnificently shot feature about Siddheshwari Devi (1903–77) of the Benares gharana. She was the most extraordinary 20th C. singer in the classical thumri tradition which, according to legend, goes back to a eunuch at Indra’s court, cursed for failing to return a lady’s love. As a young woman, Siddhi silently absorbed the music listening to the artful performances of Siyaji Maharaj. Thrown out of her aunt’s house for daring to ask questions, she painfully tries to survive in the streets of Benares, the city of rituals, suffering and death but also of passion, transformation and the sublime. Eventually, accepted as a disciple by Maharaj, she started performing at 16 years of age and became a uniquely popular singer condensing a lifetime of horror and joy in the grain of her voice, singing thumri music in addition to its variants in the Kajri, Chaiti and Jhoola folk idioms. The narrative is structured like a thumri piece: it presents key motifs (of Siddhi’s life as well as of myths and locations) and elaborates on and around them with different songs, moods, camera movements, etc., until the whole becomes a moving tapestry celebrating the transfiguration of life into music. Shot in colour and monochrome, the film proceeds by means of metaphors, evoked rather than named: an ultramarine boat floats on the Ganges, a dropped metal utensil produces musical overtones, etc. The intoxicants mandatory to the euphoria of a (sexual) meeting are contrasted with the labour that went into practising the difficult art of music. There is something of Lewis Carroll’s cat about the movie: as it evokes Siddhi’s life, her physical presence becomes more and more elusive, even escaping the actress (Vasisth) who tries to embody her existence. Towards the end, archive footage of Siddheshwari’s sole TV appearance offers a glimpse of the singer, an image which seems to recede into the technology of the recording until only the eerily intense voice remains.
Mita Vasisth in Siddheshwari
THARTHARAAT
1989 145’ col 1989
d/st/co-sc Mahesh Kothare pc Shri Ashtavinayak Chitra p Arvind Samant co-sc Vasant Sathe dial Shivraj Gorle lyr Pravin Davane c Suryakant Lavande m Anil Mohile
lp Mahesh Kothare, Laxmikant Berde, Nivedita Joshi, Priya Arun, Dilip Shirke, Jairam Kulkarni, Rahul Sholapurkar
After the successful Dhumdhadaka (1985), this is the best known of the comedies featuring the Kothare-Berde duo considered to have revived the declining Marathi film industry in the 1980s. Here Kothare plays the fearless Inspector Mahesh Jadhav, on the track of the dreaded Taklu Haiwan gang, while Berde plays Lakshya, the bumbling son of newspaper editor Zunzharrao Ghorpade. In order to raise the circulation of Ghorpade’s newspaper, Lakshya publishes a fake news story that Haiwan has entered their village of Shrirangpur. When this is proved false, Lakshya finds himself in major trouble when Haiwan actually does arrive and nobody believes him. Nivedita Joshi plays a journalist and the inspector’s girlfriend, while Priya Arun plays the daughter of the local policeman (Shirke) and with Berde comprises the film’s second love interest. The film’s rapid editing, its surfeit of unevenly choreographed action and lack of control over camerawork betrays the film’s low budget and impoverished production context, a look it shares with many commercial productions from India’s smaller film industries.
THAZHVARAM
aka The Valley
1989 130’ col/scope Malayalam
d/m Bharathan pc Anugraha Cine Arts s M.T. Vasudevan Nair c Venu
lp Mohanlal, Sumalatha, Anju, Shankaradi
A tale of revenge involving four characters in a small rural community. The remote stranger Balan (Mohanlal) arrives in a deserted valley to take revenge on the wily Raju, who is employed on a farm run by Nanu (Shankaradi) and his daughter Koochutti (Sumalatha). When Balan’s effort to kill Raju is thwarted and Balan is injured, he is nursed by Koochutti. Raju, who had earlier robbed Balan and murdered his wife, now makes off with Koochutti’s ornaments as well, adding to the satisfaction when the hero gets the villain in the end. The CinemaScope production excels in spacious long-shots, coupled with minimal dialogue, building Mohanlal into a brooding Leone-Eastwood ‘man with no name’-type stranger.
TRIDEV
1989 173’ col/scope Hindi
d/st/sc Rajiv Rai Trimurti Films p Gulshan Rai dial K.K. Singh lyr Anand Bakshi c Romesh Bhalla m Kalyanji-Anandji, Viju Shah
lp Naseeruddin Shah, Sunny Deol, Jackie Shroff, Madhuri Dixit, Sonam, Sangeeta Bijlani, Anupam Kher, Amrish Puri
The major Hindi hit of 1989. Billed as a ‘volcanic saga of three angry men’, the story has renegade policeman Karan (Deol), Ravi (Shroff), the son of the police commissioner (Kher) and a Rajasthani villager Jaisingh (Shah), defeat the criminal Bhujang, aka Bhairav Singh (Puri). The often convoluted plot has Karan fall in love with Divya (Dixit, in an early film), who is abducted by the criminal, but rescued by her brother Ravi who in turn agrees to join Bhujang’s gang. Bhujang had earlier killed both Karan’s and Jaisingh’s fathers. The film is remembered mainly for its mega-hit song Oye oye, and for Shah’s enactment of the ‘tirchi topiwala’. Its elaborate picturisation was an early success of the noted 90s dance choreographer Saroj Khan.
Naseeruddin Shah and Sonam in Tridev (1989)
UCHI VEYIL
aka High Noon
1989 100’ col Tamil
d/sc Jayabharati pc Jwala st Indira Parthasarathy c Ramesh Vyas m L. Vaidyanathan
lp Kuppuswamy, Uma, Delhi Ganesh, Vijay, Srividya, Usha, Preeta, Baby Rukmini, Rajamani, Saranath
A gentle village family drama shot in real time (emphasised by a ticking clock). An old grandfather and former Gandhian freedom-fighter, Doraiswamy (Kuppuswamy), lives with his impecunious married son and granddaughter Mallika. To make a little money they take a lodger, a young executive, Shankar (Vijay). The old man falls ill but nevertheless sets out for the city with Mallika and Shankar to be honoured for his services to the Independence struggle. He then disappears. An understated story performed by non-star actors, using Madras street noises and the ticking clock instead of songs. It is the best-known film by the noted writer (cf. his Oomai Janangal, 1984, about bonded labourers in the British Raj).
UNA MITTERANDI YAAD PYARI
aka In Memory of Friends
1989 60’ col Punjabi/Hindi/English
d/p/c Anand Patwardhan m Navnirman, Jaimal Singh Padda
Patwardhan’s extraordinary 16mm documentary on terrorist activity in Punjab inaugurated a series of films (the second is Ram Ke Naam, 1992) addressing the growing communalism of Indian politics. The film follows a group of Hindi and Sikh socialists campaigning against both a repressive state government (which not long ago encouraged communalism as a divide-and-rule tactic) and communalist fanatics. The focus of their campaign is the legacy of Bhagat Singh, a young socialist hanged by the British (1931) and now claimed both by the state as a patriot and by the separatists as a Sikh militant. The film-maker includes his own interpretation of Bhagat Singh, emphasising his rationalist atheism. As in his earlier work, the director isolates the false rhetoric of professional politicians, contrasting it with images and sounds of ordinary people in their daily lives (e.g. the sound of the woman making chapatis). He also debunks the pompousness of offical politics together with its representations: when a central government minister lands in a helicopter, the event is first shown with Patwardhan’s own footage, which then cuts to a Doordarshan TV clip, including its declamatory voice track, presenting a glorious arrival. The film ends with noted communist leader Jaimal Singh Padda, who communicated his universalist message through speech and song in the film shortly before he was shot dead. The film has unforgettable images showing murderous stupidity blazing in the eyes of the fundamentalists as well as the astonishing courage of those trying to build a socialist politics in that situation.
VARAVELPU
1989 144’ col Malayalam
d Sathyan Andhikkad pc K.R.G. Movies p K. Rajagopal s Srinivasan lyr Kaithapram c Vipin Mohan m Johnson
lp Mohanlal, Revathi, Janardhanan, Oduvil Unnikrishnan, Innocent, Mamu Koya, Murali
Having worked hard in the Gulf for eight years, Muralee (Mohanlal) returns to his native Kerala with his savings, intent on starting his own business. However, his two brothers, who had lived off his earnings, try to get him to invest in their enterprises. Nevertheless, Muralee starts a bus service of his own, and the story recounts the tragic fate of his Gulf Motors Company, wrecked by an irresponsible family, unions and petty bureaucracy. Muralee’s only consolation is his girlfriend (Revathi) as he is eventually forced to return to the Gulf. The film exemplifies Srinivasan and Andhikkad’s view that Kerala is ruined by selfishness and corruption (cf. Sandesham, 1991)
AASHIQUI
1990 152’ col/scope Hindi
d Mahesh Bhatt pc Super Cassettes/Visesh Films p Gulshan Kumar s Robin Bhatt, Akash Khurana lyr Sameer, Madan Pal, Ravi Mallick c Pravin Bhatt m Nadeem-Shravan
lp Rahul Roy, Anu Agarwal, Avtar Gill, Tom Alter, Reema Lagoo, Homi Wadia, Mushtaque Khan, Javed Khan, Deepak Tijori
Produced by the man who is credited with pioneering the audio-cassette revolution in India, this hit anticipates a mid-90s low-budget genre with minor stars relying on music as its major selling factor. The pop singer Rahul (Roy) falls in love with the orphaned Anu (Agarwal) who lives in a hostel run by a tyrannical warden (Alter). The couple overcome this problem by eloping, but face a more serious crisis when Anu is selected by a multinational design company as a model and makes lots of money. Rahul’s infantile masculine pride is saved when he makes a hit record and becomes wealthy too. The music was a major hit (notably Nazar ke saamne sung by Anuradha Poudwal and Kumar Sanu) establishing its composers and the lyricist Sameer. Bhatt later made Papa Kehte Hain (1995), the debut production of Plus Channel, a manufacturer of TV software which converted the Gulshan Kumar low-budget musicals into its most consistent mid-90s formula, aided by the entry of satellite TV and numerous top hit Countdown-type programmes which now form the major publicity outlet for such films.
AGNEEPATH
1990 174’ col Hindi
d Mukul S. Anand p Yash Johar pc Dharma Prod. s Santosh Saroj lyr Anand Bakshi c Pravin Bhatt m Laxmikant-Pyarelal
lp Amitabh Bachchan, Mithun Chakraborty, Danny Denzongpa, Neelam, Madhavi, Rohini Hattangadi, Tinnu Anand, Archana Puran Singh, Alok Nath
The hero Vijay Chauhan aka ‘Bhai’ (Bachchan) witnesses his schoolmaster father (Nath) being falsely implicated in a scandal with a prostitute and lynched by the villagers. Bhai grows up to become a gangster and encounters the main villain Kancha Cheena (Denzongpa) in a luxurious place in Mauritius. He joins the villain’s gang only to have him arrested by the police. When Cheena is released (by arranging to have a key eyewitness killed), the hero murders Cheena after negotiating the ‘path of fire referred to in the film’s title. The most violent of Bachchan’s recent films, it was also the most sustained effort to rehabilitate the politically discredited star. The title and opening sequences borrow from a poem by Bachchan’s father Harivanshrai Bachchan, and show today’s New Man walking through the fires of hell to redeem a brutalised world and make it into a new utopia. The mother obsession of Bachchan’s previous films is still in evidence. In spite of Mukul Anand’s usual fast-moving camera and distorted perspectives, the film occasionally lapses into earlier cinematic idioms (e.g. the foot-stomping song picturisation of Archana Puran Singh’s Alibaba song). Anand’s familiar anachronisms suggest that very different historical epochs are ‘actually’ very similar: an exotic James Bond-type tourist resort and the blood and stench of Bombay’s gang wars. Although still playing the vigilante hero, Bachchan initially abandoned his well-known baritone voice to suggest an older man speaking in a heavy ‘Bombay Hindi’ accent, but he later had to re-dub the voice when the experiment proved unpopular. The film was not a major hit.
AGNI VEENA
1990 ? col Oriya
d/s Manmohan Mahapatra st Nandalal Mahapatra c Jehangir Mahapatra m Shantanu Mahapatra
lp Hemanta Das, Bijoy Samal, Brindaban Barik, Ashim Basu, Jaya Swamy, Namrata Das, Pushpa Panda
Mahapatra expands his scale, usually featuring a small number of protagonists, to address the condition of a community of villagers in Orissa. Portrayed as an easygoing people with few needs, the villagers are unable to make sense of greater adversity which forces them either to pawn their belongings or to move to cities and work as contract labourers.
AKKAREAKKAREAKKARE
1990 156’ col Malayalam
d Priyadarshan pc Seven Arts, Geepes Films p G.P. Vijayakumar s Srinivasan c S. Kumar m Ouseppachan
lp Mohanlal, Srinivasan, Parvathi, Soman, Nedumudi Venu
After Nadodikattu (1987) and Pattana Praveshanam (1988), this is the final comedy in the series featuring the bumbling duo Vijayan (Srinivasan) and Dasan (Mohanlal). Priyadarshan took over as director from Andhikkad, but the film showed a marked decrease in popularity in spite of its increased budget. The two bungling friends, now in the CID, are sent to the USA to recover a crown stolen by an American named Paul Barber. Arriving in the US with an informally allotted grant of Rs 5 lakh, cleared by their Police Commissioner (Soman) and delivered by an Indian embassy official (Venu), they decide to settle down there and abandon their investigations. When the Police Commissioner back home gets sacked as a result, he too arrives in the US intent on revenge. The two friends, who spend much time outsmarting each other while romancing a nurse (Parvathi), eventually get embroiled in conflict with the dreaded Brunton gang and return home, having successfully recovered the crown.
ALLUDUGARU
1990 144’ col Telugu
d K. Raghavendra Rao pc Lakshmi Prasanna Pics, p Mohan Babu st Priyadarshan dial Satyanand lyr Jaladi, Jonnavittula, Gurucharan, Rasaraju c K.S. Prakash m K.V. Mahadevan
lp Mohan Babu, Shobhana, K.Jaggaiah, Chandramohan, Ramya Krishna, Satyanarayana, Gollapudi Maruti Rao, Saraswati, Sudhakar
Vishnu (Mohan Babu), facing a death sentence for murder, escapes from jail and is hired by Anand (Chandra Mohan) to pretend to be married to Kalyani (Shobhana). This charade is necessary to protect Kalyani’s ailing non-resident Indian father Ramachandra Prasad (Jaggaiah) from facing up to the crisis caused by the break up of Kalyani’s love affair. In the process, however, Kalyani falls in love with Vishnu. It is later revealed that Vishnu was previously married with a son, and had been imprisoned for having unintentionally murdered his wife. In fact, he had attempted to kill his Naxalite brother-in-law believing him to be having an affair with his wife. Vishnu had agreed to Anand’s offer mainly because he needed the money to pay for his son’s medical expenses. His jailer (Satyanarayana) catches up with him but allows him to continue with the masquerade until the ailing Prasad returns to the USA. The film ends with Vishnu returning to prison to be hanged. This melodrama had a tragic ending, contrary to the norm, and was moderately successful with popular musical scores.
ANJALI
1990 136’(123’) col/scope Tamil/Hindi
d/s Mani Rathnam pc Sujata Films p G. Venkateshwaran lyr Vali c Madhu Ambat m Ilaiyaraja
lp Raghuvaran, Revathi, Baby Shyamali, Prabhu, Master Tarun, Baby Anthony, Saranya, Nishanti, Shruti
Anjali (Shyamali) is a mentally handicapped girl who, after her father (Raghuvaran) sends her away for a few years, is brought home to live with her parents and two healthy siblings. The movie chronicles the love given and received by the little girl until she dies just after calling out to her mother (Revathi) for the very first time. The family is helped by a mysterious stranger (Prabhu) who appoints himself their guardian angel. The high points of the film are the numerous songs, mainly featuring the neighbourhood children, elaborately choreographed and including some fantasy numbers. The film shows the extent to which Rathnam absorbed the influence of music videos. The stoiy is sourced in a novel by Fynn entitled Mr God This is Anna (1974).
APARAHNAM
aka The Late Afternoon
1990 116’ col Malayalam
d/s M.P. Sukumaran Nair pc Rachana Films c Ashwani Kaul m Jerry Amaldev
lp Babu Anthony, Jalaja, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Babu Namboodiri
An elegy for a defeated middle-class radical and veteran of the Naxalite rising. Released from prison, Nandakumar remains a suspect and is unable to settle into a job. He refuses advice to emigrate to the Gulf and suffers harassment both from the police and from his erstwhile comrades. During the Emergency in the mid-70s, he is imprisoned again. In the end, all he has left are his increasingly fanciful memories of his days as a young radical. Much of the film’s storytelling, performance and lighting evokes the elegaic naturalism of the director’s mentor, Adoor Gopalakrishnan.
AYE AUTO
1990 137’ col Malayalam
d/st/sc/dial Venu Nagavalli pc Saraswathi Chaithanya p Raju lyr Bichu Thirumala c S. Kumar m Ravindran
lp Mohanlal, Rekha, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, Jagadish, Raju, Pappu, Murali, Srinivasan
Love story and commercially successful comedy featuring the orphaned Minu (Rekha) and an auto-rickshaw driver Sudhi (Mohanlal). When her parents died in an airplane crash, Minu was raised by her grandparents. She falls for Sudhi, who drives her to college every day. Her grandmother wants her to marry a rich financier, but her resourceful grandfather, who supports the couple, ensures the happy end. Much of the film is told from the point of view of Sudhi’s daily routine as a public conveyance driver: his encounters with irate customers, traffic police and turf-wars between rival drivers.
1990 155’ col Telugu
d/sc B. Gopal pc Suresh Prod, p D. Rama Naidu st/dial Parachuri Bros, lyr Seetharama Sastry c Ravindra Babu m Ilaiyaraja
lp Venkatesh, Divya Bharati, Vanisree, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao
Continuing motifs familiar from Chiranjeevi’s hits (e.g. Attaku Yamadu Amayiki Mogudu, 1989), Raja (Venkatesh) first ‘tames’ the aggressive heroine (Bharati) and then her mother (Vanisree). When the mother has Raja’s father killed, Raja grows up in a forest where, later, he meets the heroine. The mother arrives there too and has the hero beaten up, but he eventually gets his revenge. Future Hindi star Divya Bharati (who later committed suicide) makes her Telugu debut in this hit, which depended on Ilaiyaraja’s music for its success.
DIL
1990 172’ col/scope Hindi
d Indra Kumar pc Vinod Doshi, Maruti Int. s Rajiv Kaul, Praful Parekh dial Kamlesh Pandey lyr Sameer c Baba Azmi m Anand-Milind
lp Aamir Khan, Madhuri Dixit, Saeed Jaffrey, Anupam Kher, Deven Verma
The top Hindi hit of 1990 reprises the classic dilemmas of Aamir Khan’s earlier Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988): a love story leading to the estrangement between the families of a loving couple, thus gradually replacing the problems of individual romance with those of interfamilial relationships. Hero Raja (Khan) has a miserly father Hazari Prasad (Kher) who plans to increase his wealth by persuading the millionaire Mehra (Jaffrey) to allow his daughter Madhu (Dixit) to marry Raja. Madhu and Raja are in love anyway and indulge in high-school squabbles, a popular plot motif since Grease (1978). The marriage plans come unstuck when Mehra discovers that Hazari Prasad is not the industrialist he claims to be, but the young lovers defy their respective families and marry anyway. Raja becomes a labourer and has a major accident, allowing the two rich fathers to make their peace with each other. The ending replays the end of Guru Dutt:’s Mr And Mrs ’55 (1955) at the airport. One of the many disco numbers, Ladki hai ya chhadi hai, is a version of Elvis Presley’s Blue Suede Shoes, while another adapted Ilaiyaraja’s O Priya Priya number from Geetanjali (1989). Like Maine Pyar Kiya (1989), the film deploys an advertising film style, esp. for the soundtrack and the editing, several sequences winding up with a direct address to the audience. Following the success of his next film, Beta (1992), Indra Kumar became the top-grossing director of 90s Hindi cinema.
DISHA
aka The Uprooted Ones
1990 135’ col Hindi
d/p/s Sai Paranjpye pc Sai Paranjpye Films c Madhu Ambat, G.S. Bhaskar m Anand Modak
lp Shabana Azmi, Nana Patekar, Raghuvir Yadav, Om Puri, Nilu Phule, Rajshree Sawant
Paranjpye’s sentimental tale of migrant workers in Bombay, caught between urban displacement and a changing rural reality. Farm labourers Vasant (Patekar) and Soma (Yadav) move to Bombay following drought in their village. Soma becomes a millhand. Vasant, who has come mainly to pay off his marriage debts, returns to find his wife having an affair with her employer, the owner of a bidi (reed) factory. Soma also plans to go home, because his brother (Puri) has finally dug a well which yields water. The film uses extensive tracking shots presenting panoramic views of the Dadar region in central Bombay with its textile mills and apparently Asia’s most populated square mile. Location shots taken in the textile mills provide a quasi-documentary background for the fiction.
DRISHTI
aka Vision
1990 171’col Hindi
d/co-s/c Govind Nihalani pc Udbhav co-s Shashi Deshpande m Kishori Amonkar
lp Shekhar Kapur, Dimple Kapadia, Mita Vasisth, Vijay Kashyap, Irfan
Marital melodrama informally adapting Ingmar Bergman’s Scener ur ett Aktenskap (Scenes from a Marriage, 1974). Sandhya (Dimple), employed by a children’s publisher, and her husband Nikhil (Shekhar Kapur), a research scientist, celebrate their 8th wedding anniversary. Sandhya feels attracted to the singer Rahul. Nikhil has an affair with Vrinda (Mita Vasisth) and, amid some unexpressed doubt about whose child the pregnant Sandhya is bearing, the couple agree to a divorce. A year later, when Nikhil’s affair with Vrinda is over, the couple meet again and Sandhya convinces Nikhil that her aborted child was his. This is the first of several theatre-derived dialogue movies Nihalani made after Party (1984). Nihalani says the film is constructed in eleven movements, each signalled by a song by its composer, the noted Jaipur gharana Khayal singer Kishori Amonkar.
FIGURES OF THOUGHT
1990 33’ col English
d/p/s Arun Khopkar c Piyush Shah m Rajat Dholakia
Remarkable documentary about the paintings of Bhupen Khakhar, Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram. The three artists had participated in the landmark show Place for People (1981, cf. Chronicle) which helped transform the notion of contemporary art in India. The film takes off from a mural they jointly made on commission from a Bombay industrialist and represents the paintings of the three artists, innovatively using reframing and lighting effects while interweaving shots of the artists’s working environment. Khopkar is well known as a teacher of film theory and an authority on Eisenstein.
