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Top articles
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Agra
Bonjour tout le monde, Journée à Agra aujourd'hui, très beau temps, voyage en car un peu long pour y arriver, mais les étudiants en mode "Waouh", à la fois bien sûr pour la Merveille du monde qu'est le Taj Mahal, mais aussi pour les rues d'Agra, pleines...
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Paying guest (1957) and a celebration of Nutan's perfection
Paying guest by Subodh Mukherji (1957) is not completely worth its two and a half hours of watching: it’s just another 2 nd class romantic comedy with elements of drama and thriller. It incorporates all the elements of a standard family show: good-looking...
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Midnight's children
Famous, witty, challenging… and brilliant in the way some works of genius are, but Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie pleases and displeases at the same time. It certainly strikes the reader as a fascinating work of art, technically and stylistically;...
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Deception: how Tagore's wife had changed him
Rabindranath Tagore Deception 1918 From: Selected poems, translated by William Radice, Penguin classics, 1918 Click on the pictures to read the poem How much of this poem is autobiographical I cannot know, but in 1902 Tagore’s wife died young, at 25 after...
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Kapurush (The coward), or: women's own right to happiness
Do you have an hour to spare? 74 minutes to be precise? WATCH THIS NOW . And then come back to read. « This » is Satyajit Ray’s little marvel called Kapurush (1965, The Coward), a marvel of economy and inspiration. The story begins at night (it ends also...
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The secret mechanism of C.I.D.
C.I.D (Raj Khosla, 1956), starring Dev Anand, Shakila and Waheeda Rehman, unlike some other classic golden-age B’wood stuff, has been amply reviewed, and very aptly so too. Leading the gang is Corey Creekmur, at UIOWA.edu , who writes an extremely well-informed...
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Jagte raho, Raj Kapoor's nightmare
To inattentive spectators this 1956 film starring Raj Kapoor will probably seem a little naïve and perhaps shoddy, for it has enough imperfections to justify a less than perfect opinion about it. Some inconsistencies here, some lengthy bits there, a humour...
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Anari (1959), naive hero in a naive movie
Anari (1959), by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, in spite of its numerous defects, represents a compromise between the quality cinema strain started by Raj Kapoor, and its commercial exploitation. The movie is clearly inspired by SD Narang’s Dilli ka thug , which...
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Saudagar (1973): marriage is a business, alas!
I was first informed of Saudagar (« the trader » 1973), by Sudhendu Roy, through Carla and given my unruly interest for Nutan, and my unabated appreciation of Big B, I decided that I couldn’t wait any more, and I got that disc. It’s a very simple story,...
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Parakh, or: what is a good man?
Bimal Roy’s Parakh (Test, 1960) is an experiment. Not so much in democracy, as some people say, even though they’re right, it does contain an implicit criticism of democratic processes, but this is only a side-issue. It’s an experiment in morality or...
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Indian cinema on stamps
Hi, sorry to have been away so long, too many things in the going. This one took me some time assembling and researching, but was great fun! When I was a boy, my brother François and I used to collect stamps, mostly French ones of course, and I still...
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The reluctant fundamentalist
The reluctant fundamentalist is a strange and powerful little book. It’s clearly got some autobiographical elements in it, and because of that has manage to net some darting fishes of life that jump and flash and look up from their prison wondering what...
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Train to Pakistan
I am not sure I shall be able to do justice to Khushwant Singh’s little novel (published in 1956). It seems both too simple, too factual, and so because of that, too deeply rooted in Indian history and drama (for those who need the plot, go here ). Not...
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DDLJ: reason or folly?
Like many of you, I have noticed this film has broken the record of length (600 weeks) in that cinema hall in Mumbai (link) , and I had already been alerted some time ago by its 500 weeks’ record, so I too felt the urge to give my point of view. What’s...
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Provoked, a battle for battered women's freedom
Strange that it was Jagmohan Mundhra (of the fame of Sexual Malice and other cheap erotic thrillers) who was fortunate enough to have been able to shoot this story, the true story of a battered Punjabi woman who after 10 years of domestic violence decided...
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Why should watching older films make more recent ones seem less interesting?
This is a rewriting of a post dated April 4, 2007. The blog output is so low these days that I am resorting to rewrites! ( in fact, I’m busy with other things...) I don’t know if you’re like me, but most people around me still don’t really appreciate...
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Dhobi ghat, looking for a new centre
Dhobi ghat (Kiran Rao, 2010) is a pleasant enough film to watch; it has a seductiveness, an allusiveness whose charm lasts a while in the mind, and one wonders, after the last unfulfilled pictures have gone, what was this? What sort of movie did I watch?...
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Awara's dream sequence: a metaphor of life
Hi everyone… Here’s that detailed observation of the dream-sequence in Raj Kapoor’s Awara which I had promised you! I’m in fact quite pleased I had set that aside, because there is so much in it, and even more than what my Western perspective can divine,...
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Awaara (1951): the world's most popular movie?!
“Oh World, I am a wanderer in your puzzle!” So sings Awaara, Raj the vagabond, as he leaves the prison, and winds his way through village streets and benevolent humanity, his newly found freedom and his good nature hiding the deep wounds of a wrecked...
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Dilli ka thug: a gallery of masks
Dilli ka thug (1958) might be tossed aside as a jumble of loosely connected narrative titbits that have been put together for two main purposes: Kishore Kumar’s clowning, and Nutan’s youthful charm. A messy God seems to have been presiding over this movie,...
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Saraswati Chandra, the last tragedy
S araswati Chandra ( Govind Saraiya , 1968, last Bollywood movie in B & W) tells the story of a young aristocrat, Saraswati (Manish), who is indifferently raised by his step-mother and yet grows up and becomes a compassionate person who has lofty ideas...
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Madhuri Dixit: Bollywood's cannibalism
I am thrilled to say a few words about Madhuri Dixit. And not only because we are in an expectant Madhuri-comes-back period, with Aaja Nachle in the wings. Ever since I saw her in Devdas, where she outshines Ash Rai (well, a few more words on this later),...
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Ek chotisi love story: love and desire
« This is one of the worst Bollywood films ever made. It tells the sickening story of a 15 year old boy who loves a 26 year old women. Its weird, cos the boy is just so annoying and looks stupid. He spends long hours just spying on her with his telescope....
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Distant thunder, or how Ray recreates the World
Ashani Sanket , shot by Satyajit Ray in 1973 is again one of those movies people lift to the skies, but for which you have to wonder why what they find so important or interesting in it is so vague and general. Just saying things like “a scathing indictment...
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Aparajito, life's open eyes
Ray’s 1956 Aparajito (Unvanquished) enters triumphantly the collection of my best loved films, and effortlessly so. It’s been some time I’d watched Pather Panchali and I don’t remember everything about it, but I do recall enough to connect it with Aparajito’s...