Barsaat - Movie Review
Published: June 29, 2010
Starring Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Premnath, Nimmi
Raj Kapoor, one of the biggest stars of the decade following India’s independence, started his own production company, R.K. Films, in 1948, and Barsaat was the studio’s second film and its first success. The movie poster for Barsaat—which shows Kapoor holding his famous leading lady, Nargis, in his arms—became the iconic image of the studio. Barsaat exemplifies Kapoor's style of filmmaking.
Postmodern in style and theme, the film de-emphasizes plot and debates moral relativism. The title means "Monsoon," and rain, with its association with fertility, is a common cue in Bollywood for sex. Monsoons are also dark, intense, and violent, as is the mood of this film.
Pran (Kapoor) and his friend Gopal (Kapoor’s brother-in-law Premnath) are privileged men with the trappings of a modern lifestyle, including Western attire and a fancy American car. Pran plays Western instruments—the piano and the violin. He is a poet, melancholic and full of florid language, who believes in the virtue of love. Gopal is an unapologetic hedonist, who believes in sex for its own sake. The two men defend their positions throughout the film—each believing the other's got it all wrong. Gopal is callously using a villager, Neela (Nimmi), who's madly in love with him. Pran, too, is involved with a rustic girl, Reshma (Nargis), and he loves her with a pure heart.
But the manner in which Nargis is filmed reveals otherwise—the shots of her are profoundly sensual, and Pran is rough with her—on the pretext of playfulness—and he even pulls her hair. Kapoor's films are highly voyeuristic, and since there's no nudity in Bollywood films, Kapoor has nothing but the face to eroticize, making Nargis—an unconventional beauty with heavy-lidded eyes and a slack, always parted mouth—his perfect muse. The married Kapoor's publicized affair with Nargis, a courtesan's daughter who was pressured by her mother into the then-unseemly profession of acting at a young age, made their onscreen pairings even more titillating.
For all of Pran's poetry and high-mindedness, he desires Reshma, who is sexual property that only her father can give away and that a tribal brute threatens to take by force. While Gopal has an eleventh-hour change of heart, harsh reality seems to settle their ongoing argument. Emotion has no place in the modern world, Gopal says at the beginning of the film, but perhaps it's a luxury that belongs nowhere else.
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