GANESHANA MADHUVE
1990 141’ col Kannada
d/sc H.S. Phani Ramchandra pc Kalapriya st Malladi Venkata Krishnamurthy sc Rajachandur lyr Geethapriya, Shyamsundar Kulkarni, Doddarange Gowda, Su. Rudramurthy Sastry, M.N. Vyasa Rao c R. Manjunath m Rajan-Nagendra
lp Anant Nag, Vinaya Prasad, Vaishali, Mukhyamantri Chandru
A vathara (tenement) comedy dealing with landlord-tenant relations, providing opportunities for action as well as romance. This is part of a popular 80s ‘Ganesha’ series by Phani Ramchandra, based on Telugu stories and dealing with lower middle-class characters (cf. Gauri Ganesha, 1991; Ganesha Subramanya, 1992). Principal characters in the series include the bachelor Ganesha (Nag), his cricket-loving mother (Vaishali), his landlord Ramanamurthy (Chandru) and the landlord’s daughter Adilakshmi (Prasad). Adilakshmi, a cantankerous landlady, much cursed along with her father by all the inmates of the tenement, has an alter ego: the radio singer Sruthi. Ganesha hates Adilakshmi, but falls for Sruthi’s voice on the radio. An important character in the genre is a man who provides ideas to various characters and demonstrably helps to extend the plot. An unusual opening appeals to popular notions of creativity and artistic achievement: simulating a press conference, the filmmaker ‘presents’ his film and introduces key technicians to his audience who then ask questions about the production.
GHAYAL
1990 163’ col Hindi
d/s Raj Kumar Santoshi p Dharmendra pc Vijayta Films dial Dilip Shukla lyr Anjaan, Indivar c Rajen Kothari m Bappi Lahiri
lp Sunny Deol, Meenakshi Sheshadri, Amrish Puri, Raj Babbar, Moushumi Chatterjee, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Om Puri, Shabbir Khan, Sudesh Berry, Mitwa
Produced by Dharmendra, Deol’s father, and designed to create a definitive screen image for Deol as the urban Rambo-type vigilante (like Stallone, Deol has in every film, at least once and sometimes on several occasions, a scene where he is chained, insulted and physically tortured as the camera lingers over his sweating and bulging muscles). Here Deol plays Ajay, whose elder brother Ashok (Babbar) becomes involved with drug-dealing villains led by the politician Balwant Rai (A. Puri). When the politician collaborates with legal top brass to convict Ajay for murdering his own brother, Ajay becomes a one-man army against the state. He kidnaps the police commissioner (Kharbanda), informs Balwant Rai that the day of judgement is at hand and finally gets his man in a huge Coney Island-style amusement park. The film established Raj Kumar Santoshi, the son of P.L. Santoshi, song-writer and director of C. Ramchandra musicals, as a director in his own right.
1990 156’ col Malayalam
d Sibi Malayil pc Pranavam Arts p Mohanlal s A.K. Lohitadas lyr Kaithapram c Anandakuttan m Ravindran
lp Mohanlal, Nedumudi Venu, Gauthami, Shankaradi, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair
The rich nobleman and patron of classical music (Venu) is surrounded by greedy relatives who want to kill him for his wealth. They hire the Bombay-based contract killer Abdullah (Mohanlal), who also happens to be a ghazal singer. Assuming the identity of Ananthan Namboodiri, he befriends the nobleman, but he then changes sides and saves the old man instead of killing him. Following the conventions of classic romances, it turns out that Abdullah merely agreed to the scheme because he wanted money to recover his own ancestral property. The first hit of a series based on classical music by Mohanlal’s own production company (followed by Bharatham, 1991, and Kamalathalam, 1992), the well-shot film makes good use of its major location, the famous Padmanabhapuram palace. The music allows for several singing bouts where the young playback singer M.G. Sreekumar holds his own against the vastly more experienced Yesudas.
ISHANOU
aka The Chosen One
1990 94’ col Manipuri
d/p/m Aribham Syam Sharma pc Aribham Syam Sharma Prod. s M.K. Binodini Debi c Girish Padidhar
lp Kiranmala, Tomba, Manbi, D. Hiren, Baby Molly, Baby Premita
Manipuri family melodrama combining upward mobility with the strange ritualism of the matriarchal Meitei cult. This cult, according to the film, claims its female adherents through a series of mystical signals which the chosen woman cannot ignore. A small and happy family lives in the Manipur Valley under the care and protection of an old woman. Suddenly the young wife Tampha (Kiranmala) becomes possessed by the divinity Maibi and leaves her home to be initiated by the guru of the Maibi sect. Much of the film’s second half features the exotic dance rituals, ending with a brief encounter between Tampha, her now estranged husband and grown-up child.
JAGADEKA VEERUDU ATILOKA SUNDARI
1990 153’ col Telugu
d/sc K. Raghavendra Rao pc Vyjayanthi Movies p Ashwini Dutt st Jandhyala lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c K.S. Prakash m Ilaiyaraja
lp Chiranjeevi, Sridevi, Amrish Puri, Kannada Prabhakar, Rami Reddy, Tanikella Bharani, Baby Shalini, Master Amit, Master Richards
Major success featuring Chiranjeevi and Sridevi after a long gap, giving a new lease of life to the famous folklore genre in Telugu cinema. Indraja (Sridevi), daughter of Indra, descends to earth but is stranded there when she loses her magic ring. She falls in love with a tourist guide, Raju (Chiranjeevi), a guardian of orphaned children. The couple cause problems for the gambling activities of the evil K.P. (Prabhakar), who hires the magician Mahadrashta (Puri). The magician kidnaps Indraja in his efforts to rule the universe, but she is rescued by Raju and decides to stay on earth. Ilaiyaraja’s music and dances choreographed by Sundaram, as well as several special effects contributed to its success.
KARTAVYAM
1990 152’ col Telugu
d/sc A. Mohan Gandhi pc Surya Movies p A.M. Rathnam s Parachuri Bros. lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c D. Prasad Babu m Raj-Koti
lp Vijayashanti, Vinod Kumar, Babu Mohan, Charan Raj, Nirmalamma, P.L. Narayana, Saikumar
The definitive female cop movie featuring Vijayashanti., Apparently based on exploits of the real-life policewoman Kiran Bedi, the film stridently advocates a traditional Indian feminism as the female cop fights corrupt politicians, is attacked and injured, almost loses her job and survives mainly through her own will power. It won Vijayashanti an acting award along with an enduring screen image, repeated in eg. Surya IPS (1991), making stunt sequences mandatory in most of her subsequent films. The film was also seen as a kind of feminist version of Ankusham (1989).
KASBA
1990 121’ col Hindi
d/co-sc Kumar Shahani pc NFDC, Doordarshan st Anton Chekov’s In The Ravine co-sc Farida Mehta c K.K. Mahajan m Vanraj Bhatia
lp Shatrughan Sinha, Mita Vasisth, Manohar Singh, Alaknanda Samarth, Navjot Hansra, Raghuvir Yadav
Alaknanda Samarth and Shatrughan Sinha in Kasba
Shahani’s melodrama, based on Chekov’s little-known short story, tells of Maniram (Singh), an old-style entrepreneur in a small township in the mountains of Kangra, who made his fortune adulterating food. His business is run by the canny Tejo (Vasisht), the wife of his mentally retarded younger son (Yadav) and the Shakespearean fool in the story. His elder son Dhani (Sinha) is doing well in a government-related business in Delhi which turns out to be the printing of counterfeit currency. Dhani is brought back and married, in local style, to Tara (Hansra); however, he gets drunk on his wedding night, scatters some counterfeit notes and leaves for the city, his marriage still unconsummated. Tara is impregnated by a local fixer (Raina) and gives birth to a son who stands to inherit the family property. News of Dhani’s arrest and the police crackdown on Maniram’s corrupt enterprise is accompanied by Tejo’s ruthless take-over of local power. She kills Tara’s child, builds an electric substation on her father-in-law’s land and seduces the vacuous son of a local industrialist into becoming her partner. Her machinations are intercut with the aimless travels of a benumbed Tara holding her dead child, finding solace among the wandering minstrels and the hill tribes. Much of the film deploys a savage irony, as e.g. Shatrughan Sinha, a major Hindi star effectively playing ‘himself, is presented as a small-town braggart trying to imitate his own swaggering style, or the poignant ‘budha bhangda’ (dance for elderly Sikhs) playing over a drunken Maniram among the flashing lights of his son’s ostentatious marriage. The melodrama verges repeatedly on the satirical, chronicling a decaying nationalism and the end of modernist dreams of self-reliance, epitomised by Maniram’s manic second wife (Samarth) spouting religious mumbo-jumbo, which in no way detracts from these ideologies’ political power. The only characters who find their way out of the cultural quagmire are the ‘moonstruck’ younger son and the nameless fixer, in the song at the end when he clutches a tree in the nude. The film’s main generic achievement is to recall to the melodrama its original function, of integrating marginalised peoples and their languages into a mainstream culture. It also provides the film’s most crucial ironic edge in its implicit suggestion that in order to do so melodrama has to first invent a mainstream.
KUTTY JAPANIN KUZHANDAIGAL
aka Children of Mini-Japan
1990 63’ col Tamil
d/s Chalam Bennurkar pc Janamadhyam c R.V. Ramani
Documentary about the Sivakasi region known for its artisanal industries and for providing the national supply of matchboxes, fireworks and gaudy calendars. Known locally as ‘Mini-Japan’, Sivakasi is also one of the worst exploiters of child labour anywhere in India: 70% of its workforce are pre-puberty girls. The film juxtaposes these unsavoury labour conditions with Sivakasi’s association with ‘popular art’.
LEKIN …
aka But …
1990 171’ col Hindi
d/s/lyr Gulzar pc Dinanath Kala Mandir, Lata Mangeshkar c Manmohan Singh m Hridaynath Mangeshkar
lp Vinod Khanna, Dimple Kapadia, Amjad Khan, Alok Nath, Manohar Singh, Beena, Hema Malini
Story of an unhappy ghost, Rewa (Kapadia), who haunts the palace of Raja Param Singh of Jasod which is now government property. Samir (Khanna), the curator of a government museum, is sent to salvage the valuables in the sealed palace where he encounters the ghost. Rewa’s ability to recreate the past brings alive her tragic story, making Samir determined to liberate her even at the risk of own life. Parapsychology is touted as proof of the reality of the encounter and his ‘Why me?’ is answered by a possible encounter in their previous lives. Rewa is finally liberated when, with his help, she completes the journey through a desert that claimed her life on earth. The film adds to the horror iconography (ruins, dungeons, suggestive music and fluttering pigeons) several sequences involving the tribal Banjaras, a community presented as practising witchcraft.
MATTI MANUSHULU
1990 87’ col Telugu
d/s/m B. Narasinga Rao pc Little India c A.K. Bir
lp Archana, Moin Ali Beg
The story of a peasant couple who migrate to the city following drought in their Telangana village and become construction workers. The husband becomes an alcoholic and abandons his wife who is harassed sexually and financially until she dies a pauper, leaving her orphaned child behind.
MUTHINA HARA
1990 162’ col Kannada
d/p/co-sc S.V. Rajendra Singh pc Mahatma Pics st V.M. Joshi co-sc H.V. Subba Rao dial R.N. Jayagopal c D.V. Rajaram m Hamsalekha
lp Vishnuvardhan, Suhasini, K.S. Ashwath, Ramkumar
Rajendra Singh’s big-budget war film has the brave hero (Vishnuvardhan) fight a series of wars, starting with WW2 in Burma, then with China and Pakistan after Independence, before losing his life protecting his fellow soldiers. His wife (Suhasini), enlisted as a nurse, eventually makes a fervently pacificist plea.
NO. 20 MADRAS MAIL
1990 177’ col Malayalam
d Joshi pc Tharangini Films st Hari Kumar sc/dial Dennis Joseph lyr Shibu Chakravarthy c Jayanan Vincent m Ouseppachan, S.P. Venkatesh
lp Mohanlal, Jagadish, Manianpillai Raju, Ashokan, Soman, Suchitra, Mammootty
Fast-paced comedy thriller in which three innocent murder suspects are on the run until they are rescued by the Malayalam megastar Mammootty (as himself in a cameo appearance). Tony (Mohanlal), Hari (Jagadish) and Hitchcock (Raju), wild but warm-hearted friends, are on the train to Madras. On the way, they get drunk and have an argument with an arrogant industrialist R.K. Nair (Soman) and annoy both the man’s wife and daughter Devi (Suchitra). Arriving in Madras, Devi appears to have been murdered in a bathroom cabin. Fearing that they might be suspected, they try to run from the police, but Mammootty, who happens to be a fellow passenger, intervenes and together they find the real murderers.
OTTAYADI PAATHAKAL
aka The Narrow Footpaths
1990 96’ col Malayalam
d/s C. Radhakrishnan p Vincent Chittilapally pc St Vincent Movies c Sunny Joseph m Mohan Sitara
lp Madhu, Sreenath, Revathi, Kaviyoor Ponnamma, Isaac Thomas, Somasundaran, Chandran Nair, Paul Neelankavil, Rahim
A heavy-handed, NFDC-financed melodrama shot in Trichur and featuring a group of characters: an old judge, Bhaskara Menon (Madhu), his daughter Sati and his mentally retarded son, and the nephew, Anup Kumar, who covets the daughter. However, Sati refuses to marry Anup and devotes herself to mothering her father and brother. The dramatic event is the death of the son, Suku, a mercy-killing by electrocution by his father, the judge. The latter goes crazy (indicated by e.g. the fact that he makes an abstract painting) and, apparently sleepwalking, jumps to his death. Sati and Anup get together after all. The film mainly showcased an ageing Madhu playing the tearful judge. The director, educated as a scientist, is best known as a novelist.
PELLI PUSTAKAM
1990 151’ col Telugu
d Bapu pc Sri Sitarama Chitra
p/sc/dial Mullapudi Venkataramana st Ravi Kondala Rao lyr Arudra c R.K. Raju m K.V. Mahadevan
lp Rajendra Prasad, Divya Vani, Sindhuja, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Jhansi, Sudhakar, Ravi Kondala Rao, ‘Sakshi’ Ranga Rao, Dharmavarapu Subramanyam
Inverting the plot of the famous Vijaya studios’ hit Missamma (1955), a young couple, Krishna Murthy (Prasad) and Satyabhama (Vani), have to pretend to be unmarried in order to get jobs. The story revolves around the couple trying to maintain their secret, because their employer (Gummadi) believes that only one person from a family should be working. Finally, the boss has a change of heart and relaxes the rule when their secret is revealed. A parallel narrative, more directly quoting Missamma, also features a second couple, Sindhuja, daughter of the boss, and Sudhakar, pretending to be married. The film introduced Divya Vani, and saw Bapu working with noted humourist Mullapudi Venkataramana (cf. Muthyala Muggu, 1975) after a long gap.
PERUMTHACHAN
1990 141’ col Malayalam
d Ajayan pc Bhavachitra s M.T. Vasudevan Nair c Santosh Sivan m Johnson
lp Thilakan, Prashant, Monisha, Nedumudi Venu, Manoj K. Jayan
Noted Malayalam author Nair skilfully elaborates a minor Puranic legend from Kerala into a complex tale of violent customs, parenthood in crisis and professional rivalries. Raman (Thilakan), the ‘perunthachan’ or chief carpenter/architect in Kerala’s feudal system, is the most accomplished craftsman of his time until his son Kannan Vishwakarman (Prashant) surpasses his father’s skill and fame. Kannan also dares to fall for the daughter (Manisha) of his father’s chief Namboodiri (Brahmin) patron and friend (Venu). Hurt and angered by his son’s success and consequent arrogance, Raman ‘accidentally’ drops a chisel and kills his son. The murder is presented as a question to viewers: was it the father’s honourable defence of traditional values that caused him to kill his son, or merely envy? Ajayan’s debut film shows him to be a fine director of actors.
POLICENA HENDTHI
1990 155’ col Kannada
d/sc Saiprakash pc Dynamic Film Makers p Hariprasad, Raghubabu, Sudhakar, A.J.V. Prasad st Omkar dial Ku. Nagabhushan lyr R.N. Jayagopal c Krishna m M. Ranga Rao
lp Malashree, Shashi Kumar, Devaraj, Mukhyamantri Chandru, Jaijagadish, Mysore Lokesh, Umesh, Anjana, Tara, Srinivasa Murthy, Sitara, Vinaya Prasad
This propaganda attack on lower-caste people tells of Vanaja (Malashree), a television news reader who provides for her brother Avatari Lokayya (Devaraj) and his wife. The unemployed brother makes his money by putting on various disguises until he is caught trying to masquerade as a lower-caste person in order to obtain state benefits. He later delivers a speech about the evils anti-caste discrimination laws. Vanaja marries a timid cop and transforms him into a ‘real man’. She also arranges the cop’s sister’s marriage while herself getting through a tough civil service examination. The woman’s achievements are connected with her devotion to her husband and family, exemplifying Brahminical morality.
PRATIBANDH
1990 159’ col/scope Hindi
d/sc Ravi Raja (aka Raviraja Pinisetty) pc Geeta Arts p Allu Aravind s Anees Bazmee lyr Anand Bakshi c K.S. Hari m Laxmikant-Pyarelal
lp Chiranjeevi, Juhi Chawla, J.V.V. Somayajulu, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Shafi Inamdar, Sumalatha, Rami Reddy, Harish Patel
Telugu superstar Chiranjeevi’s Hindi debut and, like his later Hindi films Aaj Ka Goonda Raj (1991) and Gentleman (1994), a remake of an earlier Telugu hit (Ankusham, 1989). Violent even by Chiranjeevi’s standards, it tells of an ‘honest’ cop Siddhanth (Chiranjeevi) who frequently breaks the law in order to punish criminals. He offers protection to and later marries Shanti (Chawla), an eyewitness to the murder of a politician. Pitting himself against the might of a liquor baron (Patel), a gangster (Reddy), a corrupt police official (Inamdar) and the State Home Minister (Kharbanda), he loses his wife, his job and eventually his life in the service of the Gandhian Chief Minister Satyendra (Somayajulu). Much of the rhetoric, apparently in defence of an honest police force, seeks to defend individual vigilantism.
SANTHA SHISHUNALA SHAREEFA
1990 131’ col Kannada
d/co-st/co-sc T.S. Nagabharana pc Yajamana Ents. co-st/co-sc/co-dial S. Basavaraj co-dial Pal Sudarshan c S. Ramachandra lyr Santha Shishuneela Shareefa co-st/co-sc/m C Aswath p Sridhar, Girish Karnad, Suman Ranganath, Dattatreya, Hema Choudhury
Hagiography of Shishunala Shareefa, a 19th C. mystic poet and singer from North Karnataka, whose songs, addressing both the everyday and mystical experience, were rediscovered in the 20th C. and remain popular among urban Kannadigas. The film emphasises Shareefa’s semi-divine status and adopts the conventions of the devotional film. Shareefa is apprenticed as a boy to Govindabhatta (Karnad), an unorthorox Brahmin teacher who defies several of the conservative tenets of his caste. Shareefa, a Muslim, is excommunicated by his own community, while the Brahmins object to Govindabhatta’s conversion of Shareefa to Hinduism. When he grows up (Sridhar), he marries, but his wife (Ranganath) dies in childbirth. In a long sequence, Shareefa and his guru, with divine assistance, defy Brahmin plots. When his teacher dies, Shareefa has a vision shortly after he is evicted from a mosque, signalling his ascent to the status of a visionary. Like other films of the genre (cf. Sbri Venkateshwara Mahatyam, 1960), the end is a documentary with footage of pilgrims visiting Shareefa’s birthplace.
SHAKHA PROSHAKHA
aka Branches of the Tree
1990 130’ col Bengali
d/s/m Satyajit Ray p Daniel Toscan du Plantier, Gerard Depardieu pc Erato Films, DD Prod, Soprofilms c Barun Raha
lp Ajit Bannerjee, Haradhan Bannerjee, Soumitra Chatterjee, Dipankar Dey, Ranjit Mullick, Lily Chakraborty, Mamata Shankar
Following the unsatisfactory Ganashatru (1989) and his critique of contemporary corruption, Ray’s first international co-production looks more like a TV movie and continues the realist Ibsenite idiom with this story about a Bengali joint family. The honest old patriarch Ananda Majumdar (A. Bannerjee), who rose from government clerk to real-estate developer building a small township, has a heart attack on his 70th birthday, causing the large family to gather: his four sons, their wives and children. The eldest son, Probodh (H. Bannerjee), is a corrupt businessman, to the great disappointment of the old man who finds he is closest to his mentally retarded second son, the music-loving Prashanto (S. Chatterjee).
SHATRUVU
1990 138’ col Telugu
d Kodi Ramakrishna pc Sumanth Prod s Satyamurthy lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy, C. Narayana Reddy, Seetharama Sastry c S. Gopal Reddy m Raj-Koti
lp Venkatesh, Kota Srinivasa Rao, Vijayashanti, Babu Mohan, Nagesh, Vijay Kumar, Sangeetha, Brahmanandam
Melodama about an honest lawyer’s fight for justice against corrupt politicians. The lawyer-apprentice Ashok (Venkatesh) falls for, and later teams up with, the courageous female cop Vijaya (Vijayashanti in her trademark role, cf. Pelli Pustakam, 1990). Ashok’s mentor, an honest lawyer (Vijayakumar), is killed by the evil gangster Venkatarathnam (Srinivasa Rao). The hero takes the law into his own hands since legal systems are unable to trap the real villain. Ashok’s cop girlfriend initially opposes this, but the hero eventually succeeds in eliminating the entire gang of crooks. The film is known mainly for having established 90s Telugu star Venkatesh and for Srinivasa Rao’s acclaimed performance as the comic villain.
THALAYANA MANTHRAM
1990 135’ col Malayalam
d Sathyan Andhikkad p Mudra Arts s Srinivasan lyr Kaithapram c Vipin Kumar m Johnson
lp Urvashi, Srinivasan, Jayaram, Parvathi, KPAC Lalitha, Sukumari
One of Andhikkad and Srinivasan’s comedies about middle-class Kerala, usually (e.g. Nadodikattu, 1987) but not always (eg. Sandesham, 1991) associated with the performances of Mohanlal. This one lampoons meek husbands who cannot control their spouses’ insatiable desire for consumer goods. Sukumaran (Srinivasan) is an honest construction supervisor, but his wife Kanchana (Urvashi) suffers from an inferiority complex vis-à-vis her brother-in-law’s educated daughter-in-law, a bank employee. Kanchana forces her husband to separate from the joint family and move into an unaffordably expensive residence where they spend all his savings on a car, a television set, jewellery, etc. Eventually Sukumaran is arrested for embezzlement.
