GF on Gulzar’s Mausam & Hu Tu Tu

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. – Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

My first impression on seeing Mausam some time ago was that Gulzar had drawn rather smartly—if selectively—from the well of Hitchcock, specifically, from Vertigo, with Sanjeev Kumar slipping into Cary Grant’s shoes and Sharmila Tagore as the Kim Novak stand-in. Mausam of course is not the noir-masterpiece that Vertigo undoubtedly is, but is instead a moving, evocative character-drama about the passage of time and the emerging ghosts of one’s repressed past. Like Vertigo, Gulzar’s film examines an uneasy, paranoid reconstruction of memory in its dramatizing a man’s attempt to re-shape a newly-discovered physical twin of a past lover into the essence of that lost flame. The act of reconstruction is even more unsettling here given the paternal undertones of Kumar’s relationship with the second Sharmila Tagore he encounters in this film. Ultimately, then, Mausam works almost like a revenge drama—one where there is no physical, tangible avenger. Vengeance, or balance, is instead struck by memory in this narrative. And the weight of that truth about Mausam—along with all its social and political heft—didn’t reveal itself as completely to me (or maybe as potently) until I recently encountered the director’s excellent and quietly-championed 1999 feature, Hu Tu Tu.