How to stop worrying and lose your moustache (Interesting blog piece on Mukherjee’s Golmaal and Jurmana)

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Here’s a trivia question. (Don’t scroll down too quickly.) This popular director helmed two films – call them Movie A and Movie B – in the same year. A sequence in Movie A has the central character visiting a studio where a big star is shooting a nightclub scene. As it happens, this is an actual scene from Movie B, which will be released a couple of months later. Name the director and the two films.

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Answer: Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Gol Maal and Jurmana (both 1979).

The Amitabh Bachchan drunk scene from Jurmana that briefly plays in Gol Maal can be viewed as a form of in-film advertising for the director’s next release. But it’s also an example of two Hrishikesh Mukherjee movies (one a modest, middle-class comedy “starring” that most unassuming of leading men, Amol Palekar; the other a more commercial venture with Bollywood’s biggest superstar) in a little jugalbandhi. And there’s nothing unusual about this if you’re familiar with Mukherjee’s career. His films tend to rework and reexamine certain themes, ideas and character types, so that if you watch a few of them over a short period you see many delicious connections – it’s possible to imagine the films conversing across space and time.

Take the varied ways in which the “real” world and the film world intersect in his movies. Playing himself in that Gol Maal cameo, Bachchan signs autographs for a group of schoolgirls and one of them asks him to write “From Anthony Bhai” (presumably a reference to his iconic part in Amar Akbar Anthony). The superstar gives her a wry look. “Accha, toh aapko mera nahin, Anthony ka autography chahiye?” he says. It’s a reminder of an almost identically composed scene from a much earlier Mukherjee film about a starry-eyed schoolgirl being unable to separate Dharmendra the actor from the roles he plays.

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