THODASA RUMANI HO JAYE
aka Let there be a Wee Bit of Romance aka Let’s Get Romantic
1990 160’ col Hindi
d/p Amol Palekar pc Doordarshan sc Chitra Palekar c Debu Deodhar lyr Kamlesh Pandey m Bhaskar Chandavarkar
lp Anita Kanwar, Vikram Gokhale, Nana Patekar, Dilip Kulkarni, Arun Joglekar, Deepa Lagoo, Aparajita Krishna, Riju Bajaj, Shashank Shanker, Vijay Shirke, Hemant Desai
Palekar’s musical derived from Joseph Anthony’s The Rainmaker (1956) featuring Binny (Kanwar), an unmarried woman whose condition is reflected by the barren and rainless town in which she lives with her family. A stranger comes, bringing rain and romance into her life. The film uses music extensively, often weaving spoken words into songs.
VASTHUHARA
aka The Dispossessed
1990 103’ col Malayalam
d/sc G. Aravindan pc Paragon Movie Makers st C.V. Sriraman c Sunny Joseph m Salil Choudhury
lp Mohanlal, Shobhana, Neelanjana Mitra, Neena Gupta, Padmini
Aravindan’s last film is based on a story by the author of Chidambaram (1985). Making a virtually unprecedented, and deeply moving, departure from a cinematic tradition that has always emphasised regional identity, the film is set in Calcutta. The story tells of Venu (Mohanlal), a Malayali officer in the rehabilitation ministry of the Andaman Islands, who selects candidates for a refugee aid programme enabling them to settle in the islands with state assistance. He meets an old Bengali widow (Mitra) who is not eligible for the programme, but he discovers that she is the abandoned wife of his uncle from Kerala. Re-establishing family links, he also befriends her hostile daughter (Gupta) and her son, a political refugee. Their brief acquaintance ends at a shipyard where he hoards his emigrant refugees on deck and leaves for the islands once more. From its remarkable opening sequence, as the camera tracks through abandoned refugee shelters built during the 1943 famine and Partition, with a voice-over in Malayalam recapitulating that tragic history and the Kerala peoples’ commitment to the plight of the Bengalis, Aravindan makes clear his intention to transcend a localised and increasingly cynical view (cf. Chidambaram and Oridathu, 1986) and to move towards something like a national perspective on the contemporary. In the process he also abandons much of his early pictorialism in favour of e.g. the remarkable shots of Mohanlal walking through the crowded Calcutta streets, or standing on the terrace of his cheap hotel, and especially in the last sequence aboard an ancient and grossly overcrowded ship overrun with impoverished refugees, as Venu tries to bring some order into the chaos. Several well-entrenched naturalist conventions, however, prevent a further formal elaboration of the style, such as the dialogue problems (Mohanlal speaks in Malayalam and English, Neelanjana Mitra in Bengali, highly accented Malayalam and English, and Neena Gupta only in English), but the acting is uniformly in tune with Joseph’s deliberately rough-edged camera.
Shobhana in Vasthuhara
VEMBANAD
aka A Lake in Central Kerala
1990 91’ col Malayalam
d/s Sivaprasad pc Anna Cine Creations c Ashwani Kaul m Louis Banks
lp Aziz, Ranjini, Jayabharati, Babu Namboodiri
An obsessive tale of incest, either consummated or desired, on an island community of fisherfolk. A fisherman rescues a teenage girl from drowning, and is obsessed by her. He rapes her, and in the end, repeating the opening sequences, watches her drown. The narrative strategy is both engrossingly ambiguous and alienating as sequences with images of uncertain status (fantasy, desire, dream, reality) coalesce to form an undifferentiated discourse of a father’s desire for his teenage daughter together with his denial of that desire.
WOSOBIPO
aka The Cuckoo’s Call
1990 138’ col Karbi
d/s Gautam Bora pc Wojaru Cine Trust Karbi Anglong c Vivek Bannerjee m Sher Choudhury
lp Elsie Hanse, Bubul Terang, Raman Rongpi, Langbiram Engti
The first film in Karbi, a north-eastern dialect, traces the gradual politicisation of a native schoolteacher, Sarthe Ronghang, who moves beyond a romantic and nostalgic sense of his land into an awareness of the region’s real contemporary problems. The director is a graduate of the Konrad Wolf Institute (Potsdam), a documentarist and former assistant to Bhabendranath Saikia (Agnisnan, 1985)
1991 ? col Telugu
d/s Singeetham Srinivasa Rao pc Sridevi Movies p Anita Krishna dial Jandhyala lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy, ‘Sirivenella’ Sitarama Sastry, Vennelakanti c V.S.R. Swamy, Kabirlal m Ilaiyaraja
lp Balakrishna, Mohini, Tinnu Anand, Sudhakar, Velu, Brahmanandam, Ravi Kondala Rao, Babu Mohan, Gollapudi Maruti Rao, Silk Smitha
Comic science fiction fantasy partly inspired by Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future (1985). An eccentric scientist (Anand) invents a time machine with which the hero (Balakrishna) returns to the 16th C. Vijayanagara empire and meets King Krishna Deva Raya (Balakrishna again). He then travels into a post-nuclear holocaust future. A rare excursion into the science fiction genre in Telugu film, the film was not well received. The director and his lead star teamed up again later for the even more elaborately mounted fantasy Bhairava Dweepam (1994).
ADVAITHAM
1991 181’ col Malayalam
d Priyadarshan pc Grihalakshmi Prod. s T. Damodaran lyr Kaithapram c S. Kumar m Johnson
lp Mohanlal, Jayaram, Revathi, Thikkurisi Sukumaran Nair, Chitra, Soman, Innocent
A Hindu chauvinist film set in contemporary Kerala. Shivaprasad (Mohanlal), disowned by his Brahmin Namboodiri father, becomes a pawn of power-hungry Communists. Having committed several violent crimes at their behest, he is jailed but ‘rewarded’ when the Communists come to power and appoint him chairman of a rich temple trust. The hero’s ‘redemption’ is prepared by presenting his efforts at embezzlement - part of his job’s privileges - as an attempt to finance the recovery of his feudal rights and to restore his now-politically sanitised joint family. However, opposing him are the honest leader of the temple workers, the good administrator Lakshmi (Revathi) who is also his estranged former lover, and Vasu (Jayaram), a reformed ex-accomplice. When the Communists have Vasu murdered, Shivaprasad sees the light and turns into a saffron-clad sanyasi, soon gaining fame as a peace-preaching godman. In this role, he is invited to mediate in a religious dispute over a mosque (a direct reference to the violent attack on the mosque at Ayodhya). His honesty now makes him an enemy of all the political factions in the dispute, who collectively plot to kill him, but he is rescued by his now-repentant former girlfriend, Lakshmi. Shivaprasad then massacres the corrupt politicians and the film ends with him addressing Hindu devotees, asking them to ‘judge’ whether slaughtering one’s opponents is wrong. The film also recalls the heroic and, in Kerala, controversial figure of the former Naxalite Ajitha, who, according to legend would kill landlords and policemen leaving her bloodied palm print on the wall as a signature.
AGANTUK
aka The Stranger
1991 120’ col Bengali
d/s/m Satyajit Ray pc NFDC c Barun Raha
lp Dipankar Dey, Mamata Shankar, Bikram Bhattacharya, Utpal Dutt, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Robi Ghosh, Subrata Chatterjee, Promod Ganguly, Ajit Bannerjee
Ray’s last film continues his critique of decaying values in the Bengali middle class (cf. Ganashatru, 1989; Shakha Proshakha, 1990). Into the lives of Sudhindra Bose (De) and his wife Anila (Shankar) arrives Anila’s uncle whom she last met 35 years ago. This stranger, Manomohan Mitra (Dutt), lived abroad and worked with tribal communities in various parts of the world. When Sudhindra’s lawyer, who does not care about tribals, accuses Mitra of coveting Anila’s inheritance, Mitra leaves, having donated his share of the family property to his niece.
AMARAN
1991 150’ col Malayalam
d Bharathan pc MAK Prod p Babu Thiruvalla s A.K. Lohitadas lyr Kaithapram c Madhu Ambat m Ravindran
lp Mammootty, Madhu, Ashokan, Murali, Chitra, KPAC Lalitha
Shot on location, the film tells of relationships in a fishing village. Achuthan (Mammootty) had watched his wife die in childbirth for want of medical aid and is determined to make his daughter (Madhu) into a doctor. She loves her childhood friend (Ashokan), but he disapproves of her education as well as of her possessive father. Although much of the film faithfully adheres to the dialect of the fisherfolk, the realism lies mainly in Ambat’s fine camerawork.
BEDER MEYE JOTSNA
1991 ? col Bengali
p Jai Khemka st/sc/lyr Tojamul Haque Bokul c Rafiqul Bari Choudhury m Abu Taher
lp Chiranjeet, Anju Ghosh, Saifuddin, Dildar, Nasir, Abbas, Anamika, Asha Mukherjee, Kaushik, Shubhendu, Sombhu
Drawing on a popular Bangladeshi theatrical version of the Rupban Kavya fable, the gaudy production mixes elements from the devotional, the social and the historical genres while invoking both the Laila-Majnu and the medieval Bengali Behula-Lakhindar love stories. A girl snake charmer cures a Prince and they fall in love, triggering court intrigues to forestall a marriage and numerous adventures delaying the happy ending. The Prince is represented as a weakling and the film’s most spectacular sequence shows the heroine braving impossible odds to support him. A rare Indo-Bangladeshi co-production and a megahit, especially with women in rural areas, in spite of its largely unfamiliar cast, low budget and consistently over-the-top performances.
BHARATHAM
aka Symphony
1991 147’ col Malayalam
d Sibi Malayil pc Pranavam Arts p Mohanlal s A.K. Lohitadas lyr Kaithapram c Anandakuttan m Ravindran
lp Mohanlal, Nedumudi Venu, Urvashi, Laxmi, Murali
The team responsible for the hit His Highness Abdullah (1990) followed on with a story about a well-known Carnatic singer Raman (Venu) whose popularity wanes because of his addiction to drink. His protege and younger brother Gopi (Mohanlal) is forced to substitute for him when, during a performance, Raman is booed off. This causes a rift between the brothers and Gopi gives up singing until a now-chastened Raman persuades him to make a comeback at an important music festival. However, Raman is killed by a truck and Gopi has to keep this a secret in order not to ruin the marriage changes of his mute sister. Gopi is later accused of having murdered his brother. The film was known mainly for its music and for the songs by star playback singer Yesudas.
BHAVANTARANA
1991 63’ col Oriya
d/s Kumar Shahani pc Bombay Cinematograph c Alok Upadhyay
A spectacular part-fictional documentary on India’s famous Odissi dance, seen via its foremost living exponent, Guru Kelucharan Mahapatra. The film shows how living traditions and modes of social initiation can turn into classical forms. Described by the director as a film ‘about hunger’, it returns the dance to both the labour that it celebrates and the improvisations that continue to defy codification and control. Many of the dances, including the spectacular Navarasa sequence at the end, were choreographed specially for the cinema.
CHINNA GOUNDER
1991 150’ col Tamil
d/sc R.V. Udayakumar pc Anandhi Films st/dial R. Selvaraj c A. Karthik Raja m Ilaiyaraja
lp Vijaykant, Sukanya, Manorama, Goundamani, Senthil, Saleem Ghouse
Chinna Gounder (Vijaykant), the popular village headman, marries the poor shepherd girl Devayani (Sukanya). His evil brother-in-law Sakare Gounder (Ghouse) causes a series of problems that culminate in Devayani being arrested for murder. Chinna Gounder, in order to protect Devayani’s pregnant sister Valli, claims responsibility for the pregnancy. The mess is eventually resolved and the villagers drive the villains out.
CHINNA THAMBI
1991 144’ col Tamil
d/s P. Vasu pc K.B. Films lyr Vairamuthu c Ravindra Babu m Ilaiyaraja
lp Prabhu, Khushboo, Manorama, Radharavi, Goundamani, Sulakshana
When it is predicted that Nandini, the first female child to be born after three generations in the richest family of the village, will grow up to marry a man of her choice, her brothers decide to bring up the girl in complete seclusion. When she grows up (Khushboo), the only male she is allowed to see is Chinna Thambi (Prabhu), the idiot son of Kannamma (Manorama). To escape, she forces Chinna Thambi to ritually ‘marry’ her by tying a mangalsutra (necklace) to her. This leads the brothers to retaliate, but eventually the idiot/rescues Nandini.
DHARAVI
aka Quicksand
1991 116’ col Hindi
d/s Sudhir Mishra pc NFDC/Doordarshan dial Atul Tiwari, Pranay Singh c Rajesh Joshi m Rajat Dholakia
lp Om Puri, Shabana Azmi, Raghuvir Yadav, Chandu Parkhi, Virendra Saxena, Pramod Bala, Satish Khopkar, Mushtaq Khan, Shakti Singh, Madhuri Dixit
Om Puri plays Rajkaran Yadav, an emigré taxi driver from U.P. living in Bombay’s notorious Dharavi slum. His wife Kusum (Azmi), living in a one-room tenement with his mother, works to contribute to her husband’s ambitious dream of owning a factory. However, the business enterprise is a disaster as the taxi driver gets embroiled with gangsters, forcing his wife to return to her first husband. The ending shows Yadav as boundlessly optimistic as he was at the outset. The film tries to transform the conventions of realism usually deployed for such stories (cf. Chakra, 1980) with surreal effects including the hero’s oscillations between fact and fantasy (the latter with Hindi superstar Madhuri Dixit). The opening sequence announces the film’s intentions as a Hindi movie being screened to slumdwellers in the open air is abruptly ended when the screen catches fire and the audience riots.
EN RASAVIN MANISILE
1991 143’ col Tamil
d/sc Kasturiraja p Rajkiran pc Red Sun International c Kichaas lyr Pirachudan m Ilaiyaraja
lp Rajkiran, Meena, Srividya, Saradha, Preetha, Vadivelu
Based on a Madurai folk narrative, the melodrama claims to address the downside of marriages arranged in the cradle, but actually solicits our sympathy and understanding for callously brutish men. The crude drunkard Mayandi (Rajkiran) marries and rapes his fearful young niece Cholaiamma (Meena), making her pregnant. The girl eventually realises that Mayandi is a nice man whom she should have loved all along, but it is too late and she dies in childbirth. Undeterred, Mayandi then turns his attentions to Choliamma’s sister Kasturi (Preetha) and, recognising that only truly brutish men are irresistible, she challenges him to try and take her away from the man who loves her. The latter, in contrast to the sterling masculine qualities of Mayandi, is represented as a weakling who actually loves Kasturi. Mayandi eventually realises that he has to curb his notions of ‘masculinity’. Unfortunately, he pays the price for this change of heart and he dies in the arduous process of helping Kasturi to get together with her beloved weakling, whereupon Kasturi adopts her sister’s orphaned child.
GANG LEADER
1991 155’ col Telugu
d/s Vijaya Bapineedu pc Syamprasad Arts p Maganti Ravindranath Choudhury dial Parachuri Bros. lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy, Bhuvana Chandra c H. Loksingh m Bappi Lahiri
lp Chiranjeevi, Vijayashanti, Sarath Kumar, Ravu Gopala Rao, Sumalatha, Murali Mohan, Sharat Saxena, Nirmala, Sudha, Allu Ramalingaiah, Satyanarayana, Nutan Prasad
Raghupati (Mohan), Raghava (Kumar) and Rajaram (Chiranjeevi) are brothers in a lower-middle class family. Only the eldest, Raghupati, is employed. Rajaram earns some money to pay for Raghava’s studies by agreeing to go to prison for a road accident caused by the daughter of a jailor (Satyanarayana). While he is in jail, Raghupati is killed by the villain Ekambaram (Rao), a crime for which photographic evidence is available but withheld from Rajaram. Further problems are caused when Raghava’s new wife (Sumalatha) and her corrupt father, a police officer, force a split between the brothers. Rajaram is arrested once again, this time for murder, but eventually, with the help of Ekambaram’s illegitimate daughter Kanyakumari (Vijayashanti), he rescues and reunites his entire family and kills the villain’s brother (Saxena) while Kanyakumari kills the villain. The film was remade as Aaj Ka Goonda Raj (1991) and includes all the standard narrative conventions of a Chiranjeevi film, such as a ‘solo’ song number and an elaborately choreographed fight sequence early in the story.
GAURI GANESHA
1991 148’ col Kannada
d/sc H.S. Phani Ramchandra pc Kalasindhu p Vishwa Sagar st Malladi Venkata Krishnamurthy dial Ku. Nagabhushan lyr Shyamsundar Kulkarni, Su. Rudramurthy Sastry, M.N. Vyasa Rao, V. Manohar c R. Manjunath m Rajan-Nagendra
lp Anant Nag, Vinaya Prasad, Shruti, Master Anand, Mukhyamantri Chandru, Ramesh Bhatt, Sihikahi Chandru, Umesh Navale, Ratnakar, Bangalore Nagesh, Bank Janardan, Sivaprakash, M.S. Umesh, B.K. Shankar, Vaishali, Shobha Raghavendra, Malathi, Kamalashree
Continues director Ramchandra’s popular ‘Ganesha’ series (cf. Ganeshana Madhuve, 1990). The confidence trickster Lambodhara (Nag) discovers from a dead woman’s diary the three men in her life, each of whom mistakenly believed they had sex with her. He blackmails each of the three men with the claim that he possesses the child that was born of that sexual encounter, but he then gets into trouble.
GUNA
1991 167’ col Tamil
d Santhana Bharathi p Alamelu Subramaniam sc Sabu John dial Balakumaran lyr Vali m Ilaiyaraja
lp Kamalahasan, Janakraj, Girish Karnad, S.P. Balasubramaniam, Kaka Radhakrishnan, Roshini, S. Varalakshmi, Rekha
Guna (Kamalahasan) is a mentally disturbed youth whose mother Mannonmani (Varalakshmi) runs a brothel. He is obsessed with fantasies in which he casts himself as Siva, expecting Abirami to come and redeem him. Having been persuaded by his uncle to break into a temple, Guna sees the beautiful heiress Roshni (Roshni) and takes her to be Abirami, abducting her first to the brothel and, when he cannot stay there with her, to Kodaikanal. Roshni eventually realises that the madman who kidnapped her is really a kind person and she gets him to betray their whereabouts to the police. When the cops arrive, Roshni begs Guna to surrender, promising that she will take care of him. However, when her evil guardian kills her, Guna retaliates and kills the villain before leaping to his death off a bridge, holding his beloved ‘Abirami’ in his arms, thus proving that nothing can separate Siva from Abirami.
HUM
1991 184’ col/scope Hindi
d Mukul S. Anand pc Romesh Films s Ravi Kapoor, Mohan Kaul dial Kader Khan lyr Anand Bakshi c W.B. Rao m Laxmikant-Pyarelal
lp Amitabh Bachchan, Kimi Katkar, Rajnikant, Anupam Kher, Danny Denzongpa, Kadar Khan, Govinda, Deepa Sahi, Shilpa Shirodkar, Romesh Sharma, Annu Kapoor
Beginning with silhouetted scenes (cf. Sam Fuller’s Underworld USA, 1960) in the Bombay dockyards recalling Deewar (1975) and ending with the star’s bloodshot eyes advancing towards the quivering villain, Mukul Anand’s hit provides a lexicon of Bachchanalia. Tiger (Bachchan), a petty collector of protection money, changes sides when his friend Gonsalves (Sharma) leads the exploited dockers against Mr Big, Bakhtawar (Denzongpa). The perfidious Inspector Giridhar (Kher) and his sidekick (Kapoor) manipulate the bloody confrontations so that Bakhtawar is jailed for Gonsalves’ murder, his family is exterminated and Tiger, together with his two brothers (Rajnikant and Govinda) and their families, is banished from the city. Years later, after idyllic family scenes and a complicated plot involving high-level scams in the Indian Army, the Bachchan clan has to go into action against a bunch of terrorists in pseudo-hippy costumes and equipped with an assortment of armaments. The high point of the film, refurbishing an ageing Bachchan image, is the big musical number Jumma chumma (taken from Mori Kante’s Akwaba Beach album) with Kimi Katkar performing in a bar filled with sweaty, beer-swilling and foot-stomping dockers whose collective ejaculation takes the form of spraying the star with whatever liquid is available. The scene is repeated, as the gang-rape connotations are replaced by those of movie-star mania, when Katkar becomes a star and both she and Bachchan are mobbed by crazed fans. The film received an unprecedented saturation release in over 400 cinemas.
IDIOT
1991 180’ col Hindi
d Mani Kaul pc Doordarshan st Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel sc Anup Singh dial Hemendra Bhatia, Rajeev Kumar c Piyush Shah m D. Wood, Vikram Joglekar
lp Ayub Khan Din, Shah Rukh Khan, Mita Vasisth, Navjot Hansra, Vasudeo Bhatt, Deepak Mahan, Babulal Bora, Meenakshi Goswami, Zul Velani, Amritlal Thulal
With this tour de force of control over a bewilderingly complex narrative and a massive cast of characters (more than 50 key roles) constantly shifting about in both geographic and cinematic spaces, Mani Kaul continues exploring Dostoevsky’s fiction (cf. Nazar, 1989), faithfully following the novel’s original plot transposed into a scathing depiction of a feudal elite, largely bypassed by history, located in Bombay and Goa. The story begins with the return of Myshkin (Ayub Khan), having spent many years in London undergoing treatment for epilepsy. He encounters the beautiful Nastasia (Vasisth), a femme fatale pursued by the rich Pawan Raghujan (Shah Rukh Khan) and the ambitious Ganesh (Mahan). The wealthy milieu seems to live in a vacuum, alongside a formerly productive generation, such as the businessman Mehta (Velani) and his proud daughter Amba (Hansra) or the retired, drunken colonel (Bora) who is accompanied by characters like Killer and the cynical and suicidal Shapit (Thulal) on the beaches of Goa. At Nastasia’s party both Ganesh and Myshkin propose to her, but she leaves with Raghujan who throws a bundle of banknotes at her which she proceeds to burn. After the central sequence in Goa, the colonel leaves home and dies, and Myshkin becomes engaged to Amba. However, he suffers an epileptic fit and the next day Nastasia breaks the engagement, claiming Myshkin for herself. Just before their wedding she again runs away to Raghujan who eventually kills her, after which he spends the night with Myshkin awaiting the police. In the end Myshkin is revealed to have gone mad. Kaul coolly orchestrates with great virtuosity the continuously mobile, elusive points of ‘stress’ (in Kaul’s phrase) as they shift from geographic location to cinematic space and back again, from the editing and gestural rhythms to the discontinuous soundtrack, achieving a multi-layered cinematic texture that at times threatens to stretch beyond the boundaries of the frame. The innovative approach to plot and narration keeps the film on a precarious edge between formal control and random collisions of speech and identity. Much of the film’s successful use of characters as ‘independent vertices’ (as the director describes them) follows the extraordinary performance of British Asian actor Ayub Khan who uses his difficulties with Hindi to considerable advantage as the nervous and culturally dislocated epileptic. The director commented: ‘Whereas for years I dwealt on rarefied wholes where the line of the narrative often vanished into thin air, with Idiot I have plunged into an extreme saturation of events. [P]ersonally, I find myself on the brink, exposed to a series of possible disintegrations. Ideas, then, cancel each other out and the form germinates. Content belongs to the future, and that’s how it creeps into the present’. The film was made as a four part TV series running 223’ and edited down to feature length.
