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Business News/ Opinion / Public displays of affection
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Public displays of affection

Popular Hindi cinema has several honourable examples of women putting their wiles to use in public

The teacher meets his match.Premium
The teacher meets his match.

Hindi film-makers must be elated at the prospective return of Mumbai’s bar dancers. The figure of the twirling woman in the heavily sequinned blouse and skirt was a staple background element of scenes set in Mumbai’s several low-lit and high-atmospheric bars. The city’s world-weary bar waiters are also a breed apart, worthy of the imagination, but they aren’t quite as charismatic or storied as the bar dancers. Besides, Thambi or Raju Waiter doesn’t have the same ring as Monalisa or Mastani.

Popular Hindi cinema has several honourable examples of women putting their wiles to use in public. Waheeda Rehman’s perfectly measured come-hitherness in Raat Bhi Hai Kuch Bheegi Bheegi from Mujhe Jeeno Do and Paan Khaye Saiyan from Teesri Kasam, Madhubala’s passionate defiance in Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya in Mughal-e-Azam, Meena Kumari’s slow-moving grace in Chalte Chalte from Pakeezah and Rekha’s smoky allure in In Aankhon Ki Masti from Umrao Jaan encapsulate the world of the woman on display, who sheds her inhibitions for public consumption and appears available and distant at the same time. Documentaries like Saba Dewan’s Delhi Mumbai Delhi and Naach, about bar dancers and performers at the annual cattle fair in Sonepur in Bihar, respectively, and Shyamal Karmakar’s I Am the Very Beautiful, about a bar dancer named Ranu Gayen, lift the veil of chintzy glamour and reveal the hardscrabble lives of the women and the exploitation and negotiation that set them apart from the rest of their gender.

Maharashtra’s ban on dance bars was ostensibly to protect the virtue of the women and their patrons, though there is ample evidence to show that the state government was actually more worried about the illegal economic partnerships that had sprung up between police officers, politicians and bar owners. The morality-in-peril argument is easy enough to make, and has been reinforced by popular culture down the years. German director Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930) traces the fall of a virtuous schoolteacher who enters the nightclub of the title to bring back his errant students and instead loses his heart to Marlene Dietrich’s cabaret dancer, Lola Lola. The Blue Angel brought Dietrich fame beyond her borders, but the story’s beating heart is Emil Jannings, who movingly portrays the gruff man of virtue whom love literally reduces to a clown.

The Blue Angel’s initial satirical tone, which suggests that moral righteousness is destined to fail, is exercised in full in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s version of the movie made 51 years later. Lola, part of Fassbinder’s brilliant Bundesrepublik Deutschland trilogy, is not so much about the woman whose name inspires the title but more about the man who loses his sleep and morals over her. The teacher is now an upright bureaucrat (Armin Mueller-Stahl) who sets out to put an end to the town’s greased-palm culture, and whose love for Lola only reinforces the cosy nexus between contractors and government officials. Lola isn’t the real villain of this piece. In Fassbinder’s view, explored through most of his movies, it’s capitalism that proves to be the ultimate seduction.

The social subtext of both films is sorely missing from V. Shantaram’s gaudily coloured, a-song-a-minute 1972 version of The Blue Angel. The Marathi title Pinjra translates into a cage, which von Sternberg imagined as an expressionist trap full of contrasts between light and dark, the blinding enchantment of the stage and the mundane reality off it. In Shantaram’s telling, the cage is literally that, the stage is no more than a platform on which to recreate Maharashtra’s popular folk theatre traditions and showcase lead actor Sandhya’s dancing prowess. Acting thespian Shreeram Lagoo made the transition from the stage to cinema with this movie, and fellow thespian Nilu Phule is in typically superb form as a member of the performing troupe, but Pinjra’s real legacy remains Ram Kadam’s foot-tapping songs, which are better heard than seen.

This fortnightly series looks at how the cinema of the past helps us make sense of the present.

Also Read | Nandini’s previous Lounge columns

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Published: 03 Aug 2013, 12:18 AM IST
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