Waqt

[Spoilers - but probably nothing you wouldn't guess.]

Yash Chopra's 1965 mega-multi-starrer Waqt is so good! Its proto-masala elements - unrequited love, resignation to crappy lots in life, social barriers, a young man struggling to make his mark, a family separated into four parts by a natural disaster -

are nicely balanced and provide plenty of dil-squish and other forms of emotional satisfaction. Everyone in it is solid. The songs are lovely (my favorite was "Din Hai Bahar Ke," Sharmila and Shashi's college outing on what appears to be a pontoon dance floor on a lake).

Japanese pop culture-themed exception: my only criticism of the film is that the protracted courtroom sequences stomp Godzilla-like over the last quarter or so of the run time, destroying all the other threads of the story and monopolizing far more of the script than I would like. However, we are very accustomed to films faltering post-intermission, and we've seen worse falls from grace than this. And in the final scene, the courtroom becomes Katamari, though with better music, and rolls all the characters up into one giant ball of happy, so it's hard to be too angry at it. It just drags for awhile.


So: good movie with a few slow bits. If you want to know more about who's who and all the different threads, like which son ended up a thief and which one a goody-goody law student and which one poor but mere paas maa hai, read Memsaab. What I love most in Waqt is the STYLE. Oh sweet heavens above, THE STYLE! Set designers, location scouts, costume designers, and cinematographers all went wild in the best possible way. Fountains, fairy lights, flowers, fireworks! The fashions are divine. The interiors are so mod, geometric patterns dazzling. The outdoors are so breezy and in bloom. The colors everywhere signify candy-coated exuberance from a mindset of "artificial" being optimistic - the pastel palette of human dominance (no doubt to contrast the completely accidental life-altering tragedy in the characters' history). Even the flowers are synthetically hued.

Sunken living rooms that seat 37 always make me happy.









Don't all criminal offices have pinwheel quilted cushions and orchid lounge chairs?

Like Pillow Talk!


It makes me want to move into Waqt, ask Sadhana to take me shopping, join the dock party, and bliss out on the aesthetics. Being the heroine's dorky best friend with oversized glasses and clowning around with the goofy Rajendra Nath type for a week sounds like a swell vacation, doesn't it?