(From left) Ayub Khan Din, Navjot Hansra, Mita Vasisth in Idiot
INSPECTOR BALRAM
1991 88’ col Malayalam
d I.V. Sasi pc Liberty Prod. st/sc/dial T. Damodaran c J. Williams m Shyam
lp Mammootty, Urvashi, Murali, Kiran Kumar, Soman, Geetha
The sequel of Avanazhi (1986) chronicles the further adventures of vigilante cop Balram (Mammootty) and Damodaran-Sasi’s investigations into corruption, violence and impotent liberal State institutions. Preethi (Urvashi), daughter of a rich jeweller who is murdered by a criminal nexus of smugglers and politicians, dares the incorruptible Balram to secure justice. When it turns out that this group of villains was also responsible for the killing of Balram’s wife, he takes the law into his own hands. Preethi proposes to Balram and he eventually agrees to marry her when he sees her motherly devotion to his daughter. Providing ‘comic relief is the parallel story of Constable Sudhakaran and his wife Leelamma who work in the same police department where she is his superior. He tries to establish his superiority in their domestic domain and threatens to hang himself because he has to salute his wife on duty. Hindi star Kiran Kumar plays Shah, the formulaically evil international drug trafficker, with aplomb.
JNAN GANDHARVAN
1991 142’ col Malayalam
d/s P. Padmarajan pc Goodknight films p R. Mohan lyr Kaithapram c Venu m Johnson
lp Nitish Bhardwaj, Aparna, Ganesh, Philomena
Padmarajan’s last film is a fantasy featuring the college-going Bhama (Aparna) and her passion for a celestial lover (Bhardwaj, better known as a Hindi TV star) who keeps appearing from a wooden statue that she found on a beach but is invisible to others. Eventually they are separated as he is punished by higher celestial powers.
KSHANA KSHANAM
1991 158’ col/scope Telugu
d/st/sc Ram Gopal Varma pc NRP Films p K.L. Narayana, Y. Lakshmana Choudhury dial Satyanand lyr Seetharama Sastry, Vennelakanti c S. Gopal Reddy m M.M. Keeravani
lp Venkatesh, Sridevi, Paresh Rawal, Rami Reddy, Brahmanandam, Krishna Rao
When the sexy working woman Satya (Sridevi) happens upon a clue to some hidden loot, she is targeted by a gang led by the villain Nayar (Rawal). Teaming up with a petty crook Chandu (Venkatesh), the pair are chased through the film by both the criminals and the police. This megabudget chase film opens with a suspenseful bank raid, moves to surreal forest scenes as the couple rough it beside a camp fire, and climaxes as the hero fights the gangsters atop a moving train. Director Varma shows himself able to assimilate recent Hollywood styles influenced by TV advertising and music clips (cf. John Badham’s Bird on a Wire, 1990). Most of the songs are inserted with no connection whatever to the plot, unusual even in a tradition noted for the autonomy of its song picturisations. Film critic Rajeev Velicheti (1992) used the film to identify a recent trend of consumerist cinema in AP calibrated on the linguistic-regional attitudes of a Hyderabad-based middle-class. The film was dubbed in Hindi as Hairaan.
MAHAPRITHIBI
aka World Within, World Without
1991 105’ col Bengali
d/sc Mrinal Sen pc G.G. Films st Anjan Dutt c Shashi Anand m B.V. Karanth, Chandan Roy Choudhury
lp Victor Bannerjee, Soumitra Chatterjee, Anjan Dutt, Aparna Sen, Geeta Sen, Anasuya Majumdar
With this film Sen returned to his most congenial setting, Calcutta, and to one of his favourite plot formulas: the sudden disappearance of a family member causes the others to reflect on themselves and their lives. Here Sen considers the lives of a Bengali middle-class family against the background of ‘the new world order’ with the defeat of the USSR in the cold war and the unification of Germany. When the elderly mother (G. Sen) of a Calcutta family hangs herself, her husband (S. Chatterjee), her youngest son (Dutta), her mentally unbalanced daughter (Majumdar) and her widowed daughter-in-law (A. Sen) are distraught but do not have the courage to read the old woman’s diary. When the eldest son (Bannerjee) returns from Germany, his anxious questioning brings to light the disorientation experienced by the family and the way world history penetrates into the fabric of individual lives. In the end the daughter, with silent anger and resentment, burns the mother’s diary, unread.
MAMAGARU
1991 158’ col Telugu
d/sc Muthyala Subbaiah pc M.M. Movie Arts p A. Mohan Krishna st V. Sekhar dial Totapalli Madhu lyr ‘Sirivennela’ Seetharama Sastry, Vennelakanti, D. Narayana Varma, Vedavyasa c R. Rama Rao m Raj-Koti
lp Dasari Narayana Rao, Vinod Kumar, Aishwarya, Nirmalamma, Yamuna, Kota Srinivasa Rao
Vijay (Vinod Kumar), the president of a village panchayat, rescues the simple Satheyya (Dasari), from an attack by thieves. Vijay later marries Satheyya’s daughter Lakshmi (Yamuna) against the parental wishes of Kanthamma (Nirmalamma), who wants him to marry his niece Rani (Aishwarya). Vijay also brings his father-in-law to live with him. These decisions anger his brother-in-law Pothuraju (Kota Srinivasa Rao) who plots to discredit Vijay’s family. Lakshmi dies in an accident and Setheyya is driven out of Vijay’s house after Pothuraju accuses the old man of being a womaniser. Vijay finally sees through Pothuraju’s evil designs but not before Satheyya commits suicide. The low-budget melodrama revolves the performance of Dasari, being directed by the noted filmmaker’s former assistant.
NARASIMHA
1991 214’ col Hindi
d/p/s N. Chandra pc N. Chandra Prod. lyr Javed Akhtar c Binod Pradhan m Laxmikant-Pyarelal
lp Sunny Deol, Dimple Kapadia, Om Puri, Urmila, Ravi Behl, Babban Yadav, Satish Shah, Guddi Maruti, Sharat Saxena, Usha Nadkarni, Shafi Inamdar, Om Shivpuri, Nivedita Joshi, Brij Gopal, Shail Chaturvedi
Baapji (Om Puri) is the self-styled king of a township. His loyal lieutenant Narasimha (Sunny Deol) commits the crimes for him. Baapji kills the only honest policeman who attempts to arrest him, and the cop’s son, who is in love with Baapji’s daughter, is severely beaten. Baapji’s daughter drives off a mountainside and declares that she will do worse if her father does her boyfriend any more harm. When Baapji asks Narasimha to expel the policeman’s family from the town, Narasimha recalls his own homeless past, reforms and turns against his mentor. The film updates Vishnu Purana’s legend: Narasimha, half man and half lion, bursts out of a pillar to destroy the evil Hiranyakashapu. Sunny Deol, acting in the Rambo-style, performs the mythological act shortly after he has been chained and whipped, and then goes on almost single-handedly to destroy Baapji’s mansion, allowing the young lovers to be united. The villain is killed through divine intervention as he is impaled by the falling hand of a giant clock. Chandra’s visceral camerawork matches the performance of the muscular Deol and together they amount to a savage argument in defence of a revivalist mass culture.
NIRNAYAM
1991 170’ col Telugu
d/s Priyadarshan pc Shri Jayabheri Art Prod dial Ganesh Patro lyr Ganesh Patro c Kumar m Ilaiyaraja
lp Nagarjuna, Amala, Murali Mohan, Sudhakar, Sharat Saxena, Annapoorna
Based loosely on John Badham’s Stakeout (1987), a police officer (Nagarjuna) leaves his job to avenge the humiliation of a dying man (Mohan). Announcing a new professionalism in 90s filmmaking (cf. Mani Rathnam, Ram Gopal Varma, also the director’s own Thenmavin Kombath, 1994), the technical sophistication was best demonstrated in the replication of Abid’s, a well-known Hyderabad business locality, as a set for some of the action.
PRAHAAR
1991 166’ col/scope Hindi
d/co-s Nana Patekar pc Divya Films Combine co-s Sujit Sen dial Hriday Lani lyr Mangesh Kulkarni c Debu Deodhar m Laxmikant-Pyarelal
lp Nana Patekar, Dimple Kapadia, Madhuri Dixit, Habib Tanvir
Patekar’s weirdly fascist fantasy of a military Pied Piper followed by naked boys about to be transformed into a glorious army of bullies which will sort out the mess created by ‘emasculated’ people in the real world. The first half of the film lovingly portrays a dictatorial Major Chouhan (Patekar himself) subjecting the youthful male bodies to some gruelling tests. We learn that the major’s Messianism is rooted in a tragic childhood: his mother was sold as a prostitute and he spends the rest of his life compensating for the helplessness he felt then. When one of the major’s wards is killed by gangsters extracting protection money from his father, the local baker, Patekar confronts the thugs, but the ordinary folk in the area do not understand the need for drastic action and the hero is forced to massacre the villains in the dead of night, watched only by the widow of one of their former victims. The climax is, in the light of subsequent events in Bombay, a chillingly deliberate orgy of violence. The ensuing court case sentences Patekar to a lunatic asylum, where he fantasises about his naked, pubescent army.
SANDESHAM
1991 146’ col Malayalam
d Sathyan Andhikkad pc Evershine Prod. s Srinivasan lyr Kaithapram c Vipin Mohan m Johnson
lp Thilakan, Jayaram, Srinivasan, Siddique, Madhu, Kaviyoor Ponnamma
Popular social satire by the leading Malayalam genre practitioners addressing political parties and slogan-shouting activists. Having retired as a stationmaster in Tamil Nadu, the hero (Thilakan) returns to Kerala after 30 years to find his two unemployed sons (Srinivasan and Jayaram) have become full-time hangers-on in opposing political parties, asserting their strident political rhetoric both in and out of the house. The two sons try in vain to put ‘service before self until their harassed father, on the verge of ruin, makes them see sense. The positive contrast is provided by the enterprising and prudent agricultural officer (Siddique) who marries their sister and represents the film’s plea on behalf of apolitical, small businesses. The typically hilarious dialogue by Srinivasan bolsters this message.
SAUDAGAR
1991 213’ col/scope Hindi
d/st Subhash Ghai pc Mukta Arts sc Sachin Bhowmick dial Kamlesh Pandey lyr Anand Bakshi c Ashok Mehta m Laxmikant-Pyarelal
lp Dilip Kumar, Raaj Kumar, Vivek Mushran, Manisha Koirala, Anupam Kher, Gulshan Grover, Dina Pathak, Jackie Shroff, Deepti Naval, Dalip Tahil, Mukesh Khanna, Anand Balraj, Amrish Puri
Billed as a clash of titans between the 60s stars Raaj and Dilip Kumar, the conflict between two ageing patriarchs is told as a parable by Mandhari (Kher). The two are bosom buddies in their youth and Bir Singh aka Biru (Dilip Kumar) is supposed to marry Thakur Rajeshwar Singh’s (Raaj Kumar) sister. However, he has to abandon her because honour requires him to save a woman who has been rejected on the eve of her wedding. The thakur’s sister commits suicide and the buddies become bitter enemies, pursuing their feud over two decades while their respective families proliferate on either side of the Beas river. Each maintains a private army to counter the other’s threat. The real villain, Rajeshwar Singh’s brother-in-law Chuniya (Puri), has Biru’s eldest son Vishal (Shroff) killed when he tries to make peace. Vishal’s son Vasu (Mushran), sent to an ashram to prepare for joining his grandfather’s army, now falls in love with the enemy’s granddaughter Radha (Koirala) and the two eventually bring the warring clans together. The partiarchs die in each other’s arms. Dialogue reigns supreme in the film but the love interest between Vasu and Radha (played by newcomers, this being Koirala’s debut) culminates in the hit song Ilu ilu.
SEETA RAMAIGARI MANAVARULU
1991 145’ col Telugu
d/p/s Kranthi Kumar pc Shri Krishna Chitra lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c Hari Anumolu m M.M. Keeravani
lp A. Nageshwara Rao, Rohini Hattangadi, Meena, Dasari Narayana Rao, Murali Mohan
The old man Seetharamaiah’s (ANR) grand-daughter (Meena) returns from the USA with news that his son has died in an accident. The problem is how to tell the tragic news to the old man with a weak heart. The film deals mainly with the relationship between the old man and his grand-daughter, also forming a showpiece for ‘Telugu culture’ - extended into a conspicuous use of dress, custom, festivals and ritual - as the foreign-educated grand-daughter turns more ‘traditional’ than even the local people.
SOMETHING LIKE AWAR
1991 63’ col English
d Deepa Dhanraj pc D&N Prod. Equal Media c Navroze Contractor
Noted feminist documentary addressing the Indian government’s controversial family planning programme. After the infamous Sanjay Gandhi-led forced sterilisation programmes during the Emergency (1975–6), the programme ran into trouble again promoting injectable contraception, hormonal implants and abortifacient pills, often on the recommendation of international population control agencies dominated by multinational corporate interests. The film concentrates on the experience of the women subjected to the programme, contrasting this with the official discourse and the well-known government-sponsored advertising jingles (‘small family happy family’). The women speak with, for Indian film, unprecedented candour. The rapid TV-style editing sometimes undoes the fine camerawork but the film manages to convey that the invocation of Western-style notions of individual freedom in the very different context of Indian women’s lived conditions can be oppressive, esp. when women are socially denied the right to control their fertility and do not have access to appropriate post-operative health care systems.
SURYA TEJOR ANYA NAAM
1991? col Assamese
d/s Dinesh Gogoi pc Udaygiri Films p Mrinal Kumar Saikia c Ajan Barua m Gagan Gogoi
lp Mihir Bordoloi, Alok Nath, Violet Nazir, Mridul Sutiya
Made in a ‘mainstream’ fashion deliberately adapting Hindi film conventions, this melodrama however attracted attention for being one of the first to consciously address the problem of political insurgency in Assam.
VEERAPPAN
1991 151’ col Kannada
d/s Raveendranath pc Jain Movies p Chandulal Jain lyr Doddarange Gowda c Mallikarjuna m Guna Singh
lp Devaraj, Lokesh, Vanita Vasu, Sivakumar, Manu, Girish, Rajaram, Avinash, Thoogudeepa Srinivas, Sundarakrishna Urs, Mukhyamantri Chandru, Mysore Lokesh, Triveni, Chandrakumari, Leela Basavaraj, Ratnamma, Sumalatha, Radha, Vijay, Seema, Ravivarma, B.M. Venkatesh
Topical film referring, in part, to notorious real-life sandalwood smuggler Veerappan, operating on the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu border, who hit the news following a series of violent encounters with the police in the early 90s. Like crime journalism dramatising the confrontations between the good and bad while retaining a veneer of support for the legal system, the film is formally dedicated to the police who lost their lives in their efforts to capture Veerappan. However, it begins with a scene in which Veerappan (Devaraj) discusses and gives his approval to the production. A priest then explains Veerappan’s life as being a consequence of his impoverished childhood. This leads to the next character, Nayakan (Lokesh), formerly Veerappan’s employer, but now his enemy, who points to the latter’s Robin Hood-type inclinations. Veerappan’s revenge for the rape of his sister and his encounters with the police then follow. The film ends with a pair of brave police officers setting out to get him, but he eludes them.
ANKURAM
1992 131’ col Telugu
d/s Uma Maheshwara Rao pc Film India Art Creations p K.V. Suresh Kumar dial Tanikella Bharani lyr Seetharama Sastry c Madhu Ambat m Hamsalekha
lp Revathi, Om Puri, Sarath Babu, Charuhasan, Madhuri, P.L. Narayana
An unidentified man (Puri) in a train leaves his infant child in the care of a fellow passenger (Revathi) when he is arrested for being a suspected Naxalite. Much of the film deals with Revathi’s struggles with numerous government agencies as she tries to trace the man. Shot on location, and evoking a political genre attacking State repression in Andhra Pradesh, the commercial hit was a somewhat deliberate, though technically limited, effort to translate the New Indian Cinema into Telugu.
A OKATI ADAKKU
1992 155’ col Telugu
d/sc E.V.V. Satyanarayana pc AVM Film p M. Saravanan, M. Balasubramanyam st Kalaimani dial L.B. Sriram lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy, Bhuvana Chandra c V. Srinivasa Reddy m Ilaiyaraja
lp Rajendra Prasad, Rambha, Ravu Gopala Rao, Brahmanandam, Babu Mohan
Story of a man (Prasad) who cannot consummate his marriage until he earns the money he had promised in order to prove his worthiness to his wicked father-in-law (Gopala Rao). Much of the dialogue works with double-entendre, and the film is remembered mainly for Gopala Rao’s performance. Attacked for obscenity, this was one of Satyanarayana’s early encounters with controversy around sexual explicitness (cf. Alluda Majaaka, 1995).
APATHBANDHAVUDU
aka The Saviour
1992 173’ col Telugu
d/s K. Vishwanath pc Poornodaya Movie Creations p Edida Nageshwara Rao dial Jandhyala lyr C. Narayana Reddy, ‘Sirivennela’ Seetharama Sastry c A. Vincent, Ajayan Vincent m M.M. Keeravani
lp Chiranjeevi, Meenakshi Sheshadri, Sarath Babu, Geetha, Allu Ramalingaiah, Nirmala, Brahmanandam, Satyanarayana, Jandhyala
Madhava (Chiranjeevi), a member of the ‘backward’ Yadava caste, is raised by a benevolent Brahmin school teacher (Telugu scenarist/filmmaker Jandhyala) and dedicates his life to the support of the teacher’s family. He raises the money for the marriage of Lalitha (Geeta), the man’s eldest daughter. The second daughter, Hema (Sheshadri), falls for him, although she is to marry her cousin Sripathi (Babu). Lalitha’s husband tries to rape Hema and kills his own wife. Hema goes mad and is admitted to an asylum, which Madhava also enters pleading insanity, and he rescues her. The two eventually marry, transcending caste differences with the support of Sripathi and his father (Ramalingaiah). As with other Vishwanath protagonists, the hero is a model of selfless virtue (cf. Swayamkrushi, 1987) and Chiranjeevi’s performance won much critical acclaim. The film’s unusually explicit references to caste (cf. Rudraveena, 1988) can be read as upper caste unease within the context of major backward-caste mobilisation in the wake of the anti-Mandal Commission agitations. This is seen especially in the space occupied by the lead character, whose withdrawal from the public arena and dedication to his mentor’s family consciously evacuates all questions of his political rights, an issue made explicit by the Dalit movements of the time.
aka A Cry in the Wilderness
1992 87’ col Oriya
d/sc Biplab Roy Choudhury pc Gouri Pics st Satkadi Hora c Raju Mishra m Shantanu Mahapatra
lp Priyambada Roy, Master Ramdas Murmu, Laltendu Rath, Raicharan Das, Sarat Pujari
Kalyani (Roy), an intrepid journalist, investigates the rape and murder of a tribal woman by a politician in rural Orissa. Later, she also investigates the criminal activities of a moneylender, becoming increasingly involved in the lives of the tribal people, adopting the child of the dead tribal woman. However, her editor either suppresses or publishes distorted versions of her stories. This is intercut with the journalist’s own troubled married life.
BALARAM KRISHNUDU
1992 142’ col Telugu
d/s Raviraja Pinisetty pc Vineela Art Prod. p Sankara Madhu Murali dial T. Bharani lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy, Seetharama Sastry c Vijay m Raj-Koti
lp Shobhan Babu, Rajasekhar, Ramya Krishna, Jagapathi Babu, Srividya, Gollapudi Maruti Rao, T. Bharani, Babu Mohan, Brahmanandam, Rajivi, Kalpana
Feudal family drama with a rural background. Balaramaiah (Shobhan Babu) and Krishna Murthi (Rajasekhar) are step-brothers who become sworn enemies as a result of a misunderstanding caused by the film’s villain (Gollapudi). Balaramaiah is the village head and temple trustee, and holds his half-brother in contempt for having been born to a lower-caste ‘untouchable’ woman. Krishna Murthi however saves the former’s daughter from an attempted rape. Later Krishna Murthi’s sister dies trying to prevent the same woman from being kidnapped. The brothers finally reunite after Balaramaiah’s wife reminds him of his debts to Krishna Murthi and his family. The two half-brothers, depicted as rival feudal patriarchs, allow the caste aspect to surface only towards the film’s end, although hints are presented throughout the plot.
BETA
1992 171’ col/scope Hindi
d/co-p Indra Kumar pc Maruti International co-p Vinod Doshi, Ashok Thakeria st K. Bhagyaraj sc Gyandev Agnihotri dial Kamlesh Pandey lyr Sameer c Baba Azmi m Anand-Milind, Vanraj Bhatia
lp Anil Kapoor, Madhuri Dixit, Aruna Irani, Laxmikant Berde, Akash Khurana, Ajitesh, Anupam Kher, Rita Bhaduri
A rich widower (Khurana) marries Laxmi (Irani) to provide a mother for his infant son Raju. However, she is an evil woman who schemes to appropriate her husband’s property by having him locked away, making her stepson emotionally dependent on her and moving in with her equally villainous brother (Kher). Raju (Kapoor) grows up an illiterate peasant, but when he marries Saraswati (Dixit), the new daughter-in-law sets things right. The major dramatic pivot constitutes the assembling of a new patriarchy around Raju and around the contradiction of ‘bad’ characters being positioned in positive roles: e.g. the daughter-in-law must persecute the evil Laxmi without tarnishing Laxmi’s authority as her mother-in-law, and Raju himself has to accede to new notions of morality - including economic independence from the joint family - while the narrative must sustain his symbolic regard for his stepmother. After his second success (Dil, in 1990, was his first) Indra Kumar went on to make it three-in-a-row with Raja (1995), all starring Madhuri Dixit. The film is notorious mainly for its erotic picturisation of the Dhak dhak number (Anand Patwardhan later refers to the song in Father Son and Holy War, 1994, as epitomising male fantasy).
Aruna Irani and Madhuri Dixit in Beta (1992)
BRINDAVANAMU
1992 153’ col Telugu
d/sc Singeetham Srinivasa Rao pc Chandamama-Vijaya Combines p B. Venkata Rama Reddy
st/dial D.V. Narasaraju lyr Vennelakanti c R. Deviprasad m Madhavapeddi Suresh
lp Rajendra Prasad, Ramya Krishna, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Anjali Devi, Satyanarayana, Sudhakar
Produced by the Vijaya studio and reviving their tradition of the rural family melodrama (cf. Shavukaru, 1950), the story has Satyanarayana playing a character who tries to cheat an old couple (Rao and Anjali Devi) out of their house. The film’s hero (Prasad) is the couple’s grandson, the heroine (Ramya) the villain’s grand-daughter. The lead pair teach the villain a lesson.
