Suchitra by candlelight

This isn't a high-quality screen grab (it's taken from a mediocre YouTube print), but I love this scene from the 1957 film Musafir where Suchitra Sen's face is revealed in candlelight.
 

The film was Hrishikesh Mukherjee's first as a director, made when he was still very much part of the Bimal Roy camp; the DoP is Kamal Bose, who shot most of Roy's work (this was the only time he worked for Mukherjee), and there are clear visual references to Roy's films. 

For instance, in Devdas, made a few years earlier, Suchitra Sen as Paro got to light the candle that would give us our first view of the grown-up Devdas - Dilip Kumar, making his star entrance into a darkened room. In Musafir, the light (so to speak) has been passed on, and Suchitra is the one who gets that star privilege. She deserved it. I haven't seen enough of her work (and almost none of the Bengali films) to say informed things about her, but I thought her Paro was one of the great Hindi-film performances, pitch-perfect in its depiction of love, concern and despair, expressed jointly as well as in fragments, within the restrictions of a particular social setting. The quiet sadness of the character is such a fine counterpoint to Devdas's more showy masochism, and the role needed an actress who was up to it. If Suchitra had done no other film, it would be legacy enough.

[More on Musafir some other time, hopefully - it's a film that should be better known]

MAMI diary: Partition and partitions in Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost

At the MAMI film festival in Mumbai earlier this week, an old dilemma raised its head: should I stick around for the Q&A sessions that follow some of the screenings? As a journalist, such discussions – with their back-stories and insights into the creative process – can be invigorating, or at least useful at the level of information-gathering; but as a critic who hasn’t yet had enough time to absorb the film and write honestly about what he saw and felt, it can be a little problematic hearing the director and crew speak about what they were trying to do. It can create white noise, or even sway one’s feelings. (In my early days in literary journalism, it sometimes happened that I read and disliked a book, then met the author and not only found him extremely likable but also, through conversation, came to understand and even empathise with what he had been trying to do. At the end of such a meeting, even if I retained my basic view of the book, I might easily feel guilty for having been over-harsh in the review.)

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I had an unusually satisfying experience with Anup Singh’s Punjabi film Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost at MAMI. First, I loved the film itself, despite the physical discomfort of sitting in the second row and having to crane my neck and strain my eyes. Second, the post-screening chat – which featured the director as well as the actors Tilottama Shome (excellent in a pivotal role), Tisca Chopra and Rasika Dugal – was intelligent and engaging, and some of the things Singh spoke about (in response to audience questions) touched on and confirmed my own fragmented thoughts. 

For instance, I was unsurprised to learn that Ritwik Ghatak was one of his heroes, because I had wondered about this while watching the film. Like Ghatak’s entire body of work, Qissa is deeply invested not just in Partition – the sundering of a nation in 1947, creating paranoias, ghosts and demons that have haunted thousands of families over the decades – but in partitions more generally: the many levels on which we create boundaries, separating ourselves, defining various types of “others”. (As Singh pointed out, Ghatak once asked “Who is not a refugee?”)

[A very minor alert here. Strictly speaking, what follows isn’t a spoiler, since it is revealed within the first 15-20 minutes of the film – and if you’re attentive, you might guess it even during the opening credits, which have photos of the main characters. But part of the effect of the film for me was the subtle way in which things play out and come into clearer relief in these early scenes.]

The Qissa synopsis I had read beforehand was reticent about the plot, saying only that the film was about a Sikh man named Umber (Irrfan Khan) and his family, whose lives change when he marries his youngest child Kanwar to a lower-caste girl. But the story really hinges on the fact that Umber – dismayed by a proliferation of female children – decides to raise his fourth girl as a boy. 
 
“Decides” may be the wrong word, actually: it is more as if, by some mystical process, this simply happens: that Umber convinces himself the lie is true. His wife Meher (Chopra) is unhappy, but the family mostly carries on as if nothing is amiss. Other people – distant relatives, elders in the community, a teacher who instructs the “boy” in manly things like kasrat – seem either not to know about the child’s real sex, or turn a blind eye to what is going on. (One scene in particular, when the 12-year-old Kanwar tells her father that she is bleeding, and Umber responds by hugging her and exclaiming “My son is growing up so fast!”, is chilling.) Kanwar (Shome) grows up understandably confused but also eager to please, to be a good son – but when circumstances lead to her wedding to another girl and Umber’s patriarchal fervour takes an even uglier turn, the conflicts escalate.

