Synopsis
When an adulterous husband, Anil
Mehra (Sunil Dutt) finds out that his wife,
Priya, and children have left him for good,
he undergoes pangs of guilt, gets depressed
and in a mentally unstable condition attempts
to kill himself, only to be saved just in
time by the return of the dutiful wife.
Needless to say, there is a family reunion
and all’s well that ends well.
The film
Looking at the plotline, there is nothing
in Yaadein to suggest that a film
based on it would be different from the
rest of the films that the formula based
mainstream Indian film industry churns out
day in and out. An erroneous husband comes
back to his senses; the ‘honourable’
institution of marriage is saved. The wife
in question is an ideal, understanding ‘Bharathiya
Naari’, who despite being ill-treated,
loves her husband, takes care of her family
and performs her household duties to perfection.
This could well have been one of those ‘sentiment’
oriented ‘weepy kerchief films’
that the South Indian film industry is so
adept at churning out.
For some reason or the other, one missed
watching Yaadein – the Hindi
film made on this plot line, for over twenty
years – i.e. ever since one came to
know that such a movie existed. It was only
last week that one could watch it, thanks
to a DVD copy of the film. One’s keenness
to watch Yaadein stemmed primarily
from one fact - it proclaims to being, quoting
the credit titles, the ‘world’s
first one actor movie.’
 So
how has the director and in this case also
the actor managed this? It is relatively
easy in theatre for a solo actor to communicate
to an audience; the means adopted is soliloquies
– instances where a person talks loudly
to himself, not addressing anyone in particular.
Sunil
Dutt, the producer, director and the
solo actor of Yaadein, does takes
recourse to this device, quite often in
the film. At times he is even seen talking
to innate objects like a wall painting or
a bronze statue. Another device used is
phone conversations where you hear the other
person’s voice so as to let the viewer
know what is going on in the main character’s
mind. Through them we come to know that
Anil Mehra, the protagonist of the film,
is having an affair with another woman,
he is anxious due to his wife’s absence
from the house and that his friends think
that his wife is a role model for all other
married women in the world.
Anil Mehra misses his wife. Normally a
sure shot method of communicating this to
an audience would be to ask the character
to get hold of a friend and confess to him
through a dialogue as to how lonely he is.
But now since as a filmmaker if you have
closed down that option and you have already
overused the soliloquies and phone conversations,
what next?
Next, we have Anil looking at a hair pin
that his wife used, stare at it with longing
eyes in different angles, feel it with his
chin and emotionally hold it close to his
lips. He repeats the same routine with her
dress, her bed, her musical instrument,
his children’s toys etc… We
also see him dramatically hold his head,
face and chin in various places of the house
– on the table, near the stairs, in
the balcony, near the bed etc…to various
emotional background music pieces. To be
honest your first reaction when you see
any of these is ‘Oh god, not again!’
But just when we start thinking that the
director is making life easy for himself
by using such easy and obvious devices for
his solo character to communicate with his
audience, the cinematic language of the
film begins to get bolder, stranger and
more and more out of the box within the
contrast filled black and white roving images
of cinematographer Ramchandra!
Yaadein takes place within a span
of a single dark, rainy night where Anil
remembers the events of his life that has
led to the situation that he is presently
in. Obviously there are flashbacks where
we hear conversations that he has had with
his wife, in happier times. In the initial
part of the film we hear only the dialogues
- voices of himself, his wife and children.
But gradually, the film starts going ‘visually’
into the past. We actually see what Anil
is thinking – the difference being
that we don’t see the rest of the
characters. The camera itself takes the
point of view of the wife or their children.
So, we now have Anil speaking to and having
dialogues with the camera, which now has
become a character. The gaze of the camera
is normally the gaze of the audience. So
in effect, the audience becomes the characters,
thus its involvement in the story / film
is ensured.
When the hero and the heroine of the film
first meet over a cup of coffee, Mario Miranda’s
cartoons are used to establish the atmosphere
in the coffee shop and the characters in
it. Over cartoon drawings of various couples
sitting in various tables, we hear their
respective interactions through dialogues
on the sound track. The only live character
in the entire sequence is the one played
by Sunil Dutt. Anil enters the coffee shop,
sits in front of the heroine, gets bullied
by her brother, and finally even woes her
– all this without showing the face
of the heroine or her brother. Did one hear
somebody say that mixing still cartoons
with live characters is the prerogative
of only a few music channels?