CHAITRADA PREMANJALI
1992 159’ col/scope Kannada
d/s S. Narayan pc M.C. Prod p M. Shashikala c P.K.H. Das lyr/m Hamsalekha
lp Raghuveer, Shweta, Lokesh, Srinivasa Murthy, Rajanand, Satyajit, Abhijeet, Swastik Shankar, Shobharaj, Jyothi, S. Narayan, Ashalata
‘Fresh faces’ romance with a tragic end. Karate champion Prem (Raghuveer) goes to the family country retreat to practice for a tournament and falls for village girl Anju (Shweta). Her father (Lokesh), however, prevents the marriage and tries to force her to marry a womaniser with an obliging father. Prem wins his trophy and rescues Anju, but the couple are killed by the bad guys.
CHELUVI
aka The Flowering Tree
1992 102’ col Hindi
d/s/co-dial Girish Karnad pc Sadir Media, Doordarshan p B.V. Ramachandra co-dial Padmavati Rao lyr Vasant Dev c Rajiv Menon m Bhaskar Chandavarkar
lp Sonali Kulkarni, Gargi Yakkundi, Prashant Rao, Geetanjali Kirloskar, B. Jayashree, Sushma, Poornima Chikkerur, Girish Karnad, Padmavati Rao, Appayya, Sivdasan, Suresh Kulkarni, Vijaya Yakkundi
Karnad retells a Karnataka folk-tale, dubbed in Hindi, usually told by women while feeding children or putting them to bed, a time when other women would also be present. A young woman, Cheluvi (Kulkarni), living in abject poverty with her mother and sister, can turn herself into a tree yielding an endless supply of blossoms as long as they are picked very carefully. The son, Kumar (Prashant Rao), of the village headman (Karnad), seduced by the scent of the flowers, marries Cheluvi and they enjoy her flowering in strict privacy. During Kumar’s absence, the headman’s young daughter Shyama (G. Yakkundi) forces Cheluvi to disclose her secret. Unable to comprehend the delicacy and beauty of the event, the children destroy the tree, leaving Cheluvi’s body as a mutilated tree-stump. In the end, Kumar disconsolately leaves carting off the Cheluvi-stump. The folklorist A.K. Ramanujan pointed out that in Sanskrit and in Kannada the same word is used for ‘flowering’ and ‘menstruation’. Art direction is provided by Jayoo and Nachiket Patwardhan.
DAIVATHINTE VIKRITHIKAL
1992 108’ col Malayalam
d/sc Lenin Rajendran pc Souparnika Movie Arts st M. Mukundan lyr O.N.V. Kurup c Madhu Ambat m Mohan Sitara
lp Raghuvaran, Srividya, Thilakan, Vineeth, Sudheesh, Siddique
Based on the writings of noted author Mukundan, the film is set near the river Mayyazhi (Mahe) in an ex-French colony with continuing cultural links to its former colonial power. Father Alphonse (Raghuvaran), a French-speaking priest, amateur magician and alcoholic, decides to stay when Independence comes and the colonial functionaries depart on the last ship to Paris, much to the despair of his Francophile wife Maggie (Srividya). Years later, when their son Michael leaves for France in search of the ‘good life’, he shatters Maggie’s hopes for redemption. Their daughter Elsie becomes pregnant by her childhood friend (Vineeth), the son of a landlord and former Congress Party worker (Thilakan), and Alphonse’s only remaining acquaintance. The younger son of this landlord quits a potentially successful career at University in order to join a radical Naxalite group. The original novel attempted to investigate the conditions of culturally marginalized communities in Independent India. Rajendran, who contested elections supported by the CPI(M), proposes a critique of the ruling Congress Party, presenting it as a once-radical movement now infested with corruption and challenged by the progressive Left. The cinematographer Ambat’s work is, as usual, outstanding, especially in its creation of claustrophobic spaces.
GAURAVAR
1992 157’ col Malayalam
d Joshi pc Chandini Films s A.K. Lohitadas lyr Kaithapram c Jayanan Vincent m S.P. Venkatesh
lp Mammootty, Thilakan, Murali, Anju, Babu Anthony
Anthony (Mammootty) and Aliyar (Thilakan) are two ex-convicts whose families have been exterminated by the police. When they are released, they team up to destroy, in revenge, the family of Haridas, the honest policeman responsible for the original killing but now retired. Haridas, in his dying moments, confesses to Anthony that one of his three daughters is in fact Anthony’s illegitimate daughter, whom Haridas had rescued and adopted many years ago. Anthony now changes sides and turns into the protector of Haridas’s family against the attacks of his former prison-mate Aliyar. He eventually kills Aliyar and his entire gang.
GHARANA MOGUDU
1992 149’ col Telugu
d K. Raghavendra Rao pc Devi Film Prod. p K. Devi Varaprasad st P. Vasu dial Parachuri Bros. co-lyr Bhuvana Chandra c Ajayan Vincent co-lyr/m M.M. Keeravani
lp Chiranjeevi, Naghma, Vani Vishwanath, Rao Gopala Rao, Satyanarayana, Sharat Saxena, Aahuti Prasad, P.L. Narayana, Chalapathi Rao, Brahmanandam, Ramaprabha, Disco Shanti
Unemployed dock worker Raju (Chiranjeevi) saves the life of industrialist Bapineedu (Gopala Rao) who, in return, offers him a job. Raju’s efforts to organise the workers lead to a clash with Bapineedu’s daughter Uma Devi (Naghma), who runs the company. Raju becomes the president of the workers’ union, defeating Sarangapani (Prasad) who, it turns out, is actually in league with Uma Devi’s chief rival Ranganayakulu (Satyanarayana). Uma Devi marries Raju shortly after he has saved her life following the rivals’ plan to have her murdered, but this, it is later revealed, is only in order to ‘tame’ the otherwise invincible union worker. Raju moves into Uma Devi’s mansion where he continues his union work, leading a strike when Bhawani (Vishwanath), the woman who originally loved him, is dismissed by Uma Devi. In the end, when the true villains Ranganayakulu and his son (Saxena) try to destroy Uma Rani by burning the factory, Raju saves his wife again and ‘forgives’ her. Taming the wild and arrogant (i.e. independent) woman is a major preoccupation of several Chiranjeevi films, his adolescent machismo being boosted as much by thrashing dozens of villains as by putting women in their place (cf. Donga Mogudu, 1987; Rickshavudu and Alluda Majaaka, both 1995). One of Chiranjeevi’s most successful film, its release coincided with the brutal repression of a Naxalite-led workers’ movements, in this instance making reference to the Patancheru industrial area in Hyderabad. Several notorious ‘encounters’ between the police and political activists in this period of extreme State repression when Janardhana Reddy was the State Chief Minister, also led to a genre of worker-centered films featuring and made by R. Narayanmurthy (eg. Erra Sainyam, 1994). The film was a remake of the Rajnikant film Mannan (1991).
HALADHAR
aka The Yeoman
1992? col Assamese
d Sanjib Hazarika pc Prahar Chitram p Geeti Barua, Dwijen Hazarika s Apurba Sharma c Ajan Barua m Sher Choudhury
lp Nayan, Hiranya Deka, Indra Bania, Atul Pachani
The honest farmer Boloram (Nayan) has his newly made plough stolen by the local moneylender (Bania). Boloram had promised it to someone else and his honour is at stake. Told mainly as a reformist fable, attaching the plough with symbolic overtones, the film inaugurates Hazarika’s now well known style of realist melodrama (cf. Meemanxa, 1994).
HALLI MESTRU
1992 162’ col Kannada
d Mohan-Manju pc Eswari Prod.
p M. Veeraswamy s K. Bhagyaraj dial/lyr/m Hamsalekha
lp Ravichandran, Bindiya, Balkrishna, Silk Smitha, Thoogudeepa Srinivas
Pop star Ravichandran plays a village school-teacher in this Kannada adaptation of the Tamil ‘drumstick’ comedy genre (sex comedies named after a vegetable widely believed to be an aphrodisiac). The sexy village girl Parimala (Bindiya) is attracted to the widowed teacher. In the end, after a bizarre chain of events, Parimala is saved in the nick of time from undergoing a tubectomy. Silk Smitha’s adult education classes in the film provide most of the sex comedy.
HUN HUNSHI HUNSHILAL
aka Love in the Time of Malaria
1992 140’(133’) col Gujarati
d Sanjiv Shah pc Karanar Prod. s/lyr Paresh Naik c Navroze Contractor m Rajat Dholakia
lp Dilip Joshi, Renuka Shahane, Manoj Joshi, Mohan Gokhale, Arvind Vaidya
Gujarati musical allegory about politics. The middle-class scientist Hunshilal (Joshi), mainly through the actions of his scientist-girlfriend Parveen (Shahane), is pitted against a despotic politician, King Bhadrabhoop II of Khojpuri (Gokhale) whose subjects are bitten by a mysterious breed of mosquitoes and become restless. Hunshilal is employed by the Queen’s Laboratory to eradicate the mosquitoes but he defects, with Parveen, to the side of the bugs. He is caught and brainwashed but Parveen escapes the kingdom and sets out for the land of the mosquitoes beyond the Black Hills. The rulers are portrayed as indolent oppressors who spend their time playing with toy guns and toy trains. The film’s somewhat forced effort to assimilate a postmodern aesthetic is mainly evidenced in an unprecedentedly large number of songs cut into an already overcrowded soundtrack.
JATHI MALLI
1992 159’ col Tamil
d/co-sc K. Balachander p Kavithalaya co-sc Ananthu c Raghunatha Reddy lyr Vairamuthu m Maragatha Mani
lp Mukesh, Kushboo, Yuvarani, Vichitra, K.S. Gajalakshmi, Vineeth, Nasser, Madan Bob, Delhi Ganesh, Charlie
A confused film abstractly bemoaning communal violence but actually more concerned with the victims of police violence. After losing her parents in communal riots, Sriranjani (Kushboo) seeks refuge in Ooty where she meets Kesavan (Mukesh), who is recovering from being jilted. Kesavan is involved in a car crash and Sriranjini is abducted by a stalker, Reddy (Nasser), a fan of her music. Kesavan eventually manages to get to Hyderabad, searching for Sriranjini, while a pair of young lovers they befriended obtains parental permission to stay together, allowing them to join in the search for Sriranjini amidst the communal riots besetting the city. Sriranjini and Kesavan, eventually united, witness how the police, mistaking the young lovers for rioters, brutally murder them, allowing the film to end badly while detracting attention from the issues involved in communal violence. The title refers to the jasmine flower, but its design in the film and on posters scored off the word ‘jathi’ (caste).
JO JEETA WOHI SIKANDAR
1992 174’ col/scope Hindi
d/s Mansoor Khan pc Nasir Hussain Films p/dial Nasir Hussain lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri c Najeeb Khan m Jatin-Lalit
lp Aamir Khan, Ayesha Julka, Deepak Tijori, Pooja Bedi, Kulbhushan Kharbanda
Successful teen musical follow-up by the makers of Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988). Set in Dehradun in the colonial public schools, the story features the traditional sports rivalry between the rich Rajput College and the more middle-class Modern School. The hero Sanju (Khan) leads a gang of no-hopers while his sincere elder brother Ratan tries to win the annual cycling race, trained by his father Ramlal (Kharbanda) who also runs the local tea shop and student hang-out. The rivalry spills over into other areas when the rich and sexy new girl in town (Bedi) is wooed by both hero and villain (Tijori), the dance and sports star of the rival Rajput College. Sanju pretends to be rich, but is eventually ditched by the girl when the truth comes out, after which he accepts his childhood sweetheart Anjali (Julka) and wins the cycle race. The film loosely adapts the Archie comics idiom, still popular among Indian teenagers, and that of Randal Kleiser’s Grease (1978), furthering Aamir Khan’s familiar ‘boy next door’ image.
KAMALABAI
1992 46’ col Marathi/Hindi
d/p Reem Mohan c Ranjan Palit, K.U. Mohanan
Documentary about the Marathi theatre and screen actress Kamalabai Gokhale who also played the lead in Phalke’s Mohini Bhasmasur (1914). Based on interviews with the octogenarian in her Pune flat and with several clips from Phalke films, Mohan captures some revealing moments with complex cinematic reverberations: e.g. Kamalabai informally re-enacts roles she played in the 20s and, at the end of the film, she suddenly realises that the camera has been filming her all that time. Made over a three-year period, the film chronicles changing seasons and times of day with a finely tuned soundtrack and innovative camerawork.
KAMALATHALAM
1992 154’ col Malayalam
d Sibi Malayil pc Pranavam Arts s A.K. Lohitadas lyr Kaithapram c Anandakuttan m Ravindran
lp Mohanlal, Monisha, Parvathi, Vineeth, Nedumudi Venu
Nandagopal (Mohanlal) is a respected dance teacher at the Kerala Kala Mandiram (alluding to the famed Kalamandalam repertory which performs Kerala’s temple arts). However, his wife (Parvathi) commits suicide, causing the hero to turn into an alcoholic and compulsive rule-breaker. He is suspected of having killed his wife and is suspended from his job for drunken misbehaviour. The new secretary of the institute (Venu) wants him to be sacked, but his former reputation gives him a reprieve. He trains the talented student Malavika (Monisha) to perform in his ambitious composition of the Sita Kalyanam, but her jealous young lover (Vineeth) poisons him. The predictable ending sees Nandagopal reuniting with his wife in death. The film continues the well-known Lohitadas-Malayil team’s neo-traditional musicals for Mohanlal’s production outfit, but lacks the taut storylines of its predecessors (His Highness Abdullah, 1990; Bharatham, 1991). It also continues Mohanlal’s endeavours to display the full range of his talents as he performs Bharata Natyam dance.
KHUDA GAWAH
1992 193’ col/scope Hindi
d Mukul S. Anand pc Glamour Films s/co-dial Santosh Saroj co-dial Rajkumar Bedi lyr Anand Bakshi c W.B. Rao m Laxmikant-Pyarelal
lp Amitabh Bachchan, Sridevi, Danny Denzongpa, Nagarjuna, Vikram Gokhale, Shilpa Shirodkar, Kiran Kumar
Bachchan and the successful team that had made Hum (1991) went on to make this film which starts in an unspecified period in tribal Afghanistan. The hero Badshah Khan (Bachchan) goes to India to avenge the killing of heroine Benazir’s (Sridevi) father. He does so, but in the process becomes involved in an honour pact with a Rajput police officer (Gokhale), which eventually forces Badshah to take responsibility for the cop’s death when the latter is murdered by a drug-smuggling bandit (Kumar). Later, when an old Badshah is released from jail, his daughter, whom he has never seen, has grown into a second Benazir (Sridevi again), forcing Badshah to come to terms with his past. He overwhelms the narcotics bandit with the help of two young police officers (Nagarjuna and Shirodkar) who are more or less his wards by virtue of the old honour pact. Badshah’s action also reconciles him with his by-now nearly demented wife Benazir. The complicated plot is told via an extravagant camera style including numerous shots, often from a helicopter, of deserts and mountain vistas. The film is dedicated to Manmohan Desai.
KILLER
1992 160’ col Telugu
d/s Fazil pc Jagapathi Art Pics. p V.B. Rajendra Prasad dial Jandhyala lyr Veturi Sundara Raramurthy c Anandakuttan m Ilaiyaraja.
lp Nagarjuna, Naghma, Annapurna, Shyamali, Sharada
The hero (Nagarjuna), orphaned when his mother is killed by local thugs, is raised by a nurse (Annapurna), but grows up into a loner and professional hitman with sophisticated weaponry, reflecting the character’s origins in the TV serial Streethawk (1985–6). Hired to assassinate a rich little heiress (Shyamali), he discovers that he is related to the heiress and to her guardian (Sharada) as well as to his evil client who is after their property. He eliminates the villains and also restores the fractured family. The film’s music proved popular, notably the hit Priya Priyatama Ragalu. Although appreciated for its technical qualities, the film was only moderately successful. Naghma, as the hero’s girlfriend, has a purely decorative role.
MAYA MEMSAAB
aka The Enchanting Illusion
1992 127’ col Hindi
d/co-sc Ketan Mehta pc NFDC, Channel Four, Film Four International (UK), Video Cinema 13 Prod (France) st Flaubert’s Madame Bovary co-sc Sitanshu Yashahchandra dial Hriday Lani, Gulan Kripalani lyr Gulzar c Anup Jotwani m Hridaynath Mangeshkar
lp Deepa Sahi, Faroque Sheikh, Shah Rukh Khan, Raj Babbar, Shreeram Lagoo, Sudha Shivpuri, Paresh Rawal, Raghuvir Yadav, Om Puri, Satyadev Dubey
Maya (Sahi), the beautiful but extravagant wife of a country doctor (Sheikh), craves a glamorous life and has a series of love affairs (Khan, Babbar) while becoming indebted to Lalaji (Rawal). The film ends tragically when her house is auctioned and she appears to be engulfed by her fantasy life. The story is narrated in flashback as a reconstruction of the life of Maya (also meaning ‘illusion’). An Indo-European co-production, the film is formally and thematically ambitious, adapting Flaubert while revisiting a range of Indian film and television genres which are shown to shape Maya’s fantasies.
MUTHA MESTRY
1992 163’ col Telugu
d A. Kodandarami Reddy pc Kamakshi Devi Kamal Combines p K.C. Shekhar Babu, D. Sivaprasad Reddy st Bhupati Raja sc/dial Parachuri Bros. c S. Gopal Reddy m Raj-Koti
lp Chiranjeevi, Meena, Roja, Sharat Saxena, Srihari, Brahmanandam, Allu Ramalingaiah, J.V.V. Somayajulu, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Sunita
A vegetable market worker with the unlikely name of Subhash Chandra Bose (Chiranjeevi) protects its denizens when the city Mayor and other politicians support the villain Atma Ram (Saxena) in his effort to convert the marketplace into real estate. Bose’s honesty and efficiency leads the good Chief Minister (Rao) to offer him a State Assembly seat on behalf of the ruling party. A reluctant politician, forced to embark on his new career by his lover Buchamma (Meena), Bose initiates reforms in favour of the landless poor and even leads a commando-type raid on Atma Ram’s men. When his sister commits suicide after being accused of prostitution by the villain, the hero resigns his ministerial post and launches a vigilante attack that ends with the extermination of the villains. Having generally cleansed society, he returns to his earlier profession, spurning the offer to become the political leader of the state’s ruling party. Although only moderately successful by Chiranjeevi’s standards, the film fuelled intense speculation about the star’s potential entry into Andhra politics. Aspects of his performance as the minister evoke the popular Bihar Chief Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav.
PACHANI SAMSARAM
1992 157’ col Telugu
d/sc Tammareddy Bharatwaja pc Powmax Films p G. Haribabu st/dial Aakella lyr Bhuvana Chandra, Mallemala c Sarath m Vidyasagar
lp Krishna, Aamani, Nirosha, Raj Kumar, Kota Srinivasa Rao, Babu Mohan, Sudhakar, Rama Raju, Chandrakant
Successful melodrama re-establishing erstwhile superstar Krishna. He plays the sacrificing hero who educates his step-brothers, but is abandoned by them. He then single-handedly cultivates a piece of arid land on the outskirts of a village while his step-brothers recognise their mistake and reunite. Srinivasa Rao played a typical villain, who had killed their father and destroyed the family.
PADMA NADIR MAJHI
aka Boatman of the River Padma
1992 126’ col Bengali
d/c/s/co-m Gautam Ghose pc West Bengal Film Development Corp. st Manik Bandyopadhyay’s novel co-m Alauddin Ali
lp Asaad, Champa, Roopa Ganguly, Utpal Dutt, Robi Ghosh, Abdul Khader, Hasan Imam, Sunil Mukherjee
Set in pre-Partition Bengal in 1947, Ghosh used Bandyopadhyay’s classic novel to tell the story of a man’s struggle against the oppressive forces of nature, society and of his own desires. The spectacularly beautiful banks of the Padma, functioning as the metaphor for ‘the river of life’, form the backdrop. The main character in the fishing village is the boatman Kuber (Asaad), and the episodic film chronicles his tension-ridden encounters with the wealthy Muslim trader Hussain (Dutt), who wants to transform an island in the Padma delta into a haven free from communal strife. The women in the film are mainly metaphors for the eternally mysterious forces of nature.
PAPAYUDE SONTHAM APPOOSE
1992 146’ col Malayalam
d/s Fazil pc Khais Prod. lyr Bichu Thirumala c Anandakuttan m Ilaiyaraja
lp Mammootty, Shobhana, Master Badusha, Suresh Gopi, Zeenat Dadhi
When Appu’s (Badusha) mother (Shobhana) dies, his rich businessman father Balu (Mammootty) drowns his grief in drink. During a vacation, a temporary governess brings Appu some solace until he sustains a serious head injury. It appears that only the dead mother can cure the boy’s medical condition by patting him on the head. This rekindles the relationship between father and son. The enjoyable first half of the movie, with its lively and mischievous scenes and several lullabies, is aimed at children.
PEDDARIKAM
1992 134’ col/scope Telugu
d/p/sc A.M. Rathnam pc Surya Chitra st Siddique-Lal dial Parachuri Bros. lyr Bhuvana Chandra, Vaddepalli Krishna c S. Gopala Reddy m Raj-Koti
lp Jagapathi Babu, Sukanya, N.N. Pillai, P. Bhanumathi, Vijaya Kumar, Sudhakar, Rami Reddy, Chandramohan, Balaiah, Kavitha
Story of two feuding families from the politically powerful kamma caste. One is led by the patriarch Parvataneni Parasu Ramayya (Pillai), the other by the voluble Adusumilli Basavapunnamma (Bhanumathi). The four sons of the former (Kumar, Chandramohan, Reddy and Babu) are deeply loyal to their father, but trouble starts when the youngest son (Babu) falls for Basavapunnamma’s grand-daughter (Sukanya). The young couple, after a long narrative, eventually get the two families to reunite. A generally loud film, the commercial hit was known mainly for Raj-Koti’s music and for the performances of the two egotistic family heads.
