Mashaal (1984)

With direction by Yash Chopra in his socialist masala mode, powerhouse performances by our beloved Dilip Kumar, current house favorite Anil Kapoor and the wonderful Waheeda Rehman, and a great script by Javed Akhtar... there was no way Mashaal could have been bad. And indeed, the first half is transcendentally glorious. Unfortunately, things take a dip at intermission and the powerful story loses considerable steam, eventually dragging itself to a whimpering finish.


The original angry tapori kid.

We think the problem is that the first half is so nuanced and real that we were blindsided when things suddenly took a bizarre masala turn at intermission. Nonetheless, the incredible performances of Dilip Kumar and Anil Kapoor, especially in the early scenes, are reason enough to watch this film and call it - not great - but good.

Vinod Kumar (Dilip Kumar) is a courageous reporter who, after being fired by his editor for all that inconvenient muckraking, moves to a notorious Mumbai slum, Dongarbhatti, and sets up his own independent paper there. He's not thrilled with the sleazy surroundings - "Every night, drunks yelling, rowdies fighting!" he complains - but his supportive, patient wife, Sudha (Waheeda Rehman), encourages him to stick it out for a while. When a local goon, Raja (Anil Kapoor), starts threatening Vinod's paper business, Vinod refuses to back down. Instead, having glimpsed the hurt innocent hidden beneath all the layers of Raja's bad attitude and cocky swaggering, Vinod decides to take Raja under his wing and turn him into an upstanding member of society. Raja blossoms under Vinod and Sudha's care, and eventually they send him off to journalism school.

As soon as Raja is safely away, tragedy... after tragedy... after tragedy strikes, and all the foundations of Vinod's do-good idealism are shattered. Shaken and destraught, he decides to join the underworld (?!). When the new, squeaky-clean Raja returns from university and joins the Socialist Gazette (okay, it's not really called that, but it should be), he is soon confronted with the unsavory truth: his guru and guiding light has now fallen very low indeed. It all goes straight-up masala from here.


The Puri brothers - Amrish and Madan - play the villains, with (oddly) older Madan playing second-banana to younger Amrish.


All Raja wants to do is kick it with his loafer crew!

The problem, we think, is that Vinod's sudden decision to turn gangster strains credulity. For a film that methodically established all these complex and subtle characterizations, it was disappointingly filmi to have Dilip suddenly descend into his (admittedly low-key) crime lair. And it was very hard to believe that his bumbling, middle-aged friends (Saeed Jaffrey!) would suddenly become hardcore henchmen. If Yash ji and Javed sahab will permit us, we think the story would have packed a lot more punch had Vinod instead become an alcoholic or something. Same disappointment - much more believable and hence poignant!

This was really a shame, since the first half was so amazingly amazing. Gosh - the first half was like a more complex Hindi version of Good Will Hunting. Watching the hardcore, tapori Raja come out of his shell to reveal all the hurt and anger from being a slum kid always pressed down by the heel of society was incredibly touching. Anil Kapoor sirf ek abhineta nahin - hira hai, hira! All kudos go to Anil Kapoor, who won the Filmfare for this, for giving one of the best performances we've seen from him (and, if you've been keeping up with the PPCC, you know we've seen a lot recently). Just watch the following scenes: first, when Raja is first invited to Vinod and Sudha's house - how he marvels at being served coffee, and how he describes his parents' deaths with forced indifference. Second, when - after a falling out between the two - Vinod visits a drunken, upset Raja in his home and Raja tells him a little more about his parents. Anil just knocks it out of the park here - the rage at all the terrible injustices of his upbringing, and his desperate desire to be loved and accepted by Vinod! It was, as Rum would say, a moment of barsaat tears; very impressive and very similar to the "It's not your fault" scene from Good Will Hunting. Actually, most of the first half of the film was one protracted barsaat cry - e.g., the bit when Vinod kicks Raja out of his house was HEARTBREAKING.


The sad, drunken scene. Oh, Raja, you're not a worm! You'll never be a worm! Ham PPCC aur Bruce Lee hain tere saath!


Awww, Dilip! Awww, Waheeda!

The other reason the first half is so great is, of course, Dilip Kumar's performance. We were wary of this film because we kept thinking, "Oh, it's past-his-prime Dilip Kumar, naah..." but then we watched this and were reminded why we absolutely love him. He used his typically soft-spoken, understated delivery with the superbly naturalist fidgeting. Sigh, Dilip, you're so great. And his rapport with Waheeda Rehman was also compelling and sweet. Everyone go watch Dilip's Devdas and Waheeda's Teesri Kasam now - we know we're going to.

There were other great moments in the first half: the magnificent Holi song, the budding romance between Raja and fiery reporter Geeta (Rati Aghinotri), the feminist opening, the sweet scene when they all go out to the cinema... All this was really great, and got us all excited about how things would be resolved - and yet we lost so much interest with the second act that we started wishing the silly movie would just end. Don't get us wrong - well-done masala is great. Unfortunately, this suffered from the dreaded Mishandled Masala Injection of Doom, something that not only killed out barsaat cry, but unfortunately toppled this film from the greatness it could have been. Eheu, eheu...

Lamhe (1991)

Dude. Duuude.

