My third-hand impression of Pasand Apni Apni had been that it was 1) a comedy 2) based on Happy Go Lovely. That was enough to recommend the film to me (someone who periodically rewatches only the flashback chunks of Ghajini to form a charming, if abruptly concluded romance). It turns out I was missing a crucial third fragment of information: it is also a Basu Chatterjee film. Pasand Apni Apni turned out to be neither as silly as I had expected nor as insightful as Chatterjee’s best movies, but with expectations appropriately adjusted I found it a pleasant viewing experience. The screenplay is by Basu and Keka Chatterjee from a story by Tirth Chatterjee and Erik Martin. Basu da produced and directed the movie for Cineye Films.
It starts with a traffic accident. Although Star Theatre Company peon Maruti (Javed Khan) isn’t hurt, his bicycle has been totaled. Nor is he the only member of the nautanki company with transit-related troubles; floundering dancer Gita (Rati Agnihotri) cannot seem to stay on top of her neighborhood’s train timetables. Train ho bus ho pedal ho, the company’s impresario Sriram (Utpal Dutt) warns her, if you aren’t here by 10:00 each day, you’re out! Sriram is therefore uncomplicatedly pleased when Gita arrives promptly the next workday. It is Maruti who observes not merely the incongruity of Gita having been dropped off by a chauffeured car, but that said car is the same one that lately clobbered him. Gita, he and Sriram infer, must have some schmancy new boyfriend. Star Theatre has been operating in the red for the past three years, so Sriram is eager to dangle the possibility of a new patron in front of his snapping creditors. The car’s owner’s identity can be reverse-engineered from the business card against which Maruti was instructed to bill his bicycle repairs. Not having permitted Gita to get a clarifying word in edgewise, Sriram rapidly expands the fib to his current investors. He eventually goes so far as to call a press conference announcing that industrialist Sandeep Anand (Mithun Chakraborty)—he of the car—has become Star Theatre Co.’s new underwriter. To this event Sandeep himself turns up and is surprised to learn that he’s Rs. 50,000 in the red towards a drama company he’s never heard of, headed by an erstwhile chorus dancer he’s never heard of, who is also purportedly his fiancé.
Pasand Apni Apni is more fully an exploration of the Happy Go Lovely/Paradise for Two conceit than I had been expecting. After all, Sajan and the abovementioned Ghajini both make the comedy-of-errors romance backstory to a more serious second plotline. This choice, combined with the script’s disinclination to swing for consistent laughs, made it a slower, more lowkey viewing experience than I had expected. Once I had properly gotten into the rhythm of the thing, though, I appreciated how much this unflashy film rewards attentiveness. Silent gestures or background action enfold many a frisson of humor. We watch as a bill for stage dresses arrives at Anand Enterprises’s accounting department, passing silently from desk to desk until finally making it to Sandeep’s uncle Shantilal (Ashok Kumar), who is as much at a loss as the long chain of underlings to explain this mysterious charge. Later, tailor Ismail (Subiraj) makes exactly the same journey—noisily indeed, this time—in search of a senior enough accountant to tell him why said bill has not been honored! This was clearly a film made, not just in its script but its visualization as well, with eyes finely attuned to detail. Take Gita’s worn-out chappals. She had attempted to repair them, but the strap bursts off partway through her commute, due to which she flags down a car (Sandeep’s, as it happens). Once she’s arrived at the theater, she slaps her sandals frustratedly off and goes barefoot through rehearsal. When she leaves work later that same day—from the conversation in which Sriram first speculates her “relationship” with Sandeep—Maruti reminds her that she’s left the broken sandals on the theater floor. No worries, she tells him; I’ll buy new ones now. By the time she arrives back home, she already has a new pair, ones with straps that go around the big toes; she shakes them in her landlord’s face as proof that she’s just gotten paid. Considerably later, when Gita has reason to stamp on Sandeep’s foot under a table, she still has those toestrap sandals on.
Though I mentioned up top that Pasand Apni Apni was not especially resonant for me, it still has Basu Chatterjee’s signature clear-eyed, good-humored vision of big-city life. Money and its vacillatory whims are always at work in the background for the middle-class characters. Late in the game, when Gita fears that the ruse has gone too far, her mother projects that Sriram will understand their predicament. Tell him that the rent was due when you first took the car; now we’re doing well, and can afford to be honest. One person’s fortunes lean on the next like a house of cards. When luck turns, everyone chases the good star, regardless of whom it blessed first. Sriram’s previous “investors”—a deliberately ennobling word for craftsmen like Ismail, whose investments seem invariably to consist of fronting Star Theatre in-kind work on credit—are all imperiled by the theater company’s recent failures. Sriram delivers Sandeep’s business card to Ismail as proof that the troupe has a new backer. Ismail pockets it, and later thinks nothing of billing Sriram’s most recent order directly to the money man instead of implicating the unreliable impresario. These people seem casual and real, generally too busy or too stressed to bother with social niceties. If the theatrical setting provides the opportunity for a little glamor, it’s of the paste-and-tinsel variety; Gita spends the press conference standing uncomfortably around in a mythological confection of a costume, visibly itching to get to the green room and dress back down in her comfy cotton sari. It’s not a milieu I would want to live in, but it’s good for a vacation, as Sandeep discovers, too. When he first takes Gita in a taxi, she’s boggled—na baba, na, itne rupaye! He calls her a cheapskate; she introduces him to the joys of cheap masala dosa.
