Mouchaak

Delightful!

This film promised to be funny, and so it is from beginning, but not only where its intended so - the sink 5:00 in the kitchen, which happens to be far larger than one sees these days, is a washbasin, which is unusual to say the least, since the kitchen needs a sink for dishwashing and nobody ever needs a separate basin for handwash!

The relationship shown here between the young brother in law and the sister in law who cries openly 13:30 - 14:30 at the prospect of him leaving, is a typical family bond that is also shown in Tagore's Nashtaneed in all its innocence; here, looking at Sabitri Chatterji it's out of question to imagine any other connotations to the closeness. Ray, however, has deliberately deviated in making his film based on Tagore's Nashtaneed and turned a bereavement into poison.

The younger heroine here, Mithu Mukherjee, is known to Hindi films too, but not quite so much; here 1:18:00 on and especially in the song, she is very like an improvement on the then freshly successful heroine Mumtaz of Hindi cinema, and makes one wonder if it was the crowd of new faces at the time that made Hindi cinema lose this one.

Funny, the song supposedly debating about males vs females 1:29:50 - 1:35:27, has the males claim that scriptures insist women cover their face - but this is a very overtly Indian, not muslim or even mixed society, film, and no Indian scriptures ever did or could conceive much less say such an atrocious thing. Did they forget, or were they pretending for sake of appeasing? But of course, in the very next argument the males have growth of sumptuous facial hair as characteristics of superiority, which harks back to primitive need of such covering in another climate, very different from most of India with her tropical heat.

At 1:38:40 the spoken dialogue about official "first name" of taxi driver is transcribed as "christian name" instead of the spoken version, wonder if this is a covert operation converting or merely appeasing those already converted?

About 1:45:30 on there is an ugly factor of eastern social behaviour exposed whereby a couple is harassed by goons in public, especially if sitting in parks or on beach or similar places - unlike, say, a restaurant where such harassment can be addressed by the manager - if perceived not married as yet, chiefly due to overt signs of marriage missing from the woman's attire and the general behaviour of the couple. This can be tiresome even for properly married couples, even the not so young ones, who aren't exactly bored with their partners, if they aren't exhibiting the said overt signs of marriage in attires. Which says it isn't about public maintenance of moral code as much as sheer goon joy of harassing women who aren't covered completely, including face - an ugly result if the millennium and half of colonial rule.


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AKPudseg6yw

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F7pF2EE_sMw