Lamhe (Moments) is just wrong. Sorry. It seems the film divides people into two camps: those who don't mind the mother-man-daughter love triangle, and those who do. Unfortunately, while the PPCC considers itself pretty tolerant, we fall into the latter camp. We just found it... nasty. Plus, the lopsided emotionality, the ceaseless tempo changes, the fact that Anil is missing his trademark 'stache and that Sridevi spends so much time squealing pretty much ensured that we were left cold.


Who's this guy? Hmm, don't know.

Viren (some clean-shaven guy) is a London-based NRI with roots in Rajasthan. When he returns to the land of his patriarchs and meets his old nanny (Waheeda Rehman), he peeks out his bedroom window one day to see the girl next door, the bubbly Pallavi (Sridevi), dancing in the rain. Viren is immediately smitten, even though his nanny chides him - "But she's older than you! Men don't marry women who are older than them in our country, remember!" But no worries, the problem solves itself when Pallavi's fiancee (Deepak Malhotra, playing the Yash Chopra Trademark Man In Uniform) emerges from the woodwork and they're married. Viren is devastated, but says nothing. Eventually Pallavi becomes pregnant, but she and her husband get in a huge car accident (another Yash Chopra Trademark for conveniently disposing of unwanted lovers). The husband dies, Pallavi is badly injured and she too dies later in childbirth.


The Yash Chopra Trademark Hospital Scene.

OK, now it gets wrong. The baby, Pooja, is handed over to Waheeda Rehman for more nannying, and Viren, steeped in griefly grief, flees to London to spend the next twenty years grieving and tending to his mustache. He returns to Rajasthan every year for Pallavi's death anniversary, but avoids little Pooja - ostensibly because her presence is a painful reminder of Pallavi's death (indeed, when the doctors had told Viren that they could save either the mother or the daughter, Viren had immediately insisted, "Save the mother then!"). What this all means is that little Pooja grows up with an intense curiosity and crush for her Mystery Father Figure. When Viren returns on her 18th birthday to hold the yearly grief session, he lifts his griefly grieving eyes to see... SRIDEVI! AGAIN!

You can guess where the story goes now. (At least the stache is back.)


Sucking her finger! A little scandalous.


Talking into that old Star Wars prop. Yet more scandalous.

We tried to rationalize it. "Hmm, well, if Viren was eighteen when Pooja was born, that's not so horrible," we thought, "heck, Katrina Kaif is dating Salman Khan, isn't she?! We love the Anil/Rani jodi, and that's an 18-year gap too, no?!" But no amount of math could make this OK.

PROBLEM ONE: A relationship between two adults is fine, but you can't spend half the film waiting for one of the lovers to grow up from baby to consenting adult. PROBLEM TWO: The incestuous vibes are strong, as Viren is essentially the father figure - he provides money and birthday presents throughout Pooja's childhood. And he loved her freakin' mom! PROBLEM THREE: So another attempt at rationalizing the Viren/Pooja pyaar was when we thought, "Well, Viren's spent his entire adult life grieving over a lost crush from his youth and so he hasn't really grown emotionally. So maybe it's not so lopsided, after all!" Yet the film seems to constantly emphasize the stark difference in maturity between quiet, aging, world-weary Viren and child-like, giggly Pooja. ARGHH. We think maybe, maybe this would have made sense if Viren had been a 14-year-old barely pubescent kid who crushed on Pallavi and then got a more reasonable chance with the daughter. But the fact is that Viren is totally a peer of Pallavi's, stache or stacheless, and his role in raising Pooja should - you'd freakin' think - preclude any future hanky panky.


Anupam, we loved you in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai but lately you've been making it hard.

For once, we think Anil Kapoor was miscast. That is, his performance is fine (if subdued to the point that we wondered if he was on Valium) but he's both too old to play the fresh-faced youth Viren and too young to play the aging, gray-sideburned Viren. However, any actor would have been too old and too young for this - hence why we think two actors would have been needed, a Master Tito for the prologue and Anil for the adultness. That would have saved us from his naked upper lip too. And anyway, these silly mismade romantic fables are not what we watch Anil for - we want action! intensity! screaming his head off! sinister-ness! moments of vulnerability and then maybe more samurai-style screaming! Pran-like sleaziness! swinging his jacket over his head while wearing a cheesy silk shirt and bellowing, "Inshaaaaa'Allah!"! You know, something fun and lovable and Pranly. We don't want this piece of pickled, boring, tranquilized lameness.

Sridevi - we've only seen her in that Sanjay Dutt movie where she's framed as a drug mule in Hong Kong. We enjoyed her there, but in this film we could barely cope with her airheaded bounciness and giggly shrieks. Waheeda Rehman was fine in her limited role, and Anupam Kher was - as in Beta - pretty awful.

Apparently this film flopped in India (and it's Karan Johar's favorite Yash Chopra film?! where'd we read that?), and Yash Chopra decided that this was because the story was too "avant garde". Umm, sorry, Uncle, but it looks like you're going in the wrong direction. This was so anti-avant garde, it's like you went back in time faster than the DeLorean. It basically advocated child brides, as what else is Pooja?! The nail in the coffin is when Nanny Waheeda reminds Viren that dramatic age differences are only OK if the man is older than the woman. Oh yeah, no duh.