Awara (1951)

I'm not an expert on Bollywood -- in fact, I've seen scarcely any Bollywood films (well, Lagaan, which I thought was terrific like everyone else).

So I thought I'd try an early Bollywood classic, Raj Kapoor's Awara, to start to ground myself historically. Kapoor, a legend both as an actor and a sometime director, was a young man of 25 when he made Awara, his third outing as a director. But he had been born into Indian film-making -- his father was the handsome, commanding, and extremely popular actor Prithviraj Kapoor. (He plays a key role in Awara, as the judge.)

Like all Bollywood films, Awara is long by Western standards -- 168 minutes, and the IMDB refers to an original 193 minute version, which I suppose is possible (add a few more musical numbers, and presto!).

The musical numbers can easily make or break a Bollywood film for an unaccustomed viewer. There are many of them in Awara, in a dizzying variety of visual styles (from a relatively realistic song sequence on a boat at night, to an elaborately fantastic dream complete with Hindu gods). Stylistic consistency does not look like one of Kapoor's aims -- the movie also shifts between location filming and obvious sets with no sense of incongruity.

For a sprawling film on the clock, Awara is tight in other ways. It has but five characters who matter -- the vagabond Raj (Kapoor); his mother; his unacknowledged father, the judge; his surrogate father, the bandit; and his childhood sweetheart (played by Kapoor's frequent co-star Nargis). It has only two themes that I could discern -- a notion of genetic determinism put forward by the judge and debunked by others (the child of a bandit is destined to become a bandit), and a sentimental conception of childhood romance resurgent in adulthood.

Kapoor had obvious gifts as a director. Even with the noted visual inconsistencies, his visual sense within given scenes is often very strong. The night-dominated black and white look of the film is striking, and reminds me more of Mexican film melodramas of the same period than of Hollywood film noir (maybe this has something to do with the film stocks? -- a largely unexplored element in cinematic history).

Generally I liked the opening 45 minutes of Awara, the childhood sequences, the best. These have a slightly Dickensian flavor as destiny frowns on the boy Raj as if he were a Hindu Oliver Twist. If I wasn't as taken with the rest of the film -- which honesty compels me to admit that I was not, although I was impressed by it and glad to watch it -- that has to do with my lukewarm reaction to Kapoor as an actor and a presence. He proved, though, to be enormously popular worldwide, so this is probably just me.