PHOOL AUR KAANTE
1992 173’ col/scope Hindi
d Kuku Kohli p Dinesh Patel pc Sonu Films s Iqbal Durrani lyr Sameer, Rani Malik c Thomas A. Xavier m Nadeem-Shravan
lp Amrish Puri, Ajay Devgun, Jagdeep, Madhu Raghunath, Arif Khan, Aruna Irani, Satyen Kappu, Raza Murad
The hit film that introduced Devgun as a new star for the 90s. The plot is a drama about machismo in which the orphaned Ajay (Devgun) battles the drug-peddling son of his college trustee. When violence breaks out, he is mysteriously saved by a mafia don (Puri) who, it turns out, is his unacknowledged father. Ajay marries and has a son who is kidnapped, first by the gangster-father and then again by the don’s enemies. Ajay is reconciled with his father and together they eventually confront the real villains of the story. Much of the film’s violence is choreographed more effectively than is usual in Hindi films (cf. the locker-room fight in the men’s hostel and the hero’s Mad Tktor-type motor-cycle stunts). The virtual absence of a romantic sub-plot is typical of the aggressive crime thriller, using extensive political references, that came to dominate 90s Hindi cinema (cf. Prahaar, 1991). The several musical hits confirmed the music directors Nadeem-Shravan as major film composers of the early 90s.
RAM KE NAAM
aka In the Name of God
1992 90’ col Hindi
d/p/c Anand Patwardhan
The 2nd part of Patwardan’s investigation of communalism in contemporary India (Una Mitterandi Yaad Pyari, 1989). The film, shot on 16mm, addresses the rise of a fanatic Hindu right wing and its exploitation of the Ayodhya temple in its bid for power. The Ramayana suggests Ayodhya was the God Ram’s birthplace. In 1528, one of the Mughal Emperor Babar’s noblemen built the Babri Masjid mosque there. In the late 19th C., both Hindus and Muslims began claiming the site as a place of worship. Since 1984, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a militant Hindu organisation allied with the BJP, rekindled and converted the old dispute into a nationwide political programme, affirming that the very spot where the mosque was built marks Ram’s birthplace. They called for the mosque to be demolished and for a Hindu temple to be erected instead. In 1990, the BJP’s leader, L.K. Advani, went on a ‘Rath Yatra’, a chariot procession from Somnath to Ayodhya, inciting violent communal riots en route. Advani’s arrest led to the downfall of V.P. Singh’s minority Janata Dal government and, later that year, to the violent Kar Seva (reconstruction) programme that saw, amid several killings, VHP. men take over the mosque. Since then the Hindu fanatics have used the issue as a bargaining ploy against the ruling Congress regime. Patwardhan follows some of the infamous Rath Yatra and documents the Kar Seva itself, exposing the link between the local police and the militant mobs. Interviewing his subjects while operating the camera, Patwardhan has most of his speakers address the camera directly, revealing, often indirectly, their actual motivations. Patwardhan also includes the confession of the man who was employed to aggravate communal strife by placing idols in the temple and the remarkable statements of the priest in charge of the temple (who was later assassinated for his anti-communalist position).
ROJA
1992 137’(114’) col/scope Tamil
d/sc Mani Rathnam pc Kavithalaya Prod. p K. Balachander st/dial Sujata lyr Vairamuthu c Santosh Sivan m A.R. Rehman
lp Aravind Swamy, Madhubala, Pankaj Kapoor, Janakaraj, Nasser
Unusually, Mani Rathnam’s Tamil hit also became a success in its Hindi dubbed version. A politically controversial film set mainly in Kashmir, it recalls the real-life incident of a Kashmiri terrorist kidnapping of an Indian Oil official in 1993. In a spectacular opening the Indian army captures the dreaded Kashmiri terrorist Wasim Khan. In return, militants abduct the film’s hero, the Tamilian cryptologist Rishi Kumar (Swamy). Roja (Madhubala) is Rishi Kumar’s Tamil-speaking wife, left alone and unable to communicate in a land where nobody speaks her language. Eventually, just as she manages to convince a minister to agree to an exchange of prisoners, Rishi Kumar is released while the terrorist leader Liaqat (Kapoor) is ‘humanised’. The lead couple’s marriage in the sylvan surroundings of the cryptologist’s native Tamilian village, evokes the rhetoric of Tamil nationalism, a contentious issue in the context of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by Sri Lankan Tamils and the DMK’s avowed past seperatism. Rathnam then displaces this nationalism by inflating it to the dimensions of Indian and, more specifically, uncritically Hindu chauvinism contrasted with the presentation of the Kashmiris as religion obsessed, bellicose and profoundly ‘unreasonable’. In one famous scene, the tied-up hero, offended by the Kashmiris’ burning of the Indian flag, crashes through a window and tries to extinguish the flames with his body to the tune of a Subramanya Bharati lyric. In Hyderabad, the film’s Telugu version sparked an outbreak of anti-Muslim slogans. Billed as a ‘patriotic love story’, India’s election commissioner T.N. Seshan took the most unusual step of officially endorsing the film. The music was also a hit, esp. the rap number Rukmini sung in Hindi version by Baba Sehgal. Tejaswini Niranjana analysed the film’s political address in her essay Integrating Whose Nation? (1994), which led to a major debate on the film in the Economic & Political Weekly.
ROOP KI RANI CHORON KA RAJA
1992 190’ col/scope Hindi
d Satish Kaushik pc Narasimha Enterprises p Boney Kapoor s/lyr Javed Akhtar c Baba Azmi m Laxmikant Pyarelal
lp Anil Kapoor, Sridevi, Anupam Kher, Jackie Shroff, Paresh Rawal, Johnny Lever, Bindu, Deepak Qazir, Ajit Vachhani, Dalip Tahil, Akash Khurana, Siddharth
Romeo (Kapoor), the handsome safecracker, encounters the sexy Seema (Sridevi), a rival in his profession. The two are hired by the criminal Chukran (Kher) to steal some diamonds. In return, Chukran promises to reveal the name of the man who killed Seema’s father. Chukran himself had killed both Seema’s and Romeo’s fathers, and both had grown up together at an orphanage and were childhood sweethearts. Chukran, the criminal mastermind, had also killed his own good twin brother Manmohanal (Kher again), which allows him to pose as a millionaire philanthropist. Jackie Shroff plays the honest cop, pursuing both Romeo and Chukran, who is revealed to be Romeo’s long-lost brother. The film’s mixture of elements from Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955) with the penny-dreadful world of Spielberg includes the famous scene of Romeo and Seema hanging over a cauldron of acid before they are rescued by Romeo’s pet pigeon Django. Made as a spectacular and touted as the most expensive Indan film ever, it was a financial disaster, a feat later trumped by Ghai’s even more expensive Trimurti (1995). Most of the money was spent on spectacular sets and elaborate, sometimes innovative, song picturisations.
RUDAALI
The Mourner
1992 128’ col Hindi
d/s Kalpana Lajmi pc NFDC/Doordarshan st Mahashweta Devi sc/dial/lyr Gulzar c Santosh Sivan, Dharam Gulati m Bhupen Hazarika
lp Dimple Kapadia, Raakhee, Raj Babbar, Raghuvir Yadav, Sushmita Mukherjee, Manohar Singh, Rajesh Singh, Meeta Vasisth, Usha Bannerjee, Mehnaz, Pramod Bala, Amjad Khan
Set in Rajasthan, the film tells in flashback the story of the slave woman Sanichari (Dimple). She was abandoned by her drunken husband (Ganju) and her son Budhwa (Yadav) left when she rejected his shrewish prostitute wife (Mukherjee). The Pandit (M. Singh) harasses her, but she finds sympathy from the famous professional mourner or rudaali, Bhikni (Raakhee), summoned by the local potentate in anticipation of his death. Bhikni, after she dies unexpectedly, turns out to have been Sanichari’s long-lost mother. Sanichari, hardened by sorrow and no longer able to cry, becomes the mistress of Laxman Singh (Babbar). Eventually, mourning the death of Bhikni, she breaks down and becomes a rudaali like her mother.
SEETHARATHNAMGARI ABBAYI
1992 158’ col Telugu
d/sc E.V.V. Satyanarayana pc Shri Venkateshwara Art Films st Shri Venkateshwara Art Films Unit dial L.B. Sriram lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy, Seetharama Sastry, Bhuvana Chandra c V. Srinivasa Reddy m Raj-Koti
lp Vanisree, Vinod Kumar, Roja, Satyanarayana, Kota Srinivasa Rao, Brahmanandam, Babu Mohan The foster-son (Kumar) of Setharathnamma, a domineering matriarch (Vanisree), falls for a girl (Roja) from a family that the matriarch considers an enemy. However, the couple get married, while the old woman dies a defeated and isolated person: a new twist to an otherwise familiar role for Vanisree in 90s Telugu film (cf. Attaku Yamudu Ammayiki Mogudu, 1989; Bobbili Raja, 1990).
SHET PATHARER THALA
1992 157’ col Bengali
d/sc Prabhat Roy pc Gope Movies p Shankar and Geeta Gope st Bani Basu c Girish Padidhar m R.D. Burman
lp Aparna Sen, Sabhyasachi Chakraborty, Indrani Haldar, Rituparna, Bhaskar Bannerjee, Dipankar Dey, Dilip, Haradhan, Meenakshi, Lili Chakraborty, Monu, R.D. Burman
A successful melodrama about the dutiful wife and mother Bandara who becomes a widow (Sen). The subsequent conflict between her and her in-laws stems from her son’s refusal to see his mother as a widow whereas the family insists on her adhering to all the traditional, oppressive trappings of widowhood. She has to leave the family home and take a job. After a while, she forms a new relationship with an artist (Dey), but the by-now adult son cannot accept his mother as an autonomous, sexual being either, encouraged in his reactionary attitudes by his girlfriend (Haldar) and her villainous mother. The film resolves the problems, not by focussing on the issue of a woman’s right to her own identity, but by emphasising and glorifying motherhood.
SUNDARA KANDA
1992 147’ col Telugu
d K. Raghavendra Rao pc Saudamini Creations p K.V.V. Satyanarayana st K. Bhagyaraj dial Parachuri Bros. lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c Ravindra Babu m M.M. Keeravani
lp Venkatesh, Aparna, Meena, Kota Srinivasa Rao, Maruthirao, Brahmanandam
The student (Aparna) falls for the university lecturer (Venkatesh) after students play a prank and forge a love letter seemingly written to her by the man. This leads to a brief triangle, made more mawkish by the fact that the lecturer’s wife (Meena) is an orphan and the student terminally ill. Keeravani’s music was successful.
SURAJ KA SATWAN GHODA
aka The Seventh Horse of the Sun
1992 130’ col Hindi
d Shyam Benegal pc NFDC s Shama Zaidi from Dharamvir Bharati’s novel c Piyush Shah m Vanraj Bhatia
lp Amrish Puri, Neena Gupta, K.K. Raina, Pallavi Joshi, Raghuvir Yadav
In Allahabad in UP, every evening, the bachelor Manek Mulla (Puri) tells stories to a group of friends gathering at his house. Over two evenings, he tells three stories: apparently about his own boyhood, adolescence and adulthood. Each centres on a relationship with a woman and they rehearse the notions of romance, love and separation. After the stories, the friends discuss them. This bitter-sweet comedy, shot by one of India’s most outstanding cinematographers, about a man’s smug but immature attitudes towards women also raises questions about the distinctions between memory, reality and fantasy.
Neena Gupta and K. K. Raina in Suraj Ka Satwan Ghoda
TARA
1992? col Oriya
d/co-sc Bijoya (Dolly) Jena pc NFDC/Doordarshan st/co-sc Bimal Dutt c Neelabh Kaul m Bhubhaneshwar Mishra, Dhyanesh Khan
lp Bijoya Jena, Sunil Chourasia, Anit Das, Ashru Mohanty
Melodrama of a female protagonist mapped onto a story about tantric mysticism. Known mainly for sparse dialogue, especially for an extended wordless single-take sequence on lovemaking: the absence of words was sometimes seen as related to the fact that both the NFDC and the Censor Board require dialogue sheets to ‘assess’ the work.
THEVAR MAGAN
1992 168’ col/scope Tamil
d B.G. Bharathan pc Raajkamal Films p/s Kamalahasan lyr Vali c P.C. Sriram m Ilaiyaraja
lp Kamalahasan, Sivaji Ganesan, Gauthami, Revathi, Nasser, K. Radhakrishnan, S.N. Lakshmi, Prasanthi
The Tamil megastar Kamalahasan produced and wrote this Godfather-type hit described by the star as ‘a Sicilian drama’, set in the feudal Madurai district controlled by big landlords who employ their own gangs and often indulge in expensive feuds with their neighbours. The star explained that this environment was part of his childhood experience. He plays Shaktivelu, the modern son of Peria-thevar (Ganesan), who returns to his ancestral home to introduce his girlfriend (Gauthami) to his family. He becomes involved in the bloody feuds between different members of the clan led by Mayathevar (Nasser), and when his father dies he assumes the godfather’s mantle. The rival family is eventually annihilated in a gory ending. Kamalahasan’s performance, especially in the second half, pays tribute to the patriarchal figure of Ganesan, the focus of a neo-traditionalist discourse valorising fundamentalism along with the star’s screen image.
TIRANGA
aka Tirangaa
1992 168’ col/scope Hindi
d/p Mehul Kumar pc M.K. Pics s K.K. Singh lyr Santosh Anand c Russi Bilimoria m Laxmikant Pyarelal
lp Raaj Kumar, Nana Patekar, Varsha Usgaonkar, Harish, Mamta Kulkarni, Suresh Oberoi, Sonika Gill, Manohar Singh, Deepak Shirke, Rakesh Bedi, Alok Nath
Of the many ‘nationalist’ films made since the late 1980s (cf. Roja, 1992; 1942: A Love Story and Sainyam, both 1994) this commercial success is arguably the most bizarre. In order to overthrow the dreaded anti-national terrorist leader Pralaynath Gendalswamy (Shirke), the government of India hires Brigadier Suryadev Singh (Raaj Kumar), providing him with a secret commando hideout, secret access to the Prime Minister (Nath) and legal carte blanche which includes a police massacre of innocent people simply in order to enable Singh to become a convict, a move apparently necessary for his plans. Singh in turn hires the renegade cop Shivajirao Wagle (Patekar) and, after various skirmishes with the bad guys, the two men invade the villain’s hideout and scuttle his plan to destabilise the nation with rocket attacks on Independence day. The chillingly fascist arguments deployed in other Patekar-Mehul Kumar collaborations (cf. Krantiveer, 1994) are here partially undone by the surreal comic strip quality of the film, incarnated in Raaj Kumar’s flashy dress and uniquely rhetorical dialogue style, but extended into the plot by a plethora of smaller characters and by the filmmaker’s fascination with lethal gadgets with flashing lights (as in campy sci-fi effects). The plot extends into other areas as the villain’s equally bad son Rasiknath impregnates Radha, daughter of the evil Central Minister Jeevanlal Tandel (Singh), who in turn accuses Sanjiv, son of the fearless cop Rudrapratap Chouhan (Oberoi), of having raped her, thus providing extra motivation for the good guys, as if the filmmakers obscurely realised that their brand of nationalism was not by itself up to the task. At least some of the comic strip effects appear to have been intentional, such as the character of Khabrilal (Bedi), a police informer who speaks like a Doordarshan news reader and whose entry is always accompanied by the signature tune of Doordarshan’s news programme.
VIETNAM COLONY
1992 154’ col/scope Malayalam
d/s Siddique-Lal pc President Movies p Appachan-Joy lyr Bichu Thirumala c Venu m S. Balakrishnan
lp Mohanlal, Innocent, Kanaka, KPAC Lalitha, Nedumudi Venu, Philomina, Kaviyoor Ponnamma
In this unlikely subject for a comedy, Krishnamurthy (Mohanlal), a poor but brainy Brahmin, is sent with an assistant (Innocent) to work as a site officer for the Calcutta Construction Company in a particularly grim place known as Vietnam Colony. This place, set in Kerala, is under the control of gangs and slumlords who protect a small bunch of illegal squatters on the company’s land. The task of the two employees is to persuade the squatters to vacate the land so that the company can build on it. However, Krishnamurthy switches sides and helps the poor people assert their rights in the face of both the company and the gangs. The use of innovative dialogue (a Siddique-Lal trademark) and bizarre situations, the displacement of stereotypes (eg. the Muslim gangster and the dispossessed Muslim Seth) and the performances of Mohanlal, Innocent and Kanaka helped the film to achieve its popularity.
AANKHEN
1993 177’ col/scope Hindi
d David Dhawan pc Chiragdeep International p Pahlaj Nihalani s Anees Bazmee lyr Indivar c Siba Mishra m Bappi Lahiri
lp Govinda, Chunkey Pandey, Raj Babbar, Shilpa Shirodkar, Rageshwari, Ritu Shivpuri, Kadar Khan, Sadashiv Amrapurkar, Bindu, Shakti Kapoor, Gulshan Grover, Dina Pathak Munnu and Bunnu (Govinda, Pandey) form a slapstick comedy duo as the wayward sons of the jeweller Hasmukh (Khan). They become entangled in a plot to create via plastic surgery a double for the Chief Minister (Babbar in a dual role) in order to arrange the release of the criminal Natwar Shyam (Grover). The first half of the film consists solely of the duo’s antics as they fall for Priya and Ritu (Rageshwari, Shivpuri). In the second half, Munnu is abducted by the criminals and loses his memory, whereupon the film produces two more character doubles, Hasmukh’s long-lost twin (Khan again) and his son Gaurishankar (Govinda again). Gaurishankar is wrongly kidnapped along with his father and grandmother (Pathak), and eventually the two brothers, aided by a wayward policeman, Pyare (Amrapurkar), get the criminals. The film continued the enormous 90s success of lowbrow, rapidly cut action musicals with strident soundtracks featuring Govinda. However, the film’s main feature is that it seems to be in the grip of a compulsion to repeat, obsessively doubling its characters.
AKSHADHOODU
1993 145’ col Malayalam
d Sibi Malayil pc Anupama Cinema s Dennis Joseph lyr O.N.V. Kurup c Anandakuttan m Ouseppachan
lp Madhavi, Murali, Nedumudi Venu, Jose Prakash
Bleak but commercially successful melodrama about the breakdown of a poor Christian family. Annie’s (Madhavi) husband (Murali) is killed and she has leukaemia. Assisted by a concerned priest, Father Vattappara (Venu), she tries to get her four children adopted into different homes before she dies. The relentlessly manipulative story is interesting in its depiction of the Church and its role in the life of Kerala’s large Christian community. The film was also made in Telugu (Mathru Devo Bhava, 1993).
ALLARI PRIYUDU
1993 141’ col Telugu
d K. Raghavendra Rao pc R.K. Film Associates p K. Krishna Rao s Satyanand co-lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy, Bhuvana Chandra, Vennelakanti c A. Vincent, Ajayan Vincent co-lyr/m M.M. Keeravani
lp Rajasekhar, Madhubala, Ramya Krishna
Love triangle about an infantile romantic artist. The poet (Madhubala) writes lyrics which are set to music by a well-known singer (Rajasekhar) who falls in love with the poet’s sister (Ramya), believing her to be the author of the poetry.
ANTAREEN
1993 91’ col Bengali
d/sc Mrinal Sen p NFDC, Doordarshan st Sadat Hasan Manto c/m Shashi Anand
lp Anjan Dutt, Dimple Kapadia, Deepti Roy, Kajal Gupta, Amal Mukherjee, Satya Bandyopadhyay A warmly lit, vividly coloured love story about a young writer in search of inspiration in an old country mansion. He strikes up a telephonic relationship with an anonymous woman caller, isolated in her lavish urban flat. The interaction provides the writer with materials for a new fiction. The viewer, however, is shown something of the woman’s life: she is the mistress of a wealthy old man (who remains absent from the film) and thus supports her lower middle-class family. The ending deploys a device familiar from Bengali short stories as the two protagonists meet each other in a train compartment where the melody of his voice allows her a moment of recognition. Sen weaves allusions to Tagore’s Kshudita Pashan into the narrative, but the film seems to hinge on an exploration of what is shown or voiced and what is unspoken or absent.
BAAZIGAR
1993 185’ col/scope Hindi
d Abbas-Mastan pc Venus Records/United Seven s Robin Bhatt, Akash Khurana, Javed Siddiqui lyr Nawab Arzoo, Gauhar Kanpuri, Rani Malik, Zameer Kazmi, Zafar Gorakhpuri, Dev Kohli c Thomas A. Xavier m Annu Malik, Shyam Surender
lp Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol, Siddharth, Shilpa Shetty, Dalip Tahil, Johnny Lever, Raakhee, Anant Mahadevan
Ajay Sharma (Khan) becomes a ‘baazigar’, a gambler, in order to win over Priya (Kajol) and eventually to bring about the ruin of Priya’s father, Madan Chopra (Tahil). Previously, Chopra had similarly ruined Ajay’s father Vishwanath Sharma (Mahadevan) by appropriating Sharma’s industries and forcing Ajay’s family onto the streets. Ajay’s revenge consists of seducing Priya’s sister Seema (Shetty) and pushing her from a tall building. He then changes his identity and kills two more people while ingratiating himself into the Chopra household. In a violent ending Ajay dies in his mother’s (Raakhee) arms after he has killed Madan Chopra. The commercial hit inaugurates Shah Rukh Khan’s much-discussed playing of unusually vicious type of leading men (cf. Darr, 1993). Here, the depiction of his cold-blooded murder of Seema became especially controversial. Among the first of the several Khan-Kajol romances culminating in the smash hit Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), the main bulk of the film features the fresh and spontaneous performances of these still-new stars in song hits such as Bazigar o bazigar and Yeh kali kali aankhen.
CHARACHAR
aka Shelter of the Wings
1993 86’ col Bengali
d/sc Buddhadev Dasgupta pc Gope Movies p Shankar and Geeta Gope st Prafulla Roy c Soumendu Roy m Biswadeb Dasgupta
lp Rajit Kapoor, Laboni Sarkar, Sadhu Meher, Indrani Haldar, Manoj Mitra
As a result of his young son’s death, Lakhinder, descending from a family of bird-catchers, develops a mania for releasing captive birds, estranging his wife in the process. He turns increasingly inwards, rejecting the cruelty of the bird market in Calcutta and eventually also releasing his wife. At the end of this lyrical movie with exquisite panoramic and tracking shots, he is ‘saved’ by the birds as they (in an ironic reversal of the end of Hitchcock’s The Birds, 1963) enter his hut and offer him their protection.
DAMINI
1993 175’ col/scope Hindi
d/sc Rajkumar Santoshi pc Cineyug p Karim Morani, Bunty Soorma, Aly Morani st Santanu Gupta dial Dilip Shukla lyr Sameer c Ishwar Bidri m Nadeem-Shravan, Vanraj Bhatia
lp Rishi Kapoor, Meenakshi Sheshadri, Sunny Deol, Amrish Puri, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Anjan Srivastava, Paresh Rawal, Tinnu Anand, Vijayendra Ghatge, Rohini Hattangadi
Damini (Sheshadri), the virtuous daughter of an impoverished father (Srivastava) who is worried about getting his two daughters married, achieves the impossible when the millionaire Shekhar Gupta (Kapoor) falls for her. Shekhar’s family, including his mother (Hattangadi) and his mother’s brother (Anand), are initially against Damini but finally accept her, until an incident disrupts the entire family. On the day of Holi, Damini witnesses her husband’s younger brother and his three friends rape a maidservant. The entire family, including her husband Shekhar, conspire to hush up the scandal. When Damini refuses to keep silent, the family, aided by a scheming lawyer (Puri) and a corrupt police force, try to make her go insane. She is eventually helped by a down-and-out lawyer Govind (Deol) who defends her in court. For a remarkable essay on this extraordinary woman-centered melodrama and mild commercial success, see Madhava Prasad, ‘Signs of Ideological Re-Form in Two Recent Films’ (1996).
Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol in Baazigar
DARR
1993 178’ col/scope Hindi
d/p Yash Chopra pc Yash-Raj Films st/sc Honey Irani dial Javed Siddiqui lyr Anand Bakshi c Manmohan Singh
m Shiv-Hari
lp Sunny Deol, Juhi Chawla, Shah Rukh Khan, Annu Kapoor, Tanvi Azmi, Raj Hans, Neena Softa, Piloo Wadia, Vikas Anand, Dalip Tahil, Anupam Kher
The valiant Naval officer Sunil (Deol) is to marry the beautiful Kiran (Chawla). The problem, contextualising most of the film, is that she is stalked by the shadowy figure of the psychotic Rahul (Khan). Complicating the problem is the fact that Rahul is the son of Sunil’s superior in the Navy (Tahil). The film claims to introduce an emotion overlooked in the romance genre: fear. In the process it dwells, sometimes effectively, on numerous noir conventions including that of the murderous villain’s gaze being replicated by the camera’s POV, putting the viewer in the position of the murderous voyeur. The film continued Shah Rukh Khan’s exploration of ‘negative’ roles considered taboo for leading men (cf. Baazigar, also 1993). It had one major song hit, Jadoo teri nazar.
DEVASURAM
1993 187’ col/scope Malayalam
d I.V. Sasi pc Anugraha Cine Arts
p V.B.K. Menon s Renjith lyr Girish Puthencheri
c V. Jayaram m M.G. Radhakrishnan
lp Mohanlal, Revathi, Innocent, Nedumudi Venu, Chitra, Napoleon
A film about a ‘good’ villain exemplifying and celebrating contemporary Hindu chauvinist brutalism. Mangalassery Neelakandan (Mohanlal) is a drunk, a womaniser and the wealthy boss of a band of thugs available for disrupting public events. However, he is presented as essentially decent, donating money to a local temple and patronising classical music. His ‘weaknesses’ are not his fault but the unfortunate consequences of ‘modern times’ and the regrettable decaying of feudalism. Halfway through the film, he is paralysed following some unusually violent scenes, but nursed to recovery by a Bharat Natyam dancer, Bhanu (Revathi), whose career he had ruined earlier. Her action demonstrates the redemptive powers of tradition and the hero can now do the right thing in the film’s climax: in an orgy of violence at a temple festival, the restored hero is able to reassert his righteous manhood by battering his rivals into submission.
GANDHARVAM
1993 155’ col/scope Malayalam
d/co-s Sangeet Sivan pc Sithara Combines p Suresh Balaji co-s Alex I. Kadavil lyr Kaithapram c Santosh Sivan m S.P. Venkatesh
lp Mohanlal, Kanchana, Pratapchandran, Devan, Shantikrishna, Kaviyoor Ponnamma
Malayalam megastar Mohanlal plays Samuel Alexander, a poor but glamourized garage owner who falls for the rich and beautiful Sreedevi Menon (Kanchana). Having annoyed her with his attentions, he manages to make her realise the difference between ‘gentlemen’ like him and ‘rogues’. They decide to live together, an act that forms the major moral pivot of the film, and she delivers their child even as he goes to jail. Eventually, in spite of her parents’ opposition, the two nevertheless get married. The title refers to the phrase ‘Gandharva Vivaham’, which roughly means ‘marriage blessed by the angels’, an interesting Hindu ratification of cohabitation or ‘unofficial’ marriage.
GAYAM
1993 140’ col Telugu
d/co-st/sc Ram Gopal Varma pc S.S. Creations p Y. Surendra co-st Mani Rathnam dial Posani Krishna Murali lyr Seetharama Sastry c Rasool m Sri
lp Jagapathi Babu, Revathi, Urmila Matondkar, Kota Srinivasa Rao, Sivakrishna, Charan Raj, Rami Reddy
Durga (Babu) loses his brother Mohan Krishna (Raj) in a gang massacre and vows revenge. In the process, he loses his girlfriend (Revathi) to an honest cop (Sivakrishna), who in turn is out to get Durga. The police authorities, however, have to seek the outlawed hero’s help in order to get the real villain (Rao). A second love interest features Matondkar, made famous as the lead in Varma’s Hindi film Rangeela (1995). An elaborately choreographed, violent hit known especially for Rao’s performance as the liquor contractor villain. The film makes direct reference to the well-documented real-life gang wars in Vijaywada between the Devineni and Vangaveeti families.
HUM HAIN RAHI PYAR KE
1993 163’ col/scope Hindi
d Mahesh Bhatt pc TV Films/Tahir Hussein Enterprises p Tahir Hussein
co-st/co-sc/dial Robin Bhatt co-st Sujit Sen co-sc Aamir Khan lyr Sameer c Pravin Bhatt m Nadeem-Shravan, Shyam Surender
lp Aamir Khan, Juhi Chawla, Mushtaq Khan, K.D. Chandran, Tiku Talsania, Javed Khan, Navneet Nishan, Dalip Tahil, Baby Ashrafa, Robin Bhatt, Veeru Krishna, Master Shahrokh, Kunal, Kammu
Rahul Malhotra (Khan) abandons his studies to become the guardian of his sister’s three orphaned, but mischievous and undisciplined, children and to manage the family factory. The factory is in debt to the film’s villain, the Sindhi businessman Bijlani (Tahil), whose daughter Maya (Nishan) loves Rahul. Unknown to Rahul, the children offer shelter to Vaidehi (Chawla), who has run away from her authoritarian and caste-conscious father Iyer (Chandran). Rahul hires her as a governess and falls in love with her. Maya’s plot to exploit her father’s control over Rahul’s business to blackmail him into marrying her, fails when the children claim that Vaidehi is in fact their ‘mother’. In the end, Bijlani’s revenge, as he tries to have Rahul’s house auctioned, is intercut with Rahul’s effort to defeat some gangsters and deliver the factory goods that will enable him to pay off Bijlani. The low-budget ‘family movie’ was the unexpected hit of the year and reports circulated that Khan, who shares a script credit, had in fact directed the film which was produced by his family concern.
INDRADHANURA CHHAI
aka The Shadows of the Rainbows
1993 112’ col Oriya
d/cos Sushant Misra pc Visual Link p janapriya Debata cos Devdas Chhotray c Jugal Debata m Vikas Das
lp Robin Das, Vijaini Misra, Surya Mohanty, Muktabala Rautray, Bidyut Lata Devi
With hypnotic visual rhythms and a remarkable mise-en-scene of emotional tonalities, Mishra shows the lives of three women living in the modernising town of Bhubhaneshwar, its skyline still dominated by magnificent temple architecture. Vijaya’s husband died a few days after their wedding and she does not know how a woman in her situation can cope with her tender feelings for a kind local teacher. Her friend Sonia provides a graphic example of a woman desperately torn between modernity and traditional notions of female virtue, while Aunt Nila has difficulty facing up to the ageing process. The film tells its tale by way of meditative sequence shots and framings which constantly remind viewers of the conflictual existence of the forces of life (luscious trees, plants and other signs of irrepressible life) with the dry, decaying monuments of an outdated but still suffocatingly dominant premodern society, its oppressiveness as well as its achievements graphically represented by the ever-present temple spires.
KARULINA KOOGU
1993 149’ col/scope Kannada
d/s D. Rajendra Babu pc Aditya Movie Makers p D.R. Umashankari, Raju lyr/m Hamsalekha c Ashok Kashyap
lp Prabhakar, Umashree, Vinaya Prasad, Srinath A Church-like Hindu order provides the spiritual context for this unusual story about the extinction of a lower-class alcoholic’s family. The drunkard Mohan (Prabhakar, better known for villainous roles) is married to Sharada (Prasad), a cultured music teacher employed in a Hindu ashram, who tries to reform her husband. The villain in this allegory of a Hindu community is a Christian, Antony, who tries to rape Sharada and later kills Mohan shortly after Sharada is diagnosed as terminally ill with cancer. Sharada dies before she can find adoptive parents for her children, but the saintly head of the ashram (Srinath) does this for her. The film also has a few comic scenes, e.g. in a bar, where a series of jokes culminate in a song talking about the plight of Kannada-speaking people in Bangalore city.
KHALNAYAK
1993 190’ col/scope Hindi
d/p/s Subhash Ghai pc Mukta Arts sc Ram Kelkar dial Kamlesh Pandey lyr Anand Bakshi c Ashok Mehta m Laxmikant-Pyarelal
lp Sanjay Dutt, Jackie Shroff, Madhuri Dixit, Raakhee, Anupam Kher, Ramya Krishna, Pramod Moutho, A.K. Hangal, Neena Gupta
Ghai’s controversial hit presents the ‘villain’ Sanjay Dutt as exemplifying ‘today’s youth’. Dutt plays Ballu, a gangster and political criminal responsible for several assassinations, who is employed by the film’s main villain, Roshi Mahanta (Moutho). When Ballu escapes from prison without divulging the name of his employer, the police inspector Ramkumar (Shroff) sends his colleague and girlfriend Ganga (Dixit) to infiltrate the gang masquerading as a dancing girl. The film capitalised on the off-screen history of Dutt who, shortly after its completion, was arrested and imprisoned for alleged involvement in the Bombay communal riots of 1993, an incident popularly seen as a ‘real life’ re-enactment of what remains his definitive screen role. It was also controversial for the accusations of vulgarity levelled against its megahit song Choli ke peeche, ‘What’s beneath the blouse’, which, as a BBC report on the film put it, ‘had all of India hot under the collar’. Ghai has argued that the song merely adapts a traditional Rajasthani folk lyric.
KIZHAKKU SEEMAYILE
aka Kizhakku Seemai
1993 147’ col Tamil
d/sc Bharthirajaa p Kalaipuli S. Dhanu c Kannan m A.R. Rehman
lp Vijayakumar, Radhika, Napoleon, Vadivelu, Pandian
Incest theme in the tradition of Bhimsingh’s Pasamalar (1961). Siruvayi (Radhika) loves her brother Mayandidevan (Vijayakumar), and agrees to marry Sangilikuruppu (Napoleon) when her brother approves of the marriage. However Sangilikuruppu’s sister Jayakkodi commits suicide, and her widowed husband uses this to alienate Mayandidevan from Siruvayi. A generation later, the feud between brother and sister continues when Sangilikuruppu’s daughter is forbidden from marrying Mayandidevan’s son Chinnamuthu. When the two young people marry anyway, Sangilikuruppu tries to kill Mayandidevan, but Siruvayi takes the blow and dies, sacrificing herself for her brother. The brother, rather than the husband, claims her dead body.
MAHANADI
1993 162’ col Tamil
d Santhana Bharathi p S.A. Rajkanna sc/co-dial Kamalahasan
co-dial Ra. Ki. Rangarajan c M.S. Prabhu lyr Vali m Ilaiyaraja
lp Kamalahasan, Rajesh, V.M.C. Hanifa, Poornam Vishwanathan, Sukanya, Vijay, S.N. Lakshmi, Tulasi
Krishna (Kamalahasan), a widower with two children, lives with his mother-in-law (Lakshmi). Having been persuaded by a confidence trickster (Hanifa) to put all his money into a shady company that goes bankrupt, he is jailed, where his children come to visit him accompanied by their grandmother. His cellmate (Vishwanathan) receives visits from his daughter, the nurse Yamuna (Sukanya), and the latter becomes involved with Krishna’s family and looks after them. Upon his release, Krishna finds that his mother-in-law has died, his son disappeared and his daughter Kaveri works in a Calcutta brothel, where Krishna and his former cellmate find and rescue her. Distraught by the destruction of his family, Krishna eventually tracks down the con man, whom he blames for all his misfortunes, and murders the man and his accomplices.
MANICHITHRATHARAZU
1993 169’ col Malayalam
d Fazil (Unit 1), Priyadarshan, Sibi Malayil, Siddique-Lal (Unit 2) pc Swargachitra p Appachan s Madhu Muttam lyr Bichu Thirumala c Venu (Unit 1), Anandakuttan, Sunny Joseph (Unit 2) m M.G. Radhakrishnan
lp Mohanlal, Suresh Gopi, Shobhana, Thilakan, Nedumudi Venu, Innocent
One of the most discussed Malayalam films in recent times and a major success. The young Calcutta couple Nakulan (Gopi) and Ganga (Shobhana) arrive for a vacation in their ancestral home, where they encounter a centuries-old legend of a Tamil devadasi dancer named Nagavalli. She had been abducted by a Nair chieftain and had subsequently returned to haunt the old house. The small room in the attic where she lived is kept permanently locked. Ganga inquisitively opens the room and becomes possessed by the ghost. Nakulan’s friend, Sunny (Mohanlal), a USA-trained psychiatrist, arrives to help solve the problem: having suffered a troubled childhood, Ganga has become a murderously psychotic schizophrenic. Discarding psychiatry, Sunny turns to ‘indigenous’ methods and successfully effects a dramatic cure relying on a tantric cult redolent with caste prejudices. The film was shot at extraordinary speed by two units working simultaneously, one led by the veteran Fazil, the other by three younger directors (all became well known in Malayalam cinema), although still managing to achieve both narrative and technical coherence. Mohanlal makes a cameo appearance, but the main performance is Shobhana’s chilling portrayal of the demented Nagavalli.
MATHRU DEVO BHAVA
1993 140’ col Telugu
d/sc K. Ajayakumar pc Creative Commercials p K.S. Rama Rao st C.C. Unit, Dennis Joseph dial G. Satyamurthy lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c Chota K. Naidu m M.M. Keeravani
lp Madhavi, Nassar, T. Bharani, Charuhasan, Subbaraya Sharma, Kota Srinivasa Rao, Allu Ramalingaiah, Brahmanandam, Nirmalamma
Sentimental melodrama about a woman (Madhavi) whose alcoholic husband (Nasser) is killed. The village’s villain (Bharani) who was responsible for the death, also tries to rape her. Later, suffering from terminal cancer, she tries to get her children adopted. The film was an adaptation of the Malayalam Akashadhoodu (1993).
MAYALODU
1993 149’ col Telugu
d/sc/m S.V. Krishna Reddy pc Manisha Films p/st K. Aatchi Reddy lyr Jonavittula, Seetharama Sastry, Gudduru Vishwanatha Sastry, Bhuvana Chandra c Sarat
lp Rajendra Prasad, Nirmalamma, Soundarya, Kota Srinivasa Rao, Babu Mohan
A poor magician (Prasad) fights the villain (Rao) and his comic son (Mohan) in order to save a blind girl and to restore her sight. The first in a series associated with director Reddy of ‘healthy entertainers’ in the tradition of fantasy socials.
MELEPARAMBIL AANVEEDU
1993 160’ col Malayalam
d Rajasenan pc Okay Prod. p Mani C. Kalpan st/co-lyr Girish Puthencheri sc/dial Reghunath Paleri co-lyr I.S. Kundoor, Kavinjar Kalidasan c Anandakuttan m Johnson
lp Jayaram, Shobhana, Narendra Prasad, Jagathi Srikumar, Vijayaraghavan, Janardhanan, Meena
Meneparambil is a feudal peasant family consisting mainly of bachelor males committed to their caste identity. The only woman in the house is their ageing mother who laments the absence of decent female help in the kitchen. The two eldest sons, as well as an uncle, all bachelors ‘past their prime’, keep up appearances while awaiting suitably acceptable marriages. Youngest son Harikrishen (Jayaram) goes to Tamil Nadu for a job, falls for Pavizham (Shobhana) and marries her. When he brings her home, he seeks to avoid problems with caste difference by introducing her as a maid servant he brought from Pollanchi to help his mother. Several sequences follow, which are meant to be funny, showing all the men in the family turning into sexual predators. Eventually, when she has endeared herself to the family, a kidnap and rescue drama enables the truth to be told and ensures the happy ending.
MONEY
1993 131’ col Telugu
d/s Sivanageshwara Rao pc Varma Creations p Ram Gopal Varma lyr Sirivennela Seetharama Sastry c Teja m Sri Murthy
lp Chakravarthy, Chinna, Renuka Shahane, Paresh Rawal, Jayasudha, Brahmanandam
Two unemployed youths (Chakravarthi and Chinna) kidnap a glamorous woman (Jayasudha) and demand a ransom from her husband (Rawal). However, the husband had intended to have his wife killed anyway. The woman teams up with her kidnappers to get even with her husband. Produced by Varma, the film partly spoofs his own previous hit, Shiva (1989) and generally the 90s gangster genre in Telugu. It established its director, a former assistant of Varma, in the Telugu industry as well as Brahmanandam in an acclaimed role.
MUNJANEYA MANJU
1993 154’ col Kannada
d/co-p P.H. Vishwanath pc Sandesh Combines p Sandesh Nagaraj, Netravathi S. Nagaraj, S. Satish sc T.N. Narasimhan dial Kotiganahalli Ramayya lyr/m Hamsalekha c R. Manjunath
lp Ambarish, Sudharani, Tara, Ashwath, Ramesh Bhatt, Tennis Krishna, Avinash, Honavalli Krishna, Anantaram Macheri, Ramakrishna, Rajendra Singh, Ashalatha, Kantha Purshottam, Chetana, Manjula, Baby Sowmya, Baby Kumuda, Baby Netravathi
Topical crime thriller wrapped around a domestic ‘misunderstanding’ melodrama. The film addresses real estate-related crime (a controversial subject in post-liberalisation Bangalore) as represented by a North Indian villain named Juneja. Madhav (Ambarish), a lawyer with a mission, makes an enemy of Juneja when he refuses to take him as a client. At home, his wife Meera (Sudharani), pathologically sensitive to disturbing news, gets Madhav to promise to refuse dangerous cases. They help Meera’s friend (Tara) by hiring her for his office, but Meera suspects an affair and becomes jealous. Eventually, both the crime story and the domestic story find a joint resolution.
PONTHAN MADA
1993 119’ col Malayalam
d/sc T.V. Chandran pc Horizon Cinema st C.V. Sriraman from his stories Ponthan Mada and Seema Thampuran c Venu m Johnson
lp Mammootty, Naseeruddin Shah, Laboni Sarkar, Rashmi
Nostalgic movie set in the 40s about the irrational bonding of the low-caste Ponthan Mada (Mammootty) with his colonial landlord Seema Thampuran (Shah), an aristocrat who spent his youth in England until he was expelled for supporting the Irish Republican Army. The two transcend class boundaries as they communicate through Thampuran’s window, with Mada hanging from a palm tree. This past is excavated mainly by the arrival of a family, decades later, to live in Thampuran’s abandoned mansion.
Mammootty and Naseeruddin Shah in Ponthan Mada
RAJENDRUDU GAJENDRUDU
1993 152’ col Telugu
d/s/m S.V. Krishna Reddy pc Manisha Films p K. Aatchi Reddy dial Diwakar Babu lyr Bhuvana Chandra, Jonavittula, Seetharama Sastry c Sarath
lp Rajendra Prasad, Soundarya, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, Kota Srinivasa Rao, Brahmanandam, Babu Mohan, Srilakshmi, Hanumantha Rao, Ali
Comic melodrama in which an animal plays the role usually reserved for the hero. Gajendra the elephant witnesses the murder of its master (Gummadi), a retired forest officer, and is later won by Rajendra (Prasad) in a lottery. Gajendra tracks down the killers and rounds up some thugs, in the process finding its new master a business, and is also instrumental in Rajendra finding a girlfriend, Alaka (Soundarya). The film continues Reddy’s distinctive style of the fantasy melodrama with a moral message, invoking a genre associated with the AVM studio.
SARDAR
1993 175’ col Hindi
d Ketan Mehta pc Foundation of Films on India’s War of Independence p Shyam Benegal/Sahyadri Films s Vijay Tendulkar c Jehangir Choudhury m Vanraj Bhatia
lp Paresh Rawal, Annu Kapoor, Benjamin Gilani, Vallabh Vyas, Lalit Tiwari, Tom Alter Big budget biographical on the last five years of nationalist leader Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (Rawal). The film continues the trend launched by Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) of government-produced authoritative versions of India’s freedom struggle, which have culminated in numerous Doordarshan productions in the 50th anniversary of Indian independence. The film’s original version was scripted by Tendulkar, who later published his script as an independent work.
SIR
1993 151’ col/scope Hindi
d Mahesh Bhatt pc Visesh Films p Mukesh Bhatt s Jay Dixit lyr Qateel Shafi, Rahat Indori c Pravin Bhatt m Annu Malik
lp Naseeruddin Shah, Pooja Bhatt, Atul Agnihotri, Paresh Rawal, Avtar Gill, Soni Razdan, Sushmita Mukherjee, Gulshan Grover
Bhatt turns the plot of James Clavell’s To Sir With Love (1967) into an action drama. The saintly college lecturer Professor Verma (Shah) takes on two gangsters, Jimmy (Grover) and Velji (Rawal), in order to support his students, particularly Pooja (Bhatt), Velji’s daughter. Verma’s infant son had been killed in a random drive-by shooting and now he first cures Pooja of her stammering - caused by the trauma of watching her mother commit suicide - and then offers his protection when Pooja and another student, Karan (Agnihotri), want to marry. The action features much gang rivalry as Jimmy tries to abduct Pooja in revenge for Velji’s murder of Jimmy’s brother. Bhatt manages the shift from melodrama to action movie with an impressive control over narrative momentum and pace.
SUNYA THEKE SURU
aka A Return to Zero
1993 128’ col Bengali
d/s Ashoke Vishwanathan pc H.G. Films p Madhumati Maitra, Hillol Das, Mrinal Das c Vivek Bannerjee m Dipak Choudhury
lp Dhritiman Chatterjee, Mamata Shankar, N. Vishwanathan, Lily Chakraborty, Anjan Dutt, Anuradha Roy, Ashoke Vishwanathan
Experimental, and controversial, debut feature set in the context of the 1960s Naxalite student movement in Calcutta. Resorting to a mix of colour and monochrome scenes to convey the persistence of the past in the present, the story tells of a professor of economics, Bhishmadev Sharma (Chattrejee), peripherally connected with and clearly sympathetic to the student movement, who is arrested, tortured and imprisoned for ten years. He emerges into a changed Calcutta, exemplified by the existential traumas of his now rich former student Samar Gupta, the writer Pragnya and the young activist Udayan, the latter unperturbably continuing to claim that the present is a revolutionary situation. The film’s political passion derives from its refusal to forget a traumatic past, juxtaposing the interaction of temporal dimensions with a sophisticated mise en scene of spatial discontinuities.
