Chaudhvin Ka Chand
Released 1960, directed by Mohammed Sadiq
A hesitant Golden Age product, perfectly machined and also haunted and self-reflexive, echoing some of the more inward films of Hollywood in the forties. Credited to Mohammed Sadiq, Chaudhvin Ka Chand (which translates loosely as Full Moon) stars and was produced by Guru Dutt, and was assembled by Dutt’s longtime hyper-capable coterie, including Abrar Alvi on the script and V.K. Murthy as cinematographer. As such it tends to be subsumed into Dutt’s larger oeuvre, although as an outlier in setting and aesthetic. The film takes place in Lucknow, among a well-lineaged Muslim upper-class; one of the characters goes by the title “Nawab,” and Mughal-era architecture provides a perfectly cinematic backdrop – graceful, symmetrical, highly worked – to much of the action. The version of Islam on display here is stylized, largely cultural (no one is seen praying), and cleanly pleasant, characterized by a tyranny of reputation that manifests as smoothly functioning propriety. Dutt’s life was in a constant sturm-und-drang turmoil at this point, his marriage was falling apart, and he was drinking heavily; it’s easy to imagine the film’s Islam as a cooling contrast, his personal idea of escapism.
There are three protagonists, all men (the film’s gender politics also mirror those of classic Hollywood, in that the systematic repression of women is omnipresent, and is complicated where it is complicated by an honest commercial and/or artistic interest in the inner life of individual female characters, and in how they assert power). They are friends – Shaiza the clown (Johnny Walker), Pyar the leader (Rehman), and Aslam (Guru Dutt), dreamy and kind – and despite being adults their friendship has a soft, boyish intimacy, directly linked to the absence of even potential romantic rivalry between them. Their social milieu practices strict purdah, women are kept veiled in public, and moreover there is no sense that any of the young men will have much control over an eventual pairing – they act as agents for their families. Thus, as the plot advances, and as the friends are tensed by the introduction of romantic conflict, there is a feeling that we are witnessing the end of a delayed adolescence, and the strife of entering into the complexities of adulthood.
This sounds a little like the recent run of Aptow-made and influenced comedies, and it is. There is the same sense of immense relaxation in the early scenes – hang-out scenes – between the friends, the same creation of an appealing slow-rhythmed milieu, the men sprawled across divans and drawing on hookahs as they talk. Chaudhvin also functions as a comedy for long stretches, letting Johnny Walker do various broad bits that play off of his finicky Cowardly Lion persona (part of the charm of this central friendship is how accepting each of the men is of the others, and how patient the other two are with Shaiza, instead of constantly talking down to him as might be done is a coarser-grained comedy). In contrast with Aptow however there is a focus as well on making the spaces the characters exist in appealing – you wouldn’t want to spend time in an Aptow character’s apartment (or you wouldn’t care one way or another, they’re nowhere spaces), but Lucknow is portrayed as a bubbly well-tempered mix of the ravishing and the picturesque. Scenes that take place in the broader community, such as an open market setting that appears several times as a location where men and (veiled) women can mix, are freely photographed, catching clear images of bustling sunlit life; while the more formal scenes of the upper-class are organized in careful, rich, symmetrical tableaux that blend with the prevailing architecture and mass layer on layer of ornament – furnishings, clothing, jewelry. The various levels of society are perforated by a servant class that is either humorous or worshipful; there is no socioeconomic critique. Our viewpoint is firmly anchored within a privileged fantasia.
The world thus created is so appealing that when the Shakespearean/Victorian plot begins to function it feels extractive, milling a pleasant raw material into something merely functional. It’s a matter of mistaken identity, or rather hidden identity shading into mistaken identity. Pyar, assertive and driving the action, briefly glimpses a woman under her veil at the market. This is Jameela (Waheeda Rehman, cuttingly precise in the flashes of character she is allowed), the poor daughter of a local Imam; but beautiful, and Pyar is smitten with an operatic passion. However she recedes, back into the confined feminine world that he cannot access, and via a misunderstanding is married instead to Aslam. This is an efficient device, one that we quickly see has been calibrated so as to deliver the maximum anguish to gentle Aslam. Caught by his extraordinarily tight bond of friendship with Pyar, he sets out to help him identify his mystery woman, while slowly realizing that she is already his wife. The question then becomes, what is he obligated to do – and, trying to weigh where this is going, we wonder like tourists puzzling over a map if the answer is kill himself.
Chaudhvin is a musical (a category of art that I’ve always felt is a sort of funny pre-rebuke to any attempted critique – if you don’t like the movie you’ll like the songs! What, you also don’t like the songs?!?), and for the most part the songs represent a societal rather than personal perspective, a musical zeitgeist. They begin by emphasizing the surface order of collective things – the rightness of purdah, the joy of a proper marriage – but as the film progresses become slyer, more interested with the realpolitik of person-to-person attraction. Several of these later songs are performed by a local courtesan (played by Minoo Mumtaz), one of the few working-class characters to receive our attention – a scene of her tuning up with her small backing orchestra is bracing against the more languorous action of the three friends and their milieu; and when we eventually find out that Shaiza is in love with her it deepens our regard for him as a black sheep in a society that, ultimately, one should not want to be accepted by.
Only Alma is given songs that directly express his inner state, first in a paean to his new wife, and then later, once he has discovered what she is to Pyar, in a lament. These are the most shaded, moodiest pieces in the film, expressionist confections, the camera still and then softly gliding to an even more poignant angle. In one shot we see Alma on a balcony above his moonlit garden; then our vantage shifts until finally he is nearly hidden by the railing’s intricate scrollwork. Only his face is still visible, caught and framed by the twining lines.
NOTES
Against expectation it is Pryar who dies, not Alma. After discovering the true identity of Alma’s wife, Pryar kills himself by eating a diamond, pried from one of his rings. I was curious if this was an accepted fictional device (it is not an accepted non-fictional device). However, as with the use of a bent spoon to survive hanging, Google was unhelpful.
