REVIEW: Hum Dono Rangeen (2011)

CHIRPING BIRDS AND PURPLE SHIRTS

There is something very piquant about watching Hum Dono Rangeen at the cinemas. It's been colorized as we know, and the crowd consists mostly of senior citizens who struggle to clamber to their feet when the National Anthem starts playing (in their times such chest-thumping jingoism didn't really crop up on a popcorn outing). While the coloring process has been very vividly accomplished, sometimes the preponderance of purple-colored outfits, whether it is shirts or saris, makes one question the sartorial tastes of the post-production team.

Then there are those melodramatic scenes in which people are taken by the hand and thrown out of the house (a courtesy shown by Ms Leela Chitnis to a very gamine Sadhana), or someone drops a plate she's carrying as soon as some morbid piece of news comes her way (Lalita Pawer is the guilty party here). Some of it makes your eyes roll, but most of it is merely amusing, and sometimes, despite the cloying self-sacrifice and self-righteousness on display, the shenanigans even move you to shed a tear. Almost. Of course, there are those lingering moments of silent foreplay between the star-crossed lovers (Dev Anand and Sadhana, Dev Anand and Nanda) that have all but disappeared from the silver screen and it's all about quicksilver moments of fast-food romance these days (for e.g. love is likened to bread pakoras and chow-mein in a recent film) without even an iota of the gravitas required to make a golden moment out of something that is decidedly tacky, even in real life (despite what the Valentine Day fascists would have you believe).

Then there is that one scene in which the hapless wife whose husband had gone missing, hears that he has now returned, albeit in a clean shaven and head-bobbing avatar (it's an imposter a la Sommersby). Here, we have the spectacle of the consummate actress Nanda, walking from her bed room down to the living room (they stay in one of those apartments that have played a cameo in countless 60s films) and it is an extended shot of several minutes, in which every emotion possible flickers across her face. And mind you, it is still subtle, and it is still pitch perfect because actresses of those times, while firmly entrenched in the precepts of melodrama, invariably never went overboard. Of course, this archetypal woman will soon be chastised for wanting too much sex, and must prove that she is the kind of elemental lover who cares for the mind and not the body, before she can be re-united with her now one-legged husband who is in the throes of post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in the battlegrounds of Burma (yes, not Myanmar, we are still in the 60s—actually the film is set in the 40s, even further back!).

For that one scene of Nanda, and possibly the one of Dev Anand confronting himself in a classic-angel-versus-the-devil-in-your-head situation (which may have been conceived by Vijay Anand rather than the director Amar Jeet, in possibly a Abrar Alvi-Guru Dutt kind of collaboration), this purple-infused version of Hum Dono is worth the price of admission. And please ignore the surround sound, because that’s really only a whole lot of birds chirping—I’ve spotted an owl, a crow, and countless pigeons in the chorus—and bird-spotters (or whatever the corresponding auditory word is) will have a field day.