User Reviews

Starring and produced by Guru Dutt, though not directed by him. This is an overly melodramatic and overly long movie, but it is quite good. I mean, most Bollywood movies are over-dramatic. This is the kind of film, though, where important secrets are kept far beyond the point of reason. The plot begins as a comedy of errors and ends as a tragedy. A lot of the material Shakespeare would have been proud to come up with. A man, Pyare (played by an actor known as Rehman, not to be confused with the film's lead actress, Waheeda Rehman) falls in love with a woman he sees briefly, but before he can seek out and propose marriage to her, it is insisted by his mother that he marry the daughter of a priest. Pyare doesn't even consider it, and gets his best friend, Aslam (Guru Dutt) to marry the girl. Of course that girl turns out to be the one Pyare fell in love with. For a long time, up until Aslam discovers the truth, the film is an excellent comedy of errors. Johnny Walker, whom you may remember as the singing barber from Pyaasa, provides ample comic relief. The songs are sparse throughout the film, but they are lovely when they arrive. Particularly wonderful is the film's one color sequence, where Aslam sings his new wife's praises on their wedding night. Rehman, one of the cinema's great beauties, may never have looked better. At the point when Aslam discovers the secret, more than halfway through the movie (the running time is 2 hours, 48 minutes), he tries to construct a plan to get his wife to divorce him, so that he will not lose his friend. He does this partly at the suggestion of his wife, after he describes the situation to her in ridiculously allegorical terms. One would think that Aslam would just reveal the truth to Pyare. Sure, it would be hurtful, and perhaps they would part ways for a while. But the guy just barely saw the girl in the first place. He might feel awful and stupid for a long time, but time heals all wounds, right? Of course, that wouldn't make a good movie, or at least not a good melodrama.

It's lovely, the music is excellent, and it is probably worth watching if you enjoy classic black-and-white movies, but I found it far from satisfying.

I can see that it was meant to be a tragic ode to brotherly love and friendship, the audience is pretty much beaten over the head with this. But in actual fact this is a thin veneer over an embarrassing objectification of physical beauty above all else. It seems to use love, but just superficial infatuation, pretty much just lust if you come down to it, as an excuse for completely childish and selfish behavior and the director seems to want us to see this as tragic and I can only assume we are supposed to feel compassion for Pyare and even more for Aslam, but it's really hard.

I'll leave the dated male-female relationships alone; they were the ideals of the time and the place and that's all that needs to be said about it.

But Pyare and Aslam confuse me. It seems that a man who spurns his mothers wishes (her only two wishes out of life, at that) and breaks taboos by sneakily watching his sister's friends when they think they are in private is not someone who would inspire the love that Aslam offers Pyare. It seems that Aslam should be chastising his friend and trying to get him to honor his mother and his obligations, but instead he just supports Pyare in his path to self-destruction. And in the end, when Pyare realizes exactly what has been going on this whole time and just what an idiot he has been, he doesn't actually try to fix anything, he doesn't learn and grow, he doesn't deal with the results of his stupidity. No, of course not, he just gives up and kills himself, leaving his ill mother devastated and his friend's cousin a spurned bride. Tragic? Maybe, but not the way I think it was meant to be.