Mili & Jurmana — Mukherjee’s & Bachchan’s twin secrets

There’s a deep trauma at the heart of both films. Repressed in Mili, always on the surface in Jurmana. In the former it foregrounds the story, in the latter it comes about in the film’s ‘real’ time. In either case it erupts at the heart of bourgeois sociality and it calls into question all ‘values’ within this edifice. Mili has the structure of a mystery. In this most quintessential of middle class apartment buildings with all its human warmth and camarederie alternating with pettiness and hypocrisy there emerges the ‘dark ogre’, fairy-tale-like, who occupies the top perch and who spends most of his time gazing into the heavens with his telescope. A prince, haunted by scandal, becomes an ogre. The mystery begins exactly here. It is never made clear whether the mother was guilty of adultery or not. Her confession to her tortured son maintains her innocence but he cannot know for sure. His father believes otherwise and extinguishes the secret forever. The son withdraws from the world.

In Jurmana another scandal comes about. Then there is atonement. Even if there is a seemingly neat resolution at the end one gets the sense of having been exposed to a profound disturbance. If Amitabh Bachchan is a kind of ogre in Mili in the later film he is a smooth villain. In each instance a trauma brings about his dark side. Also in each case the love of a woman either idealized as a beautiful soul or as virginal innocence rescues him. But Mili remains open-ended and Jurmana leaves one with a sense of unease.

These films are too sharp and too finely etched in all respects to only be simplistic indictments of a social class or even didactic morality tales. These stories are properly fables of violence staged as part bourgeois romance, part quasi-detective drama. One thinks of Ray’s Chiriakhana. But if Ray’s film is still indebted to a 19th century model of detective fiction Mukherjee presents a similar universe but removes the ‘master figure’ of the Holmes-like detective-quester. In both Mili and Jurmana it is precisely the lead male protagonist who cannot decode the meaning of his universe until very late or who can only do so when aided by the principal female protagonist. In neither film can the male figure come to peace with himself and get reabsorbed into the existing social framework without accidentally falling in love.

Jurmana stages a bet between two modes of being in the post-Emergency state of the late 70s. The older and traditional ‘native’ type represented in Vinod Mehra’s character and who is also associated with small town mores. Then Bachchan’s character who graduates from ordinariness to extraordinary corporate success and who becomes alienated from the ethos of small town life. The two characters start out as friends and then meet as rivals for the same woman who again quite easily represents traditional Indian notions of the feminine. In this sense too the resolution seems somewhat dark. Prophetically the film closes the door on the Vinod Mehras of India. It was entirely an inspired decision on Mukherjee’s part to cast Amitabh Bachchan and Vinod Mehra for these two parts.

In Mili as much action takes places on staircases or ‘in between’ floors as it does within apartments (or flats). The crucial scene occurs on the former when a threatening Bachchan is forced to turn away and disappear into his ‘lair’ when the scandal is evoked by a child. It is as if this his one vulnerability, the specter he cannot confront. His father represents another corporate type and his life is twinned with the terrible act of violence he ultimate commits. The ‘fallen’ women are equally important for the world of each film. In fact it is hard to think of two other films in the entire history of Hindi cinema that give so much space to them within a ‘normal’ framework and then proceed to humanize them. Bachchan’s mother in Mili (though the mystery is always operative here, one never really knows what happened), Aruna Irani’s character in the same, Dolly in Jurmana with the touching final gesture of returning Bachchan’s payment. These women ‘fall’ because of the systems they inhabit. In Jurmana the logical step forward is taken after Mili and the principal protagonist is herself the ‘ideal’ and the ‘fallen’ woman. Here it is literally a shift in perspective that brings about the change.

On a more personal note both films have forever been among my very favorite ones and Amitabh Bachchan’s performance in each is really extraordinarily fluid. He is so sharp an actor in each, so quick (in Kurosawa’s sense of the term which is to say without sacrificing subtlety) and so completely triumphant that one almost misses the timber of these performances if one is not watching closely. It is always easy to appreciate the more commercial performances because the characters and the situations are always pitched to a certain key (though Bachchan’s gift was that even in these he could be pitch-perfect and yet summon up his deepest reserves of performance). But films like Mili or Jurmana are so delicately constructed that the lead actor here has to be very perfectly attuned to this fact. In either film (and this is not to take away anything from some of the other fine performances) it is Bachchan who provides the first tremors, the principle disturbance in those worlds. His is the character who is in each case out of sync with his environment and the films then become about his path to self-realization and ‘normalization’. It is commonplace to assert that Bachchan has extraordinary moments in films like Deewar or Don or Amar Akbar Anthony or Mukaddar ka Sikandar or a host of others. One agrees entirely with this. One could hardly ever run the danger of over-praising these performances. But what one is always in danger of neglecting is his performance in films like Mili or Jurmana which are second to none in his oeuvre. The films themselves are among the director’s very finest works and far more sophisticated and advanced than some of his more heralded films. Mili and Jurmana are exemplary films but also at our present ‘Indian’ crossroads important cautionary tales in more ways than one. The repressed always haunts…