50s Cinema | Mr. & Mrs. ‘55
अनीता: आपके पति… कभी कभी पीटते भी है आपको ? (Your husband… does he sometimes beat you?)
भाभी: तन मन से प्यार भी तो वही करते है | भाथ खाते समय, कभी कभी दाँत तले कंकड़ भी आ जाता है, उससे लोग भाथ तो खाना नहीं छोड़ देते | (But he is also the one who loves me with all his soul. If you find a pebble in your food, you don’t stop eating do you?)
Before this beautiful exchange took place between Anita and Preetam’s sister-in-law, I had been fidgety. Guru Dutt’s direction and Abrar Alvi’s easy humor had been engaging, and Madhubala’s performance as Anita a delight to behold. The film itself seemed somewhat progressive.
Mr. & Mrs. ’55 begins with Seeta Devi, who is Anita’s aunt, running a feminist group lobbying for a divorce bill whose acceptance in the legislature is imminent. The feminist streak, dismissed by a couple other characters as a British instinct, is otherwise dealt with sincerely and with none of the hackneyed jokes I had somewhat prejudicially expected. Cue a meet-cute between Anita and Preetam, a poor cartoonist. We also realize at this moment that Guru Dutt, if given a choice, would always play a down-on-his-luck artist of some sort.
The central conflict is introduced right about now, which is that Anita must marry within a month to claim seventy lakh in inheritance from her late father. Aunt Seeta Devi schemes, and Preetam is the right man in the right-place-at-the-right-time to be the perfect candidate for a fake marriage which can end in divorce once Anita is seventy lakh richer. Except he plans to renege on the “fake” part of the agreement.
Breezing about are Johnny Walker and Tun Tun, and the film goes down easy. It made me sit up and take notice which was surprising — I had planned on watching the film as part of a personal project in cinema history. I ended up having fun, for the most part. Anita could almost be considered an antecedent to the third wave feminist comfortable with her femininity and rejecting her aunt’s pleas for women’s independence.
Why had I then been fidgety? Because the film had been doing everything right till this scene. Or somewhat right. Preetam had sort of kidnapped Anita before this and brought her to his house, and introduced her to his sister-in-law. But she’d been largely okay with it, and wasn’t too fond of her own place and her own relatives. I was fidgety because I was slowly realizing as the film moved on that the conflict was not about money; it was about marriage and why it is the ideal. While feminism wasn’t the script’s joke, feminists were the antagonists.
Which is why Preetam’s sister-in-law’s beautiful analogy exploded as a somewhat expected head-slam into the core of Guru Dutt’s film. If you find a pebble in your food, you don’t stop eating do you? And Anita eats it up, pebbles and all!
It’s a fun film. With this scene and a couple others around it, it’s just annoyingly hard to defend.
