325. Bharat Mata (Mother India) (1957)

Directed By Mehboob Khan

Synopsis

It's not easy being a mother, owe money to a money lender, having your cows die, your husband lose his arms and then leave you, your mother-in-law die, your village destroyed in a flood, your baby die, and in the end having to shoot your son dead. Not easy at all.

Review

Phew... just spent three hours watching this, and it was a good film. It feels much more of an indigenous Indian style of cinema than the more Westernised films of Satyajit Ray, there's the singing and the dancing and the extreme melodrama.

Another interesting thing about the film is it's Sovietic look, I actually had to look up if it was a co-production because there are so many shots in the film that look like Stalinist or Maoist propaganda, and I found out it is a co-production with the USSR, and that makes a lot of sense.

The shots with that Left-Bloc influence look immediately iconic and that is a truly impressive thing to do, there are a dozen of moments in the film that are as iconic as any propaganda poster, this is also a result of the artificiality of the film. There is little attempt to be realistic, the dancing and the melodrama add to this sense. But then this is cinema and not real life, it is perfectly OK to eschew realism for stylisation if done right, and here it is done right. Just a bit too long, and my DVD had no subtitles during the songs, which was very annoying as my Hindi is a bit rusty.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The film is a remake of Mehboob Khan's earlier film Aurat (1940). The film would later be remade in Telugu as Bangaru Talli (1971). The film was fifth Indo-Russian co-production, and was preceed by Pardesi (1957), also starring Nargis Dutt. In 2005, Indiatimes Movies ranked the movie amongst the Top 25 Must See Bollywood Films. The film ranked #3 in the list of all-time box office hits.

Mother India pulls a plow: