What is right with Amar and wrong with Dilip Kumar

responding to this and somewhat in medias res..

For me that ‘risky’ sequence at the center of the film is somewhere between seduction and rape. More tilted towards the latter for sure. But consider the contexts of the 50s and the sorts of films that were being made. This is a very bold moment and it occurs within the bourgeois paradigm. How often have we seen this in Hindi cinema? Usually you have the villain doing the raping or in something like Damini the side character in an upscale bourgeois household who can easily be hated. In other words there are no ‘stakes’ for the viewer. There was that fantastically good moment in Aks where a possessed Bachchan forces himself on Nandita Das. It was very effective and the violence really came to the fore not least because of Bachchan’s magnificent portrayal. The great thing about Amar is that you have a normal bourgeois hero who in a moment of weakness forces himself upon a girl. This isn’t the over-dramatic, theatrical kind of rape sequence where the villain runs after the girl and she tries desperately to get away and so on. There everything is clear. But in this sort of moment there is ambiguity. The scene darkens out as Dilip Kumar approaches her. She resists of course but it is quite obvious that Dilip Kumar would hardly have raped her like a villain if she had truly resisted. And of course the film has already revealed that she is very attracted to Dilip Kumar herself. I don’t at all mean to suggest the old cliched ‘it’s really yes when it’s no’. But there is a gray area here. If I were to frame it in psychoanalytic terms I’d say that she herself wants Dilip Kumar to force himself upon her! In other words not that she secretly desires this but that this is the only way in which her desire for Dilip Kumar can be fulfilled in any fashion. In any case and at a more literal level my sense of the moment is that she genuinely resists him but upto a point. She is eventually ‘seduced’ by his violence. This is therefore not the usual rape sequence and this is also what is great about the film. The framework in which this moment occurs but also how it is treated.

In the second half the whole guilt angle is I think appropriate. The script has the structure of a classical Greek play in some ways (right down to the whole theme of cosmic justice). First the act, then the drawn out consequences. It is necessary for Dilip Kumar to struggle with the latter as this is what humanizes him further and at the same keeps the violence of the rape alive. In other words he is guilty but nothing is so simple in the film. This one moment simply destroys his otherwise very stable bourgeois framework. And this is what he has to wrestle with. There is no way for him to atone for his guilt without destroying his life. Now here I think the film would have worked better if there had been no pregnancy. The stakes of guilt would have been much more genuine without the ‘evidence’. Nonetheless I can forgive this in a film where everything else is in my view well-handled. The class angle here should not be missed either. It is unlikely that the dilip Kumar character of this film would have forced himself upon a woman of his class in any circumstance.

Note I said those two were the best Dilip Kumar films of that period. I didn’t really talk about performance. Dilip Kumar’s moodiness certainly suits these films. But in Amar he is perhaps far too introverted to do this character complete justice. In other words he seems throughout the film a character somewhat uninterested in his ‘environment’, including the people around him. The ‘rape’ then suddenly forces the character to engage with his world in a more authentic sense. But of course because of his guilt he is withdrawn now for a different reason. The two kinds of ‘withdrawal’ in the two halves though do not come across ‘differently’ enough. But this could be expanded into a larger critique of Dilip Kumar’s acting style (narcissistic as I have defined it) where the actor is really only interacting with himself and not necessarily with those around him. In other words the other characters are simply props for him to support his own ‘performance’. This is a tendency that Dilip Kumar increasingly developed over time though it is less apparent when he does lighter stuff. With the latter there is definitely a ‘watch how I do this’ economy but in the more serious moments he is basically an interior actor in the bad sense. And this comes through film after film in the 50s. A character struggling with his angst but not at all oriented towards the world. And these inner ‘withdrawals’ are once again not sufficiently modulated. and this is different from being an actor of reserve or doing the understated performance.

all of this though should not be read as a dismissal of Dilip Kumar. Far from it. I just see it as a problem with his mode of performance. Dilip Kumar was a kind of twisted Hamlet in this sense. Forever in dialog only with himself. And that lack of projection often comes across. Again not everywhere. There are very notable exceptions too but that ‘sullen boy’ note which because it isn’t varied enough spoils I think even his better moments. Ultimately then it comes down to mood. He is great at representing a certain angst-ridden mood but not not great at then carving a performance out of this. In some ways this tendency is evident even in the early Andaz where Raj Kapoor more expansive, spontaneous performance easily gets the better of his and many saw it this way at the time. And of course I am not even getting here into the bombastic completely over the top mode that he started developing in the 60s and which reached its pinnacle in his 80s work. Here I frankly find him insufferable at many points. More in the business of declamation than anything else. This does not mean that one cannot deliver a successful performance in a more theatrical or ‘operatic’ mode. Here I will cite the Black example which is precisely one where Bachchan is superb being over the top at many points (Agneepath is another example). Save for the introductory scene (with Bachchan) which I have never liked. Because this is done a bit like Dilip Kumar. Too exaggerated, too declaimed…