Kaaliyaa

There is a line between portraying an abusive relationship as problematic, and showing it as glorious. Prisoner of war VK (Karthi) reminisces about his romance with an army hospital doctor, Leela (Aditi Rao), while plotting his return to India. The film, mostly told in flashback, is an endless array of abusive segments pegged as somehow romantic and indicative of the intensity of the fighting man. With each missed warning signal of "Run, Leela, Run" the educated, independent doctor is endeared more and more by the egregious excesses of her fighter pilot suitor. If relationship abuse were were required to be flagged with a written warning accompanying the scene (as the Indian government requires for scenes with characters drinking or smoking), the film would have a second layer of subtitles. The only mildly redeeming feature of the film is the locales, which Mani Ratnam's films are known for, though they scarcely do much to assuage the unwitting unfolding of the portrait of an acid attacker as a young man. The screenplay mainly consists of seven or short-film like sequences of bizarre behavior, offset by a momentary apology and close-up shots of the protagonist's pained face, to set up the next. There is no real plot development or dive into the characters, which even the lovers of the MGR model of macho screen romance would find hard to empathize with. The best scene in the film is when a paunchy character actor dies, and is stuffed into a coffin at best designed for a svelte fashion model, leaving the audience to rue the scriptwriter editing away the compelling scene in which his arms would need to be sawed off to fit the grave. That scene was only saved by its irrelevance to the plot.

The film is about a rabble-rouser (Jeetendra) who dies and goes to hell, where he starts up a union among the workers of Yamraj, the God of Hell (Premnath). He gets the workers to strike and eventually manages to get Yamraj himself to go on vacation, thereby stopping 'entry services' into hell. This consequently ends deaths on earth, and sends the Gods of heaven into a tizzy.

This is an extremely interesting film for a number of reasons - first, the references to Hindu gods are often irreverent (Yamraj is asked what he had to do with the 'immaculate conception' of Yudhistir in the Mahabharata) making one wonder if films have become less permissive over time! Second, there are several underhand references to Indira Gandhi's emergency (when Jeetendra engineers the strike in hell, he warns Yamraj that his own close aides will turn on him and depose against him in an enquiry commission if push came to shove).

And if all of this is not reason enough, the film is overall very entertaining -- Premnath and Deven Varma are fantastic as Yamraj and Chitragupt, the dialogue and script are quite funny. That said, the film could have shaved a few minutes off.

Besides being a very watchable film, it is a must-have for all serious students of Hindi cinema. The film is dedicated to Bimal Roy (practically the entire crew is comprised of people who worked for Roy) and in this film, Hrishikesh Mukherji's narrative style is clearly reminiscent of Roy's style. Hemant Kumar's music from this film is practically legendary, as are Kaifi Azmi's lyrics. The film has a few flaws -- it starts and ends beautifully, but could have been tightened up around the middle. The lead duo, Sharmila and Dharmendra, are adequately good, but it's the support cast that really carries the film. The director spends time working on the relationships between the cast - Deven Varma and Shashikala, despite (or because of) the latter's slightly annoying excess, have surprisingly good chemistry, and David, doing his classic overgrown bachelor is dependably great. The film is stolen though by Tarun Bose, who plays the lead character's troubled father to perfection.

The thing that strikes out about the film is how well it comes together as a whole -- the cinematography, screenplay, the music, the editing and the acting. To the credit of Mukherjee and Roy alike, the film epitomizes the Black & White class drama that so strongly influenced Indian popular cinema in the post-independence era. I cannot recommend the film enough.