Retro Reel by Sreepathy, Volume 13

Retro Reel is a column about movies, but not about the latest box-office releases. There will be aspects of review, but the column is intended more as a recommendation of good movies of different genres, with the sense of a retrospective – hence, the ‘Retro’ in the name. In a day and age when movies are projected digitally, the word “reel” may seem retrograde and outdated. Yet, no other word captures the imagery of a movie as “Reel”…Sreepathy is an unabashed movie buff who loves a well-told onscreen story. He has a list of about 450 must-watch movies, and Retro Reel is an attempt to share with friends of a similar bent of mind, some of the best movie-watching experiences he has had. He lives in Naperville with his wife and two sons.

Anand

“Babumoshai, zindagi badi honi chaahiye, lambi nahin…”

So says Rajesh Khanna’s eponymous character from Anand (1971), with a genuinely disarming twinkle in his eye. He says many such things throughout the movie, with not a trace of the mushy or the maudlin. And makes you cry. Again and again. You cry, not because you know that Anand, the young protagonist of the story, is dying. Neither do you cry because he knows that he is dying. You cry because he laughs. Because he makes people around him laugh. And, because he looks death in the eye and laughs in its face. It’s not the tragedy, but the comedy of Anand that breaks you down…

Now, chances are that if you are Indian and 30-plus, you – and your uncle – have seen Anand. So, I won’t venture to tell you the details of the story of this all-time beloved Hindi movie. Just that it’s about a deep bond that develops rapidly between two unlikely, and very contrasting, young men. On the one hand, you have Bhaskar, a reticent and reclusive physician, who is consumed by inveterate death and disease that constantly surround him in his profession turning him into a hardened, bitter cynic. And on the other, you have Anand who is being consumed by a terminal disease from the inside, waiting for his impending death, and yet, filling and spreading sunshine in the remaining moments of his life. It’s the story of a desperate friendship between a helpless doctor and a hapless patient.

This wonderful movie, which in my book, is one of the five finest mainstream Hindi movies ever, was made by Hrishikesh Mukherjee – one of India’s most thoughtful filmmakers. Like no one else before or after him, he mastered the idiom of middle-of-the-road movies, deftly avoiding both the crassness of commercial cinema as well as the arduousness of the art-film world. You could always identify with the characters in his movies and relate with them very easily. If you are a fan of sincerely heartwarming Hindi movies of the 60s and 70s, you would’ve realized that many of them carried Hrishida’s moniker – from Anuradha, Anupama, Ashirwaad, and Satyakam; to Guddi, Abhimaan, Namak Haram, Mili, and Khubsoorat; and to the hilarious Chupke-Chupke, Gol-Maal, and Rang Birangi.

Yet, Anand is his finest work onscreen, for which he wrote the story and screenplay, and did the editing as well. The story, apparently, has very deep personal undertones. You’ll see that in the beginning credits of the movie, Hrishida dedicates it to the city of Bombay. And, to Raj Kapoor.

It was well-known that Hrishida and Raj Kapoor were very good friends in the industry, but what is not so well-known is that Hrishida fashioned the bubbly, joyous, talk-nineteen-to-the-dozen character of Anand on Raj Kapoor. And fashioned the reserved, serious, skeptical character of Bhaskar on himself. Interestingly, his first choice for Anand’s role was Raj Kapoor himself, but his superstitions got the better of him because the character dies at the end of the movie. And the fact that Raj Kapoor used to call him “Babumoshai” didn’t help either ! In the movie, Anand is a Punjabi and his “Babumoshai”, Bhaskar, is a Bengali doctor.

The storytelling in the movie has two brilliant aspects to it – both thanks to Hrishida. The first is in the way he employs the flashback technique, using the pages of Bhaskar’s diary as a storytelling device to heighten the poignancy and wonderment of the story. The second is in the way he has crafted the by-now legendary climax scene of the movie. Certain European film institutes, apparently, hold up that climax scene as one of the finest examples of how the seemingly technical aspect of film-editing can dramatically impact the narrative of a movie. I have seen Anand at least five or six times, and yet, when the audio-tape begins to play in that scene it never fails to give me goose-bumps. Every single time. Without exception.

When Rajesh Khanna passed away a couple of months back, this was his only performance that came to my mind. My apologies to all die-hard Khanna fans – he was a star with oodles of charm, but a ‘hamster’ when it came to acting. But Anand is an exception. Perhaps, this was the only movie in which he didn’t ham his way through; he got under the skin of the character, lived it, and was simply outstanding. Having said that, though everyone raves about Khanna’s wonderful acting in that author-backed role, the more challenging role to portray was Amitabh Bachchan’s Bhaskar. The underplayed, simmering angst and the quiet pain of helplessness that Bachchan brings to the doctor’s character, in my opinion, deserves more credit than it got. Anand was among the earlier movies of Bachchan along with Saat Hindustani, Abhimaan, Reshma Aur Shera, Saudaagar, and Namak Haram when the gifted actor inside him came out shining. After that, once he was poured into the mold of the Angry-Young-Man, the star, Big-B, was born. And, a talented actor slowly withered and died…

There are many other good things about Anand, but I would be remiss if I did not mention the quality of its dialogues and its poetry. A man of Gulzar’s stature needs no plaudits, and it’s not surprising that his refined hand has penned some of Hindi cinema’s most memorable dialogues for Anand – cultured, yet not pompous; light-hearted, yet profound. The music and songs composed for the movie by Salil Choudhury is of a quality rarely heard, and includes the classic poetic gem, Kahin Door Jab Din Dhal Jaaye, which was the first ever screen-song of Yogesh, a lyricist who was very talented but remained little-known. And then, there is the movie’s centerpiece, Maut Tu Ek Kavita Hai – Gulzar’s ode to death, a poem that paints death not as a dark destination but as a wistful tryst with the beloved – recited in the inimitable voice of Bachchan for his Bhaskar character.

Ultimately, Anand is a perspective on whether life is to be lived long. Or, lived large. And, it always reminds me of a line from Fireflies, one of Rabindranath Tagore’s delicate poems:

“…The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough…”