THIRUDA THIRUDA
1993 169’ col/scope Tamil
d/p/co-s Mani Rathnam co-s Ram Gopal Varma dial Sujata, Suhasini c P.C. Sriram lyr Vairamuthu m A.R. Rahman
lp Prashant, Anand, Heera, Anu Agarwal, S.P. Balasubramaniam, Malaysia Vasudevan, Saleem Ghouse, S.S. Chandran
An unsuccessful comedy loosely inspired by George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) telling of two petty village thieves, Azhagu (Prashant) and Kadir (Anand), who rescue Rajathi (Heera) from suicide and fall in love with her, as she does with them. On a train, the two thieves steal a woman’s handbag which contains a computer card giving access to a case of freshly printed banknotes which also gets stolen. The petty thieves become involved in endless chases while their triangular love story remains unresolved. Made as a big-budget spectacular, the film consciously attempts to move out of the terrain of regional politics as seen in the director’s better known, and notorious, hits Roja (1992) and Bombay (1995).
VARASUDl
1993 158’ col Telugu
d/sc E.V.V. Satyanarayana pc Shri Jayabheri Art Prod. p D. Kishore dial L.B. Sriram lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy c Chota K. Naidu m M.M. Keeravani
lp Nagarjuna, Krishna, Naghma, Gummadi Venkateshwara Rao, T. Bharani, Brahmanandam, Geetha, Baliah, Sharat Saxena
Lavish melodrama remaking the Hindi hit Phool Aur Kaante (1992) by a director known until then mainly for low-budget films. The teen love story laced with invocations to heroic machismo includes the parallel narrative of the hero’s (Nagarjuna) relationship with his father (Krishna). The scene in which Nagarjuna holds Krishna by his collar led to major protests from the fan clubs of the former Telugu superstar, who placed large advertisements appealing to his audiences to recognise the importance of that scene to the story.
VIDHEYAN
The Servile
1993 112’ col Malayalam/Kannada
d/s Adoor Gopalakrishnan pc General Pics p Ravi st Paul Zakaria’s novelette Bhaskar
Pattelar Ente Jeevitham [Bhaskar Pattelar and My Life] c Ravi Varma m Vijayabhaskar
lp Mammootty, M.R. Gopakumar, Tanvi Azmi, Savita Anand, Babu Namboodiri, Ravi Vallathol, P.C. Soman, Aliyar, M.K. Gopalakrishnan, Krishnankutty Nair
Gopalakrishnan’s exploration of the ‘Hegelian’ master-slave dialectic in a South Karnataka setting. Bhaskar Pattelar (Mammootty) is the aggressive, tyrannical, hard-drinking village landlord whose will is law, while Thomma (Gopakumar), a Christian migrant labourer from Kerala, is his timid and fearful but always loyal slave. Thomma resents the master’s control, but is always there when required, whether it is to help murder Bhaskar Pattelar’s kindly wife, Saroja, or to make his own wife, Omana, sexually available to the master or to dynamite the sacred fish in the temple pond, the temple being the only effective site of resistance to the landlord’s tyranny. Thomma is unwilling to join the other villagers’ plot to kill the tyrant, but exults in freedom when Pattelar is finally shot dead. The author of the original story objected to the film’s interpretation of his work, renewing an old controversy about filmic adaptations of literary works.
AAGHATA
1994 137’ col Kannada
d/s Suresh Heblikar p/co-st K.A. Ashok Pai co-st Rajani Pai lyr M.N. Vyasa Rao c S.R. Bhat m Vijayabhaskar
lp Srikant, Girish Karnad, Shruti, Suresh Heblikar, G.V. Shivananda
Kannada psychodrama based on the true-life case studies of the Pai couple, practicing psychiatrists and the film’s producers. Usha (Shruti), daughter of a retired school teacher, turns down a marriage proposal from a progressive US-based engineer in favour of university colleague Vikas (Srikant). Vikas abandons Usha when his oppressive father demands a dowry she cannot pay. After psychiatric treatment, Usha joins a rural voluntary organisation where she falls for its leader, Francis (Heblikar). The demise of her second lover after local gossip takes on religious overtones causes a further psychological crisis. The psychiatrist in the film (Karnad), representing the producers, offers a sociological critique of the events.
AATISH
1994 155’ col/scope Hindi
d Sanjay Gupta pc Sippy Films p G.P. Sippy st/sc Robin Bhatt, Sujit Sen dial Kamlesh Pandey lyr Sameer c Najeeb Khan m Nadeem-Shravan
lp Sanjay Dutt, Aditya Panscholi, Raveena Tandon, Karishma Kapoor, Atul Agnihotri, Shakti Kapoor, Gulshan Grover, Tanuja, Ajit, Kadar Khan
Baba (Dutt) and Nawab (Panscholi) are hired thugs in the employ of a dreaded gangster (Ajit) and thus the sworn enemies of his rival (Grover). Baba’s entire family, especially his mother (Tanuja) and his girlfriend (Tandon), become implicated and Baba’s sidekick is maimed/castrated in the process. Baba’s younger brother (Agnihotri) is a police officer who, in the film’s gory end, shoots his elder brother. The film covers some of the terrain extensively visited in 70s Hindi films (e.g. Deewar, 1975), except for the unusually elaborate staging of graphic violence. The film features the hit song Dil dil dil/Main tere pyar mein khoya.
ADHARMAM
1994 152’ col Tamil
d/sc Ramesh Krishna pc G.K. Films st/dial Chandramohan Nag c V. Manikandan m Ilaiyaraja
lp Nasser, Murali, Ranjita, Vijay, Vadivelu, Ajay
The environmentally aware sandalwood smuggler Dharma (Nasser) plants a sapling for every tree he chops down in the forests of Gunderippalayam. When he is killed by forest rangers, his younger brother Arjuna (Murali) continues the smuggling business with greater violence. In the end Arjuna justifies his actions by arguing that the state itself is responsible for creating criminals. Some of the film works with mythological references.
ALLARI PREMIKUDU
1994 147’ col Telugu
d K. Raghavendra Rao pc Shri Satya Durga Arts p Suresh Satyanand s Satyanand co-lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy, Vennelakanti c Chota K. Naidu co-lyr/m M.M. Keeravani
lp Jagapathi Babu, Soundarya, Rambha, Kanchan, Ramya Krishna, Brahmanandam, Nirmalamma
The hero (Babu) bets a friend that he can get three women to fall for him without any of them finding out about the others. He does this with the noble intention of raising money for his daughter’s operation. Much of the film features song sequences with barely-concealed voyeurism, including scenes with actors rolling in flower beds and being pelted with apples and oranges.
AMAIDHI PADAI
1994 ? col Tamil
d/s Manivannan pc M.R. Films Intl. lyr Vali, Pulamaipithan, Ponnadiyan c D. Shankar m Ilaiyaraja
lp Sathyaraj, Ranjita, Kasturi, Sujatha, R. Sundarrajan, S.S. Chandran, Manivannan Feudal drama set over two generations. Thangavelu (Sathyaraj), training to be a police officer, cannot marry Uchamma (Ranjita) because his grandparents reveal his past history as an illegitimate child. His father Nagaraja Cholan (Sathyaraj again), a Member of the State legislature, had been supported in his early career by the rebel political leader Manimaran (Manivannan), a reference to MDMK leader Vai Gopalswamy. Having become a successful politician, Nagaraja abandons the woman he is to marry, Thayamma (Kasturi), causing her to commit suicide leaving behind their illegitimate son. Nagaraja instead marries the princess Sivakami (Sujatha) who however sees through his evil designs. Later, the grown up son teams up with Manimaran and Sivakami, and eventually kills his father. The film was a major commercial success, seen as a comment on the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s tendencies towards nepotism (cf. DMK Film).
AMODINI
1994 101’ col Bengali
d/s/lyr/m Chidananda Das Gupta pc NFDC c Madhu Ambat
lp Piyush Ganguly, Rachana Bannerjee, Ashoke Mukherjee, Anusree Das, Tathagata Sanyal, Aparna Sen, Kankana Sen, Ashoke Basu, Dhiman Chakraborty, Sipra Basu, Devika Mitra
Noted critic Das Gupta’s comedy is set in the 18th C. when Calcutta was being built and inviolable norms of Brahmin social hierarchy often led to absurd situations, e.g. when upper-caste brides, who could not marry below their class, ended up marrying infants or much-married males trading on their eligibility. The irascible Amodini, daughter of a Kulin Brahmin landlord, is forced to marry a servant in her house when her scheduled groom abandons her in favour of a more lucrative alliance. She promptly kicks the servant boy Pundu out of her house as soon as the rites are over. The servant moves to Calcutta (then Sultanuti) and returns years later having made his fortune in the British colonial economy, considerably wealthier than his former employers. Amodini, determined to get him back, unburdens her troubles to Pundu’s latest wife and the threesome live happily ever after. Unlike the later films of Das Gupta’s mentor Satyajit Ray, the plot itself becomes secondary to innovative camerawork, often using minimal light and high-speed stock, and to stylised references to popular Bengali artforms.
ANDAZ APNA APNA
1994 160’ col/scope Hindi
d/s/co-dial Raj Kumar Santoshi pc Vinay Pics p Vinay Kumar Sinha co-dial Dilip Shukla lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri c Ishwar Bidri m Tushar Bhatia
lp Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, Raveena Tandon, Karishma Kapoor, Paresh Rawal
The adventurer Amar (A. Khan) sets out to woo the heiress Raveena (Tandon), but has to overcome his rival Prem (S. Khan). Their efforts to thwart each other are intersected by the villain Teja’s (Rawal) efforts to kill Raveena. In the end, it is Raveena’s friend Karishma who turns out to be the real heiress. The two actresses maintaining, and actually exchanging, their real names in the film also refers to a well-publicised feud between these two stars who at this time filled the gossip columns with interviews attacking each other. Director Santoshi (Ghayal, 1990; Damini, 1993) moved away from his familiar style to make this sitcom which depends mainly on Aamir Khan’s flair for comedy.
ARANYAKA
1994 90’ col Hindi
d/s/c/p A.K. Bir pc NFDC st Manoj Das m Bhavdeep Jaipurwale
lp Sarat Pujari, Navni Parihar, Mohan Gokhale, Sanjana Kapoor, Laltendu Rath, Subroto Mahapatra, Sunil Singh
The Raja Saheb, played by the noted Oriya actor Pujari, embarks on a hunting expedition in cannibal country accompanied by an anglophile businessman (Gokhale), his hysterical wife (Parihar), an Army Major (Singh) and his English wife (Kapoor). The two males are attracted to each other’s wives. The only outsider to the culture of feudal-upper class hedonism is the Raja’s adopted tribal son, who represents the land that the cultural elite set out to conquer and who is regarded by them variously as a wild sex-object, hunter and slave. The hysterical wife seduces and then claims to have been raped by the tribal, who is chained and tortured. An orgiastic feast follows as the group eat what they imagine to be the wild boar shot during the hunt. They discover the next day that the meat was the tribal’s body. This discovery is left deliberately ambiguous (unlike in the novel), allowing for several interpretations. The film is noted mainly for Bir’s stunning camerawork, enhancing the elements of fable and allegory.
BADSHA
1994 ? col/scope Tamil
d/s Suresh Krishna pc Sathya movies dial Balakumaran lyr Vairamuthu c P.S. Prakash m Deva
lp Rajnikant, Naghma, Raghuvaran, Janakaraj, Anandraj, Kitti
When the honest autorickshaw driver Manickam (Rajnikant) falls for Priya (Naghma), daughter of the diamond smuggler Keshavan, the father recognises Manickam as the dreaded Bombay gangster Manik Badshah. In Bombay, Badsha ran a criminal gang mainly to fight arch rival Mark Anthony (Raghuvaran), who had killed his friend Anwar. After Badsha kills Anthony, he stages his own ‘death’ and finds himself a new identity. Badsha’s past catches up with him when his own brother Siva, a policeman, reopens the old police file, and further when Keshavan, Anthony’s former cashier, kills Anthony’s wife and steals his wealth and his daughter Priya. Badsha eventually kills Keshavan and marries Priya. This enormous hit, along with Annamalai (1992) by the same director, was seen as the Tamil megastar’s entry into state politics with numerous rhetorical devices announcing his opposition to the ruling AIADMK government (eg. lines like ‘It is not important how we fight, what is more important is who we fight against’).
BANDIT QUEEN
1994 119’ col Hindi
d Shekar Kapur p Ka-lei-doscope (India), Channel Four Films (London) sc Mala Sen from her biography of Phoolan Devi dial Ranjit Kapoor c Ashok Mehta, Giles Nuttgens m Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, M. Arshad
lp Seema Biswas, Nirmal Pandey, Manoj Bajpai, Rajesh Vivek, Govind Namdeo, Saurabh Shukla, Raghuvir Yadav, Sunita Bhatt
The harrowing although in the end heroic story of Phoolan Devi, previously filmed in the form of a Hindi musical (Phoolan Devi, 1984), is represented by Kapur in an intensely emotional movie drawing on a wide variety of generic elements ranging from socialist realist posturing via action movies to lyrical and, at crucial moments, impressively reserved and elliptical scenes more commonly associated with the art cinema. The story starts with the young village girl (Bhatt), still a child, being sold by her impoverished parents as a bride. The ensuing rape of the child on her ‘wedding day’, conveyed by an agonised scream, sets the tone for much of what follows. The heroine (Biswas) grows up under a regime of caste banditry and terrorism, exercised mainly by the local thakurs, backed up by police terrorism, both involving the most brutish forms of sexual terrorism as one gang rape (by the police who arrested her for running away from a child-molesting husband) is followed by another perpetrated by the thakurs which lasts for three days and is conveyed by way of a relentlessly opening barn door as the upper-caste villains file in, including a symbolic rape by an entire village community who force her to strip naked in the village square. However, instead of allowing her cold fury to destroy herself, the heroine teams up with an outlaw gang and wreaks bloody revenge on her persecutors. Chased by the police, she evades capture long enough for the news of her exploits and ordeal to spark a nationwide interest in her fate, making it difficult for the local representatives of power simply to kill her off. Political expediency requires the government to negotiate with her and she eventually surrenders at a public ceremony to which masses of people flocked from far and wide. She is applauded by the assembled people, suggesting her rebellion found a deep echo in a population exploited and terrorised by the politically powerful thakur caste in that region. Predictably, the film became controversial, a phenomenon acquiring additional complexity when Phoolan Devi, released, remarried and harbouring political ambitions but still liable to prosecution for murder should the authorities decide to press the matter, repudiated the film. The newcomer Seema Biswas gives a performance of great intensity and conviction in the lead role.
1994 162’ col Telugu
d/s/co-lyr Singeetham Srinivasa Rao pc Chandamama-Vijaya Ents. p B. Venkatrama Reddy co-lyr Veturi Sundara Ramamurthy, Seetharama Sastry, Vaddepalli Krishna c Kabirlal m M. Suresh
lp Balakrishna, Roja, Vijaya Ranga Raja, K.R. Vijaya
Vijaya Studio pioneered the genre of the ‘folklore’ costume-fantasy film in the 50s and relaunched it in the 90s with larger budgets and computer-driven special effects. The King’s second wife, and hero’s (Balkrishna) mother, is rejected by her husband and finds shelter with some holy men. The son, separated from his mother, sets out in search of a magic potion when the King is afflicted with disease. Adding to the plot is the fact that the princess (Roja) too is cursed. The resemblance to e.g. Patala Bhairavi (1951) is heightened by the fact that N.T. Rama Rao’s son Balakrishna plays the main role.
CHUKKAN
1994 158’ col Malayalam
d/sc Thampi Kannamthanam pcjuliya Prod. st/dial Babu Pallassery lyr O.N.V. Kurup c Ravi K. Chandran m S.P. Venkatesh
lp Suresh Gopi, Gauthami, Jagathi Srikumar, Soman, Rajan P. Dev, Thilakan, Narendra Prasad
When the conscientious old worker (Thilakan) is sacked by the factory owner, the worker’s Marxist son Gaurishankar (Gopi) changes his tactics for transforming society. Teaming up with Gayathri (Gauthami), the daughter of a once-famous Namboodiri writer, and Sreeraman (Jagathy), a loyal but minor political fellow traveller, the trio join a ruling political nexus of unscrupulous factory-owners, politicians and police chiefs, undermining and ruining them ‘from within’. The film’s aggressive advocacy of consumerism, featuring flashy clothes, cars and guns sometimes unintentionally substantiates its ‘end-justifies-the-means’ message. The camerawork, often using spectacular noir effects, and Gopi’s performance, dominate.
THE CITY
1994 153’ col Malayalam
d I.V. Sasi pc Seven Arts Intl. p G.P. Vijayakumar st Priyadarshan sc/dial T. Damodaran lyr Bichu Thirumala c Ravi K. Chandran m Johnson
lp Suresh Gopi, Urvashi, Ahana, Lalu Alex, Anandaraj, Ratheesh, Nizhalgal Ravi
‘Searing expose’ of corruption in the metropolis, mainly providing a platform for Suresh Gopi to play the violent uniformed avenger. In a contemporary Kerala city ruled by drug traffickers, pornographers, smugglers and other assorted criminals, the cop Ravi (Gopi) avenges the murders of the Deputy Inspector General’s daughter and of his journalist friend while enduring the marriage of his girlfriend to a formerly corrupt but now reformed Member of the Legislative Assembly. In the end, when two rival gangs, one from the South, the other based in Bombay, clash in a riot of machine gun-wielding villains, Ravi manages to exterminate both gangs. Sasi and his scenarist Damodaran revisit, on a larger scale, familiar territory from their 80s films (cf. Avanazhi, 1986, Inspector Balram, 1991).
COMMISSIONER
aka Police Commissioner
1994 175’ col Malayalam
d Shaji Kailas pc Sunitha Prod. p M. Mani s Renji Panikkar c Dinesh Babu m Rajamani
lp Suresh Gopi, Shobhana, Soman, Ganesh, Siddique, Ratheesh, Ravi Vallathol
Suresh Gopi’s performance, embodying the fascist machismo of the honest and committed police officer, made him a Malayalam superstar. He plays the no-nonsense, seething, foul-mouthed IPS Bharatchandran, quite prepared to bend rules ‘to get things done’. Both story and dialogue often powerfully invoke the widespread sense in Kerala that politics and society are so corrupt that only some ruthlessly authoritarian action can remedy the situation. The spectacular film’s music enhances the authoritarian rhetoric while invoking J.-C. Van Damme-type heroics. It did well in a Telugu dubbed version entitled Police Commissioner.
DROHKAAL
1994 171’ col Hindi
d/p/st/co-sc/co-dial Govind Nihalani pc Udbhav Cine co-sc Anjum Rajabali co-dial Atul Tiwari, Govind P. Deshpande m Vanraj Bhatia
lp Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah, Meeta Vasisth, Ashish Vidyarthi, Milind Gunaji, Annu Kapoor, Kitu Gidwani, Amrish Puri
Nihalani returned to his familiar 80s genre (cf. Ardh Satya, 1983) of the fast-paced political thriller with this story about terrorist movements in Northern India. Abhay Singh (O. Puri), the emotionally insecure head of an elite anti-terrorist squad operating in a terrain made to resemble 1980s/90s Kashmir, sends two insurgents to infiltrate the terrorist group led by Commander Bhadra (Vidyarthi). Bhadra is captured and, for much of the film, matches wits with Singh using knowledge provided to him by his own informers within the police. When Singh’s own senior officer (A. Puri) commits suicide after being revealed as a terrorist informer, Singh breaks down and turns informer to save his wife (Vasisth) and child from the all-pervasive terrorist menace. In the end he kills Bhadra, and succeeds at the cost ofhis own life in placing his own man (Gunaji) at the head of the terrorist gang. The rapid editing, extended use of close-up and tight dramatic control - Nihalani’s hallmark - dominate the long and tortuous story.
ENGLISH, AUGUST
1994 116’ col English
d/co-sc Dev Benegal pc Tropicfilm p Anuradha Parikh st/co-sc Upamanyu Chatterjee, based on his novel c Anoop Jotwani m Vikram Joglekar, D. Wood
lp Rahul Bose, Salim Shah, Tanvi Azmi, Meeta Vasisth
Agastya, aka August (Bose), a member of India’s urban English-speaking elite, fan of Bob Dylan and Marcus Aurelius, arrives in the small town of Madna, A.P., as a newly-commissioned Indian Administrative Service bureaucrat. Much of the largely comic film shows life in the Indian heartland through his eyes, including bureaucratic corruption, swaggering officials and people such as the cynical cartoonist Govind Sathe. This is interwoven with his own voyeuristic fantasies and memories of life in the big city. In the end, transferred to a Naxalite-dominated area where radicals have killed a similarly Westernised colleague, he takes time off to write his novel. The film begins with his unsuccessful effort to sell the novel to publishers. Mainly an ode to multiculturalism, presented as generational problem. The original novel, of the same title, was one of the better-received items of the post-Rushdie boom in Indo-Anglican fiction.
GALILEO
1994 92’ col Malayalam
d/p/s James Joseph pc Galaxy Communications c Sunny Joseph m V. Chandran
lp Narendra Prasad, Ramachandra Mokeri, M.R. Gopakumar, Leela Panicker, Mukundan
Joseph’s feature debut is a low-budget costume biography of Galileo, unrelated to Brecht’s play, rehearsing his well-known ethical dilemmas and conflicts with the Church. The theatrically staged film confines itself to minimal sets.
HKHGOROLOI BOHU DOOR
aka It’s a Long Way to the Sea
1994 106’ col Assamese
d/co-sc/p Jahnu Barua co-p Sailadhar Barua pc Dolphin Communications co-sc/dial/ed Heu-En Barua c P. Rajan m Satya Barua
lp Bishnu Khargaria, Susanta Barua, Arun Nath, Kashmiri Saikia Barua, Miral Quddus
Barua’s Assamese modernisation melodrama tells of the boatman Puwal (Kharghoria) who ferries people across the remote Dihing river. On the invitation of his son Hemanta (Nath), he goes to see him in the city, Guwahati. Hemanta invited the old man mainly to have him sign a legal document that would enable the sale of family land. The circumstances of the deal disillusion Puwal, who returns to his village. There, in the film’s second half, a bridge is built over the river by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, losing the boatman his ancestral employment. Constructed in two movements, the film is held together by the relationship between Puwal and his orphaned grandson, Hkhuman (S. Barua), which becomes the framing device representing the kind of modernity that encircles the uncomprehending old man. Elements of the plot resemble the director’s earlier Halodiya Choraye Baodhan Khaye (1987), but even the symbolic revolt of the earlier film is now missing.