Qissa begins with the spectre of Partition, but its canvas widens to encompass the gender divide, the line between the human and the spirit worlds, between sanity and insanity (I thought of Bishan in Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”, lying under the barbed wire at the India-Pakistan border, and the question of whether he is madder than the world around him). This dilution of themes may be problematic for some viewers (an audience member told Anup Singh that he thought it was two different films in one) and the film undeniably has many balls in the air, but I think there are important links between these themes too. Many people who suffered the worst of Partition became living ghosts in the sense that they were petrified in the past, unable to let go or to look ahead. And for someone like Umber Singh – a proud alpha-male who sees himself as the king of his crumbling castle – this situation is made even more complicated because he can view the future only in terms of having a male child who can carry his line forward; each successive birth of a girl is like a slap on the face for a man who needs some sense of permanent identity and rootedness. As his frustrations and insecurities grow, the political becomes personal, and his family is affected in many overlapping ways.

This is a stately, well paced film, with lovely background music that draws on folk tunes (the lyrics are by Madan Gopal Singh, who also helped translate the original, English dialogues into Punjabi). There are many beautiful widescreen outdoor compositions, including some set in the desert (sitting with the screen just above me, I often had to turn my head a full 90 degrees to look at one thing, then another, and was reminded that even this awkward experience is preferable to the one of watching a good-looking film for the first time on a small YouTube screen) – but there are also claustrophobic nighttime scenes in Umber Singh’s house, where the very air is thick and oppressive; you can almost feel what might be going on in this man’s tormented, fixated mind and the effect his actions are having on his wife and daughters. 

For all the vividness of these images though, there is a pleasingly hazy quality to the narrative, a haziness that has the texture of myth and legend. As the director pointed out during the discussion, many stories we hear about Partition begin on a strictly factual note, with remembrances of things experienced by relatives or friends, but then veer off into the realm of speculation and imagination, which may be the only way to deal with such grim matters. Qissa has that ghostly quality, very appropriate to its subject, and for me its allegorical and magic realist elements worked just fine.

The lead performances are excellent too, and I thought there was something to be said about the casting; you might not think of Tisca Chopra and Tilottama Shome as being a convincing mother and daughter, but watching them here I couldn’t help seeing a distinct facial resemblance. In fact, Shome mentioned during the discussion that she thought Singh was making a big mistake by casting her, a short-statured Bengali woman, as a Punjabi girl who has to live her life as a man. “I came to the role with my usual stereotypes of what masculinity should be,” she said, “but Anup told me, don’t worry about being ‘a man’, just focus on being a good son to Umber.” She also said Singh had asked her to watch the old Dilip Kumar films Tarana and Aan for cues on how to play the role. It took her some time to figure out what her director wanted her to discover in those performances (“at first I thought it was because Dilip-saab had these very deliberate gestures, and I wondered if there was something specifically masculine about that”) but later she realised that Singh wanted her to “find” Kumar’s way of smiling – even in difficult situations – in those films. In the larger picture, Kanwar’s story may be a sad, grim one (when she is liberated from the pretence, she finds she doesn’t like wearing women’s clothes because they have become like “scorpions” for her), but that didn’t mean the actor playing her had to look sullen.

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I found the Dilip Kumar anecdote interesting, because it suggested a director who could make unusual connections and leaps of imagination, draw inspiration from a variety of sources. When I spoke with Singh afterwards, he told me that he watched all kinds of films enthusiastically. “I am a big fan of Guru Dutt and Kenji Mizoguchi,” he said (and here I thought of the lonely ghosts in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu).

During the Q&A session, in defence of his film’s structure and its supernatural elements, he had mentioned that Indian storytelling had always adopted very different methods from the cool, psychological realism of contemporary Western narratives: in traditional Indian storytelling, there have been tales within tales, the idea of closure has not been very important, there is room for whimsy, for one mood blending into another. I asked him later if his interest in such narrative methods extended to the forms used in popular Indian cinema. “I love mainstream Hindi cinema, it has been so much a part of my growing up,” he replied. “But I have a caveat. I feel popular cinema has played with Indian storytelling traditions but also misused them at times. We have many hierarchies as a society – in terms of class, gender and so on – and transgressions have always been important in our storytelling, going back centuries. There have always been narratives that critique the prevailing traditions and assumptions. However, when storytelling is used simply to reaffirm the status quo – which is what popular cinema often does – I think that’s a problem.”