Further, during certain other times, especially
in romantic situations, the director extends
this logic when we see Anil hugging a portrait
of a lady drawn on a glass pane, the portrait
representing his wife! We hear the wife’s
dialogues as we see the portrait. Taken
out of its context, if one had to tell someone
that Yaadein had many such sequences,
it is possible that it would sound bizarre
and even probably funny. But seen within
the context of the rest of the techniques
used in the film, it seems perfectly logical.
And the glass pane even moves a couple of
inches back when Priya, the wife’s
character is not in a mood for physical
intimacy and moves forward when she is!
And when this happens, we do let ourselves
believe that Anil Mehra and Priya are having
an intimate moment between themselves!
If you are not awed or amused or shaken
by the above sequences, then what follows
in the film would surely make you so! As
the film progresses, we see numerous examples
of the stubborn refusal by the director
to show any other character in the film
apart from its hero, in flesh and blood
- the immediate one coming to mind a sequence
where Anil decides to throw a party in his
house to celebrate the birth of his son.
Believe it or not, in this sequence balloons
are used in lieu of real people. These balloons
have human faces painted on them and they
talk with each other through dialogues that
we hear in the sound track! Anil interacts
with them as if he is interacting with live
people. A lady balloon serves drinks, yet
another balloon is pissed drunk on the sofa,
and a few more flirt with each other. But
the effect - we really feel that a messy
party is on. Due to the conviction with
which the filmmaker has carried this off,
our suspension of disbelief is complete.
In a sense it is surreal – like the
scene just before the climax where Anil
is confronted by the suddenly menacing looking
noisy toy sets. In earlier times he used
to play with the same toys with his children,
but now in a true expressionist sense, they
have returned to haunt him – some
of them even hang in front of him, threaten
him, follow him and block his way, wherever
he goes.
After having heard and felt the character
Priya, one longs to see her in flesh and
blood, at least in the end when it becomes
obvious that she is going to return to her
house to forgive her husband. Maybe one’s
mind made unfair connections with another
film of the yesteryears - Jagthe
Raho (1956), where the only time we
see a heroine (Nargis), is in the song Jago
Mohan Pyare Jago right at the end. The voice
of Priya in Yaadein is done by
Nargis,
but the closest that one comes to see her
‘live’ is when her shadow is
shown rescuing the hero from the jaws of
death. The sequence is shot in silhouette,
the action of which happens on the other
side of a backlit white cloth. A thought
does cross one’s mind at this point
of time. What difference would it have made
if instead of a live shadow, we had seen
the real Nargis rescuing Sunil Dutt? Or
for that matter, what difference would it
have made to the film if instead of using
all those techniques to hide the other actors,
the director actually showed them? Sunil
Dutt could as well have done so, but choose
not to because it was a creative option
that he and his team had exercised. In filmmaking,
most of us are forced to find creative solutions
to issues that arise from circumstances
upon which we do not have a control. But
one would think that Sunil Dutt had the
means to make this film on a scale that
is much larger than what it is now, but
chose not to.
As a filmmaker, one may think twice before
using a balloon or a drawing on a glass
pane and parade them as real characters
in any of my films, even as a spoof. One
is also not in tangent with the high-intensity,
emotional pitch of the film or the melodramatic
externalized acting of its central character
or the depiction of its stereotypical characters,
especially that of Priya who has no identity
of her own apart from being a dutiful wife
and a loving mother. It seems extremely
odd today that the very first thing she
does when she comes back, is to plead her
husband to forgive her for she thinks that
she has made a big mistake by walking out
of her house / marriage - never mind that
it is the adulterous husband who is at fault
and not her!
But what finally makes Yaadein
well worth the view, what excites one is
its director's consistent creative experimentation
with various cinematic tools that he has
under him and his willingness to take risks
and tread the path of the unknown.
Ramchandra PN is an alumnus of
the Film and Television Institute of India
(FTII), Pune with specialization in Film
Direction, 1991. He has directed several
documentaries and serials for television
on film and video. Suddha, his
first feature film made in the Tulu language,
won the Best Indian Film Award at the Osian
Cinefan’s Festival of Asian Films,
2006.
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