Having started this series in January on really solid ground with 1998's Dil Se, I was ready in February to go back and do something that I kind of felt the instinct to start out with: see a really formative Bollywood film.
Unfortunately, iTunes was no help whatsoever.
The first five or so movies I checked from my Bollywood watchlist that were pre-1980, iTunes had none of them. Then I started checking some other titles I'd had earmarked as likely choices for this series for one reason or another, and it didn't have many of them either.
Just when I started to panic -- and was very close to renting something from the past five years that featured a gay relationship, which I thought would be interesting -- I found a goldmine of Bollywood on Amazon Prime. Including the first "formative" film I'd checked for on iTunes, 1957's Pyaasa. Amazon will be a likely source for most of the rest of the films I watch in this series, given its generous quantity of such films. (Netflix has a number as well, but you won't be surprised to learn they are more recent titles.)
Now, Pyaasa is pretty old -- 16 years older than I am, which makes it pretty old -- but it is not the oldest Indian language film I have ever seen. That honor goes to Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, which came out two years earlier but cannot rightly be considered a Bollywood film because it did not emerge from the studio system that comprises Bollywood. (I believe I'm correct in phrasing the basic parameters of Bollywood in that way; I'm just starting out, so you will have to forgive any minor inaccuracies as I discuss these movies.) I googled it to be sure, and Pather Panchali was produced by the government of West Bengal, which definitely sounds outside the commercial sphere of Bollywood.
And Pather Panchali made me a little concerned about Pyaasa. Because there are aspects of its production that are very rough -- much rougher than what a commercially funded film could produce just two years later -- Pather Panchali threw up a little bit of a barrier with me that I never got past. I should clarify that a movie looking rough is not, in itself, reason for me to reject it, but I'm just trying to convey the experience I had with this particular film. The roughness of the filmmaking (sorry Ray, I'm sure you are brilliant) kept me from full engaging at the start, and the story never really brought me in. I am surely wrong about Pather Panchali and someday I would like to revisit it, plus see the other movies in the Apu trilogy, to learn how wrong I really am. (There's a longer discussion of my thoughts on Pather Panchali here if you are interested.)
Despite some worrisome moments in the first ten minutes, Pyaasa is not Pather Panchali.
I should discuss the significance of those first ten minutes before we get on to the film proper. Like Pather Panchali before it, I couldn't get through Pyaasa on my first attempt. While in that case, sleep overtook me, here it was something entirely external to the experience of watching the movie. I first tried to watch Pyaasa on the night the Oscar nominations were announced -- I say "night" because here in Australia, those announcements occur at about 12:20 a.m. I had budgeted exactly the amount of time I'd need to watch the two hour and 20 minute movie, with a few short breaks, before tuning in live to see who'd be competing this year for best picture. But at about the ten-minute mark of Pyaasa, my wife came into the living room to talk to me about something -- don't remember what -- and that conversation took maybe 15 minutes. By that point, the window for Pyaasa had been lost, and I watched Andrew Bujalski's far shorter Funny Ha Ha instead.
I wasn't able to get back to Pyaasa for two weeks, frittering away most of February in the process. There were a couple times I considered putting it on, but it was too late or I was too tired. Simply put, Pyaasa was starting to assume the epic scale of a real chore in my head. It's short by Bollywood standards, but it's long by the standards of most films, and I was really worried about another Pather Panchali experience, plus maybe with singing. The first ten minutes of Pyaasa might have been more polished than Pather Panchali, but not significantly, and I didn't feel myself immediately engaged by the characters. (In case you didn't know, Pyaasa is also black and white, which again is something that factors into the way we prejudge a movie and its possible resources.)
The singing part was the part I was not sure about. As I try to come to a definition of what Bollywood is -- even though it is many things -- I've been asking myself whether singing and dancing is a quintessential part of it. Obviously Bollywood is a behemoth producing hundreds of movies a year, and they cannot all feature singing and dancing. But more to the point, are the movies on my Bollywood watchlist primarily going to have been "recommended" to me because they contain singing and dancing? Is a person making lists of essential Bollywood films going to consider that in the lists they make? Were singing and dancing there from the start, or did they only come later?
I soon learned that yes, singing and dancing were there from the start -- but only if you consider the musical era in Hollywood to be "the start." Bollywood has the same lengthy history that Hollywood has, with films dating back to the turn of the 20th century, so obviously, not much singing then.