Examining the status quo – and how lives are affected when change occurs – is a central concern for him. “I have lived a life of fragments myself,” he said, “I felt much within me was scattered, and Ghatak’s cinema gave me an insight into my own scattering. I have also been interested in the making of new ‘refugees’ in our times, notions about nationhood, about families and genders: what is a man, what is a woman? And how our views of such things are proscribed and limited, leading to immense inner violence and unnecessary separations.

"When our old traditions are being challenged, we tend to hold on to the past and we take out our frustrations on those who are closest to us, as Umber does in the film. In the opening scene, his first words are 'Listen to my story'. And by the end, the man has realised his culpability, realised how his actions have ruined so many lives. It is very much a story about a changing world, where new ways of thinking and living exist, and where people who are set in the old ways have to deal with this."


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[Qissa, which has been co-produced by NFDC, should get a commercial release next year, and will be out on DVD soon after that]

P.S. And returning to the question with which I began this post: this boy, with whom I saw Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, would have answered with a very firm “No”. As soon as the film ended and the director walked up on stage, our venerable critic gathered his notes, leapt out of his seat and made a mad scramble for the exit. That’s purity of purpose for you.

Crossed connections: love in Madhumati and Vertigo

[From an on-off series about little connections between generally unrelated movies that happened to be made around the same time]

The films: Bimal Roy’s Madhumati and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, both released in the summer of 1958

The case: Hitchcock’s film (one of his least successful when it came out, but now among the most celebrated movies ever made) has a detective, Scottie (James Stewart), becoming obsessed with a woman named Madeleine (Kim Novak); they fall in love, but then she dies (or so he thinks) by falling from a great height, and he comes to believe he is responsible. Shortly afterwards, he meets Judy, who bears a strong facial resemblance to Madeleine – he emotionally arm-twists her into dressing up as his lost love so he can immerse himself in a fantasy.

In Madhumati, a tragic love story is similarly followed by an attempt at remaking/play-acting. Anand (Dilip Kumar) falls in love with a village girl named Madhu (Vyjayantimala) but loses her (she falls from a tall building, though this is not immediately revealed) and wallows in grief and guilt until he meets Madhavi, who looks just like Madhu. He persuades her to dress up as the woman he lost.

A strong similarity in plot points then, but there is a big difference in the two men’s personal imperatives and in the nature of the love depicted in the two films. The obsessed Scottie believes that Judy can somehow become the dead Madeleine, and his “love” has an ugly element of control or possession in it. Madhumati takes the more sentimental position. Once Anand realises that Madhavi is someone else altogether, he doesn’t show the slightest romantic interest in her; he asks her to pretend to be Madhu only so he can trap the villainous Ugranarain (Pran) into a confession.

The point is clearly made in an important scene where Madhavi comes to meet Anand in his cottage. Here is a flesh-and-blood woman who strongly resembles the dead Madhu, and who is sympathetic to his plight – yet he leaves her mid-conversation and dashes outside because he has heard the plaintive song of Madhu’s ghost. It might be said that like Scottie he is chasing a shadow, a woman who doesn’t exist – except that in the world of Madhumati the ghost does exist. A defining difference between the two stories is that Roy’s film believes in the supernatural, and this in turn allows it to posit an eternal version of love, built on the idea that Anand and Madhu are soulmates for all time. (Vertigo pretends for a while to believe in the supernatural – and in reincarnation – but this is eventually revealed to be a red herring.)

The twin motifs of climbing towards a height, and then falling from it, feature strongly in both films too (and in different ways suggest the vertiginous feelings that accompany romantic obsession). Both are breathtakingly good-looking films – one in colour, the other in black-and-white – and the cinematography has an ethereal quality: in Vertigo there is a scene in a cemetery where Scottie (and the viewer) sees the enigmatic Madeleine from a distance, as if through a mist; when Judy first emerges from the bathroom having “transformed” into Madeleine, she seems ghostly too. In Madhumati the mist is a palpable, living presence almost throughout the film, and Madhu is sometimes presented as an apparition, as someone not quite of this world, even before tragedy strikes.

