Aag | Kapoor | 1948 For years now, I've been declaring this my favorite Raj Kapoor film and it's mostly based on my recollections from having my mind blown the first time I watched it when I was 10 or 11 years old and then again 3-4 years later. Basically, I hadn't seen it properly for at least a decade and I've been meaning to revisit all these for a really long time now. So thus it begins.
That opening sequence is just so stunning and somehow I'd forgotten that the film works almost entirely in flashback mode. So I was all the more shocked by the whole thing. And I guess I have to admit that those first two flashback installments (childhood and college) are both predictable and marred by some terrible acting, especially the former. That said, tiny Shashi Kapoor is soooo adorable. The thing is I remembered none of that stuff and rightly so. The film really begins only once Raj Kapoor's character leaves home to pursue his theater dreams. That's really what the film is all about and from that point on, it's just one great scene after another. I'd also forgotten just how long it takes before Nargis finally shows up and I was pretty restless throughout the first half of the film as a result. Oh, but what an entrance she makes. When she lifts up her head and her curls part to reveal her eyes, it's almost too painful to even look at her gorgeous emotion-laden face.
And then it's all these gorgeous close-ups of their faces dripping with passion and longing. And then comes the scene that i've probably re-watched the most from this film over the past few years. Raj Kapoor in an attempt to push Nargis away and into the arms of his best friend and benefactor asks her what it is she sees in him that his friend doesn't have. And in a move that's totally uncharacteristic for Bollywood, then and now, she lists not his virtues or his good heart or his talents but instead his physical traits .. his eyes and his hair .. and she keeps repeating these clearly articulating her desire for him and it just makes me go :O :O! Everything after that scene pretty much makes me think men are scum until the actual play within the film wherein the camera zooms in on Raj Kapoor's face and suddenly, I want to weep for her and for him and the world at large and the impossibility of happiness in that situation and I'm turned into a puddle of tears.
I intend to watch
Awaara (and a couple of others by him) soon and it's entirely possible that this is not the most accomplished or perfect of his films. But that last hour is all about art versus real life and how we tend not to see what is right before us because we are too blinded by the ideal notion of romance that film/theater/literature/fading memories have instilled in us and that stuff is just so incredibly moving to me. I don't know how I feel about the denouement. On the one hand, it feels like a somewhat tacked-on happy ending but at the same time, I love that the veracity of the coincidence at the end is ambiguous. And there definitely is a part of me that rejoices at that hopeful ending. Real life offers me none.. so I'll take what I can get from the movies.