Awara

Awara (AKA Awaara)
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Bollywood! I first explored the wild world of Indian cinema last year with my profile of contemporary superstar Amitabh Bachchan, but this time I thought I’d look at classic Bollywood, with a film all the way from 1951 called Awara.

I suppose I had assumed the tradition of Indian musicals was a more recent phenomenon; not sure why—but this film, too, is a song-and-dance joint, albeit a rather dramatic and serious (AND LONG) one. To someone in the West more familiar with the structure of shows featuring the music of the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Rogers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, the Sherman Brothers, etc., Bollywood music can sound pretty different.

And I’m not just talking about the melodies and rhythms, which were nice. I noticed within this movie lots of recurring refrains within individual songs and a predilection for metaphor and emotion over storytelling and characterization. The music in Awara communicates the story, but not to the same degree as a Western musical—and perhaps that’s not a big surprise, given how melodramatic the story is.

Awara asks you to accept the belief that it’s nature, not nurture, that determines how someone will end up in life, which reminded me of We Need to Talk About Kevin, only in a much more overt way. Part of the culture? Mmmmmaybe. The framing sequence focuses on the attempted murder trial of this dude Raj, accused of attacking a judge. His lawyer, Rita, in putting the judge on the stand, implies he’s as much to blame for what happened as Raj, and that leads us to a long flashback involving these three people.

Long ago, the judge’s wife was kidnapped and held for days by a criminal with a beef against the judge, but after seeing she was pregnant, he let her go, believing her child would grow up as bad as he believed the judge to be and that would be his revenge, I guess? Judge thought wifey had an affair with the bandit (she was a widow when he married her, you see, and you know what those kinds of women are like) and he threw her out of the house. Branded with the scarlet letter by everyone around her but still in love with her husband (Krishna knows why), she raised the child, Raj, on her own, determined that he walk the straight and narrow path—and maybe be a judge one day—and not be a criminal.

As a kid, he met Rita who, by a huge coincidence, was the judge’s ward. She left an impression on him and his mom. They parted company and reunited years later as adults, but by that time, the self-fulfilling prophecy was realized: Raj was indeed a criminal. They fall in love, stuff happens, singing and dancing, blah blah blah. This all ends with a plea to save the children living rough on the streets, so I get the feeling a message was meant to be included in between the singing and dancing. The bit about lost parents and life on the streets made me think of Lion, though Raj never searches for his true father.

If you know anything about Bollywood cinema, you know their musical numbers can get as over-the-top as anything Busby Berkeley ever concocted. Behold this dream sequence from Awara. By no means does this represent the film as a whole; in fact, the movie, dance numbers aside, is pretty grounded in the real world, so this really sticks out, the way a ballet number does in a Gene Kelly musical. Apparently this was the first time a dream sequence was done in a Bollywood movie.

Plot holes and leaps of logic aside, though, this definitely had its moments. The light comedy scenes between Raj and Rita feel like they could’ve come out of a late-30s Jimmy Stewart romcom. The cinematography relies too much on the dramatic close-up for my taste, but the set design is superb and we get some nice exteriors of 50s India, both city and country. If you’re willing to sit through all three hours, you’ll definitely find some things you’ll enjoy—though it really didn’t need to be so long.

The director, producer and star is named Raj Kapoor, and he was one of India’s biggest filmmakers. A Bollywood actor from the age of ten, Kapoor was something of an Orson Welles-like wunderkind; he had his own studio by the age of 24 and would make and star in films into the 80s. Two of his sons would follow him into acting. He was feted by the Indian film industry with many awards throughout his career. Kapoor’s father, actor Prithviraj Kapoor (who started out in the silents), played the judge; in fact, his father Dewan also appears in the film as does Raj’s youngest brother Shashi, who plays the character Raj as a youth.

Rita is played by one-name sensation Nargis. She had frequent collaborator Raj Kapoor beat; she started out in acting at age five. Western audiences might know her from the Oscar-nominated film Mother India, from 1957.

Awara was a huge hit in multiple countries, in particular Turkey, who remade the film in 1964 as Avare. The big hit song, “Awaara Hoon,” meaning “I Am a Vagabond,” was allegedly even popular with Mao Tse-Tung in China. In the movie, Kapoor does a Chaplinesque comic sequence with this song that’s very endearing—and it’s pretty catchy.