In both films (I know, I’m stretching now) a tree plays a central part in the lovers’ assignations: Madhu and Anand use a tree’s shadow falling across a rock to mark the time of day they will meet; Madeleine counts the rings on an ancient redwood to reflect on the transience of human life. That might seem a minor detail, but the redwood scene is also a reminder of the big divergence between the films: Madhumati is built on circularity and the idea that nothing ever really “ends” – if Anand and Madhu can’t be together in this life, they will always have another chance in the next one – while Vertigo suggests that there are no such second chances and that an attempt to artificially construct one can only result in tragedy; lives are finite and circumscribed, and too often wasted in pursuing an ideal rather than in appreciating what stands in front of you.

And lastly, one of those pleasing coincidences that often occur when one is watching many (varied) films over a short period. Last month I saw two films – on consecutive days – that were dramatized stories about real-life directors. One was Hitchcock, which I wrote about here (and which made a reference to Vertigo’s plot as a variation on Alfred Hitchcock’s real-life treatment of blonde actresses). The other film, Meghe Dhaka Tara, was about Ritwik Ghatak, who was the story-writer of… Madhumati. (If this blog had a soundtrack, this would be the cue for an ululating ghostly wail.) Which brings me to an irony in the Vertigo-Madhumati association: Hitchcock – the “commercial” director, usually associated with escapism – made the more hardheaded film, a cynical work with many scenes that make a viewer feel like he has bitten into a sour lemon; while Roy and Ghatak – both archetypes of the "socially conscious" artist – created a lush melodrama (I don’t use the word pejoratively) about stormy nights, wandering spirits and immortal romance. It’s a pleasing reminder of cinema's limitless possibilities, and of the limits of classification.

A cinematic time machine - notes from the centenary film festival

[Did a version of this for my DNA column]

“These films were made during the relatively short period in cinema history when the only way to see a motion picture was to gather in groups in a darkened theatre,” writes George Stevens Jr in the anthology Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. The words (and the book itself) are an ode to a time when film-watching was not yet possible in the privacy of one’s home, and I thought about them a few months ago, while watching Billy Wilder’s classic The Apartment in a mini-theatre; it was a reminder that despite my love of old Hollywood, I have seen very few of those films in conditions approximating a traditional theatre setting. And as a professional writer, one can feel like a bit of a fake pontificating about such movies despite being so removed in space and time from the way in which they were first seen (and intended to be seen).

I thought of Stevens’ words again at the Centenary Film Festival in Delhi last week, where I saw movies like the Navketan classic Baazi and Bimal Roy’s iconic Madhumati in a large hall in the Siri Fort Auditorium. Though the screen wasn’t covered end to end (most of the films I saw took up barely half the total screening space) and the prints weren't consistently good, it was still an experience to be valued. Early in Baazi, there is a terrific, symbolism-laden scene where the small-time gambler Madan (Dev Anand) is taken to a swish club and led ever deeper into a den of urban vice; as one door after another opens to admit him, new secrets come into view. I could relate to Madan’s wide-eyed expression: watching these films in this environment, I felt like I was walking through a time portal into a new and exotic place.

It was a place where you could see stars like Dilip Kumar rendered youthful again, on a big screen in a darkened hall, and imagine that this was how the original audiences saw them. You could gape at an opening-credits list that read like a roll-call of legends. (From Baazi: Guru Dutt, Balraj Sahni as writer, S D Burman and Sahir Ludhianvi, Zohra Sehgal in charge of “Dances”, and as assistants in small font size, V K Murthy, who would become one of our finest cinematographers, and Raj Khosla. From Madhumati: Bimal Roy, Ritwik Ghatak as screenplay-writer, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Salil Choudhury, Hrishikesh Mukherjee as editor.) Watching with the benefit of hindsight, you could engage in speculation too. To see an early, vulnerable Dev Anand – before his trademark mannerisms had been honed, and long before he went down the thorny road of self-parody – is to wonder: what if the audience hadn’t connected with this young man’s personality? What if Baazi had been a flop, Navketan had never got off the ground and Guru Dutt’s directorial career had been shelved? What would the history of Hindi film have looked like then? In a dark hall, these questions have a special immediacy.