I've been yammering at you for quite a while and I haven't really even gotten into the movie yet.
Pyaasa is considered a classic example of the form and is directed by Guru Dutt, who is also its star. As I was watching the film, I did some quick math and decided that Dutt could possibly still be alive today, so I looked it up. Nope, and nope by a lot. He died only seven years later at age 39, from what was either an accidental or intentional mixing of alcohol and sleeping pills. He had already tried to kill himself twice, so it was probably the latter. But he was a huge star before then and I'm thinking I might encounter him again, depending on how many older films I watch in this series.
Dutt plays a poet named Vijay, whose poetry cannot gain any traction with publishers because it deals with social issues rather than romance. His brothers hate him but he has the love of his loyal mother, who is not in great health. He quits his menial blue collar job after his foreman throws out his poetry, knowing what it was but not caring, and soon after there's an episode where the same poems (salvaged from the trash) are sold as scrap paper by his malicious brothers, which he must track down. I love the notion that in India of the late 1950s, scrap paper was something that was sold -- though not for very much money, which becomes a metaphor for how Vijay thinks the world sees him.
He must track down this scrap paper, which leads him to a street walker named Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman), who bought the scrap paper. (What a prostitute needs with scrap paper, I'm not sure.) Speaking of engaging with social issues ... I think I imagined that a Bollywood movie might try to steer clear of tackling issues like prostitution, but maybe Dutt had plenty in common with Vijay, refusing the lures of commercialism and trying to succeed with topics he really cares about. By all accounts that worked with Pyaasa.
His encounter with Gulabo confirmed the thing I hadn't been sure of, and couldn't be sure of despite some melancholy singing in the film's opening minutes -- the movie does indeed follow (create?) the template for future Bollywood films, which is to break from the story for (sometimes lengthy) songs. Now, to say there is dancing in the way there is in a film like Dil Se would not be correct. Given what we know of Dutt, he would likely shun the big commercial dance number, and indeed, what dance we see here is minimal and never involves more than two people. In the one case where there are two people dancing, they are waltzing, not performing Bollywood dance.
It was really useful to see this sort of origin of future Bollywood, because it suggests that there was something common in the DNA of these films, even when the subject matter was not frivolous. A movie with this story would never be a musical in Hollywood, but Dutt's usage of songs, sprinkled regularly throughout, suggests something deeper within the culture that expects this sort of expression on film.
To be fair, the songs have a textual purpose as well. Vijay's poetry is something that is meant to be sung, in the style of classical Indian music, and it's possible that all the songs in the film are "realistic," in that they involve material really being sung by the characters to each other in that moment, not the metaphorical expression of their thoughts and feelings that comprise a Hollywood musical. Like, in a Hollywood musical a character would probably never say to another "Remember that song you sung to me earlier?", because the song would exist in this nebulous space between a thing that really happened and a thing that didn't really happen. I think all the songs in Pyaasa really happened, but they are spaced out the way they would be in a Hollywood musical, so the effect is similar on the overall thrust of the film.
I quite liked the songs, but as the movie went on, I really liked the story. It picks up incredibly in its second half, after drifting a little too much for my tastes in the first half. It gets really complicated and interesting, also following Vijay's previous love, Meena (Mala Sinha), who didn't marry him because he was poor, as well as the person she did marry, Ghosh (played by an actor who goes by the single moniker Rehman), who also happens to be a literary publisher. Ghosh rejects Vijay's initial attempt to publish, though there later comes a reason he wants to publish the poems, which allows for a really fascinating look at such topics as greed, betrayal and artistic integrity.
By the end, the story actually takes on some aspects of the story of Jesus Christ, which I found really interesting from a movie with these origins. It's possible it also resembles a story in Hinduism or Islam, so I might just be being narrow-minded in my interpretation, but as a western viewer I only have my own reference points.
Long story short -- it may be too late for that at this point -- by the end I was really overwhelmed with how much I liked the movie. In its second half it moved from somewhere around three stars, all the way up to 4.5. And whether my reaction was really more appropriately a four-star reaction, I felt happy to honor Pyaasa in this way -- maybe sort of a makeup call for the paltry 2.5 stars I had given Pather Panchali.
I don't have my movie picked out for March yet, but thanks to Amazon, I have plenty of choices. There are three or four movies on my watchlist that I had heard of prior to starting this series, so it may be time to take down one of those, so I can intersperse the others throughout the rest of the year.
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