Relatedly, I found Sriram, Maruti, and their cohort increasingly interesting as the runtime went on. Sriram in particular starts from a very unsympathetic place, eager to manufacture Gita’s supposed good fortunes into his own no matter what she has to say. He’s callous towards both his employees and his friends, always angling other people into the positions he needs them in, scolding and then buttering them up in rapid alternation. Poor Maruti, smarter and calmer than Sriram, is stuck trying to keep the peace. Maruti immediately recognizes that Sandeep’s business card can be turned into liquid cash, and also that there are no more guarantees in their game once it’s been given away to Ismail. He is also the first person to worry about the lie spiraling out of control. (Sriram, too huffy to ever pay Maruti much heed despite his genuine attempts to help, simply gets rid of him by sending him on an errand for cigarettes.) Over the course of the movie, watching Sriram became increasingly like looking at aspects of myself I dislike, at decisions I’ve regretted making when operating under pressure and panic; his actions, while not commendable, were increasingly understandable. Very late in the game, he musters a bittersweet moment of honesty—perhaps my favorite scene of the film. The other supporting characters, though they get less run-time, are also well-limned. I’m a big fan of the older married couple who keep running into Sandeep in public places. Also on Sandeep’s side of the cast are the three none-too-serious girlfriends with which he comes pre-packaged. Despite only one getting more than a single scene, each feels distinctive. In “Kiske Pyar Me Khoye Hue Ho”1 the girlfriends all manifest and accuse Sandeep of being, this time, in love or real—psychologically astute, I thought, to derive honest romantic advice from imaginary versions of all of one’s previous girlfriends! It was refreshing that none of them were portrayed antagonistically, whether towards Gita or among each other; these girls clearly knew from the beginning that exclusivity wasn’t in the cards, and Rajini is not at all upset to be mistaken for Anita on occasion.
I regret to announce that those three girls—none played by an actress I could recognize—each had more personality in them than Sandeep. Mithun is a real cypher here. Rati’s performance left me more satisfied. I stand by the aphorism that people like people who are good at their jobs, which Gita is certainly not. Though competent enough as a chorus dancer, I wouldn’t want to hire her; she just cannot, for no very conspicuous reason, get her life together. (We learn that Gita’s late father, a music director, was a friend of Sriram’s and she’s been kept on with the troupe out of fondness for him. I should also note that we learn this from Sriram himself, who is not to be trusted.) When Sriram appoints Gita lead actress, my sympathies were solidly with the previous heroine and the principled stand she makes against her deposition; the same goes for Gita’s peers in the chorus, when they resent her political promotion above them. Though she does at least take the time to smell the flowers—by which I mean enjoying the sudden power she has over her boss as supposed guarantor of Star Theatre’s good fortunes—Gita spends most of this film bewilderedly out of her depth. At one point, Gita having confided to her that she feels overwhelmed by her new false life, a friend advises her to simply remain as she is. In that moment, Gita cannot even describe her present self. This is almost a “traits Shelomit dislikes in fictional characters” checklist, yet by the time the film concluded, I had found myself charmed by this uncertain, overwhelmed, ineffectual woman.
Both of my favorite songs, composed by Bappi Lahiri, are from the sequence wherein Sandeep first meets with Sriram and company. Set in the Sheraton (if you believe the dialogue), or maybe the Horizon (if you believe the signs), “Ding Dong Ding Dong, Bole Ghari” is staged as a floor show. Strangely for this genre of filmi song, it both looks and sounds like something you possibly could see put on at a hotel bar, were you to be very fortunate. It has the same style of floaty, stuck-down-a-well vocal distortion familiar from “Aap Jaisa Koi,” here supplied by Sharon Prabhakar, but the funk bassline is the star of the show. Adorably, the picturization grows out of a social situation many of us have no doubt experienced: a reluctance to be the first person on the dance floor, gradually alleviated by an irresistibly danceable tune. The wall behind the tiny bandstand is decorated with oversized clocks, while various aluminum-foil astronomical bits and bobs hang from the ceiling over the dance floor. The backup dancers—various couples having dinner at the hotel restaurant—are cute as the dickens, too, palpably enjoying themselves. If filmi music is often a creature of extravagant fantasy, this song pleasantly evokes many a good evening I’ve enjoyed in real life and with normal people. Musically, though, my favorite selection comes a few minutes afterward. Believing the financial future of the theater company to have been firmly secured, Sriram, Maruti, and assorted creditors make a triumphal exit through the hotel lobby, singing their gratitude and relief in the comedy qawwali “Are Woh Dene Wala.” They twirl past a picture-book assemblage of puzzled travelers to all squeeze back into the natty red car they had gone to the care of hiring for this important meeting. Upon arriving back at Star Theatre Co., they pile out again and resume singing, now with the grateful aid of the stage musicians. Happy-making!
1 Is this song some kind of esoteric take-off on “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” or have I gone mad? After a workweek heavy on tune family analysis, I’m starting to doubt my own ear.