To clarify, I’m not romanticising the theatre experience for the sake of it. Personally I like watching films on my own time and in my own space, many of my most cherished viewing experiences have been sans company, and there is a wider case to be made for the virtues of non-communal movie-watching. (In the US in the 1950s, home viewing begat a generation of movie students-turned-filmmakers who could appreciate personal, individualistic films without being distracted by other, possibly unresponsive viewers.) Nor was the Centenary Festival shorn of irritants. People walked in and out of auditoria, talking loudly, leaving doors open with light and sound flooding in. The emceeing before some screenings was over-earnest, there were prolonged and self-aggrandising speeches that sometimes led to delays.

And yet there was something special in the air. I felt it when a large section of the audience cheered loudly at the first appearance of the young Dev in his cap, scarf and old jacket – made up to look like a scruffy street vagabond but still an undeniable “star” presence – and when Rajesh Khanna burst through the door of the doctor’s clinic in Anand. Or when rows of viewers whistled at Johnny Walker’s drunken act atop a tree in Madhumati. Or when the man sitting in front of me began humming the opening notes of “Suhana Safar” in anticipation, during the montage of nature shots preceding the song.

Even watching the Fearless Nadia-starrer Diamond Queen – in a poor and poorly projected print – brought its own frisson. I overheard conversations between old people who had a dim memory of what Homi Wadia films were like (“lots of stunts”) but seemed to have forgotten about their remarkable blonde action heroine (playing a liberated “city-returned girl” who would have greatly intimidated Baazi’s Madan). A gentleman behind me, apparently knowledgeable, said a confident “Yes yes, Fearless Nanda” while reading out the opening credits for the edification of his companions.

There are other facets to watching old movies in this way. Performances which seem over-declamatory on TV can sometimes work better in a hall, because you feel like the actor is directing his gestures at a theatre full of people. It is closer to the experience of the stage, and one isn’t preoccupied with “naturalism” because this isn’t a mundane setting like your living room – it’s a special space that you have paid to be admitted into, where you perform the unnatural ritual of sitting quietly in the dark, like an audience at a magic performance, while pictures flash before your eyes at 24 frames a second. “Originally, the idea was to take yourself out of normal time to see a film,” the director Shyam Benegal told me during a recent conversation, “But when you watch a film on TV, you can be doing other things – chatting, eating, answering the door; you aren’t out of normal time.”

These screenings mostly took me out of “normal time”, but there were some unseemly ruptures in the fourth wall too. During a screening of Saeed Mirza’s Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai, the sound vanished for a few minutes until someone yelled in the general direction of the projection room. Shortly afterwards, the framing went awry, and finally there was an alarming moment when the film seemed to dissolve and burn in front of our eyes mid-scene. (The effect was akin to what Ingmar Bergman did in Persona, deliberately fraying the reel to interrupt the film’s narrative. But formally inventive as Mirza's film is in its own ways, that definitely wasn't what was going on here.)

For a tense five minutes, some of us wondered if we had been unwilling witnesses to a crime against art – the grisly destruction of an important print – but the film resumed and we were sucked back into the illusion. Still, it was a sobering reminder of what has and can be lost. The centenary fest was a welcome initiative, but on the 100th anniversary of the first public show of Raja Harishchandra, the poor state of film preservation and careless attitudes to screening often beg the question "Dadasaheb Phalke ke bhoot ko gussa kyon aata hai?"

Notes on Gulzar's Koshish (including a Dilip Kumar 'friendly appearance')

Watching Gulzar’s 1972 film Koshish the other day, I was reminded that even when a movie's tone is predominantly sombre, a light interlude can be effective and revealing. Koshish is the story of two speech-and-hearing-impaired people (apparently it isn’t politically correct to say “deaf and dumb" these days, though no one told the DVD subtitle-writers this) who meet, get married and negotiate the many challenges of their shared condition. Needless to say, this makes for a film with many emotional scenes, underlined by Madan Mohan’s insistently (and often effectively) melodramatic background score.

And yet, there is an unusually whimsical, carefree moment early in the film. Hari (Sanjeev Kumar) and Arti (Jaya Bhaduri) are getting to know each other, going for walks together and so on. After watching a man talk into a public phone, they enter the booth and make prank calls – dialling numbers randomly, pretending to speak and listen. A succession of befuddled people answer the line at the other end, and finally there is a charming cameo: Dilip Kumar (presumably playing himself) walking down a stairway in a large house, looking around with mild annoyance at having to pick up the phone himself. He listens to Hari making incoherent sounds for a while, then mumbles “Yeh toh mujh se bhi maddham bolte hain” (“This guy speaks even more softly than I do”) and puts the phone down.

I couldn’t help imagining this was Hindi-movie meta-commentary of a sort, with the famously “understated” thespian of an earlier generation (Dilip Kumar) marvelling at the (even more) “understated” actor of the present day (Sanjeev Kumar). (What, I wonder, would these two make of Ajay Devgan acting entirely with his sunglasses throughout Company? But let’s save that for another discussion.)

Subtextual analysis aside, this sequence might seem frivolous, but I think it’s an important scene for the film because it shows us Hari and Arti in a light moment, sharing the sort of intimacy that they can’t share with anyone else – it’s almost like they are waggling their thumbs at the “normal” people who can speak and hear. It makes it easier to believe that these two can grow into a relationship together and that they will be able to have some fun too – that their married life won’t just be a litany of struggles. It shows a side to the relationship that we don’t get to see much of in the second half of the film, as things become increasingly grim.

Koshish has a reputation as one of the more sensitive dramas of its time and indeed there are many good things in it, starting with the heartfelt performances of the two lead actors – Sanjeev Kumar in particular. (As old-time readers of this blog will know, I’m not a big enthusiast of Kumar as a self-consciously Serious Actor, but this role really is a tour de force for him – the movie would be diminished without his dignified, anchoring presence.) There are some lovely scenes early on, notably Arti’s initial turning down of Hari’s marriage proposal and her subsequent change of mind. Nothing is explicitly spelt out here for the viewer, but the impression I got was that Arti feels the proposal is motivated by sympathy – that Hari (who is more self-sufficient and worldly-wise) is offering to take care of her – but changes her mind when she sees him in a moment of vulnerability; she realises that they can look out for each other, that this can be a relationship between equals.

But given all this nuance in the first half, I thought the film was compromised by the abruptness of its final 20 minutes and an unconvincing resolution where the protagonists’ son Amit is emotionally bullied into marrying a deaf and dumb girl (the daughter of Hari’s boss).

It’s obvious that the idea here is to dole out a moral lesson – Koshish was made at least partly to raise social consciousness, and this ending is its way of telling the audience that handicapped people should be allowed the same opportunities as everyone else. And as a beacon for social attitudes, of course this message is appropriate. But at the individual level, surely it should be possible for a young man to turn down a proposal without having to endure his father putting him through a ferocious guilt trip and ordering him out of the house? (“Your mother and I had this disability too,” Hari tells Amit through sign language, “but we brought you up, taught you how to read and write, and this is how you repay us?”) Despite Kumar’s superb performance in this scene, the premise is shaky, and sends out very mixed signals about responsibility and obligation.

Something else I found jarring: when Hari’s boss initially makes the proposal, Hari (who doesn’t yet know about the girl’s condition) firmly refuses, indicating in sign language that the gap in social status between their families is too large. This is an unedifying moment (to say the least) given that the film is shortly about to condemn discrimination in another sphere. Basically, though Hari is stricken by his son’s reluctance to accept a speech-impaired girl for a wife, he himself has been attaching undue importance to the class divide – something that is a much less momentous factor in a situation where two people will be spending their lives together.

It’s discomfiting to see how the power equation quickly gets reversed when the truth about the girl is revealed: Hari kisses her on her head and “accepts” her as his daughter-in-law; it’s as if disability has evened the scales between the two families, bringing the upper-class girl “down” to the level of the lower-class man. All told, I wish the issue of social status had been sidestepped altogether and the proposal had come from one of Hari’s colleagues.

There is much to admire in Gulzar’s work as a filmmaker. He chooses atypical stories and subjects, has a feel for the arc of complex relationships between men and women, and when he’s emotionally invested in a scene it always comes across. ** But some of his work has a hurried, not fully thought out quality to it. I thought Koshish erred on the side of heavy-handed moralising when it could have spent more time showing the growth of the special relationship between its two central characters. In short, I wish there had been a little less preaching and more scenes like the phone-booth one.

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** Given Gulzar’s strengths as a songwriter and his interest in music, I wonder if it’s facile to note that the song sequences in his films – Ijaazat and Aandhi come to mind immediately – are often shot more lovingly, with greater care and attention to detail, than the non-musical passages are. Watch the poetic use of dissolves and the synchronisation between visuals and lyrics in “Katra Katra”, for example, and compare it with the strictly functional camerawork and cutting in the other parts of the film.