Mausam 1975

Mausam is a 1975 Indian Bollywood social film released on 1975. The film is directed by Gulzar, produced by P. Mallikaarjun Rao.

Stories about rich men attempting to transform prostitutes into proper ladies are usually unappealing to me, as they are often sodden with obnoxious moralistic subtext: a sexually uninhibited woman needs a male savior to rescue her by teaching her to conform to societal norms. But Mausam is a little different. Gil seeks his own redemption, not Kajli's - he is trying not so much to repair Kajli for her own good, but rather to reconstruct her mother, so that he may ask her forgiveness for the wrong he did her so many years before. This lends a sadness and desperation to his efforts at rehabilitating Kajli, a very different approach to the Pygmalion-esque elements of the tale. Mausam also works because Sanjeev Kumar is one of the finest actors in Indian film. His controlled touch ensures that the film remains sensitive even as Dr. Gil leans heavily toward the paternalistic. Gil is wounded and confused; he comes to Darjeeling hoping to ride off into the sunset with his beloved Chanda - not to rescue from brothel life a daughter he never knew Chanda had. Sanjeev Kumar's nuanced performance preserves Gil's pain and uncertainty as he navigates the unexpected twists in his own fantasy. It also makes plain Gil's implicit sexual attraction to Kajli, who is after all the doppleganger of her mother as Gil last saw her. There is an everyman quality to Sanjeev Kumar that makes his portrayal of human pain that much more effective and real; this is as evident in Mausam as it was in Silsila, in which he stole the show from stars with much more conventional charisma.

Stories about rich men attempting to transform prostitutes into proper ladies are usually unappealing to me, as they are often sodden with obnoxious moralistic subtext: a sexually uninhibited woman needs a male savior to rescue her by teaching her to conform to societal norms. But Mausam is a little different. Gil seeks his own redemption, not Kajli's - he is trying not so much to repair Kajli for her own good, but rather to reconstruct her mother, so that he may ask her forgiveness for the wrong he did her so many years before. This lends a sadness and desperation to his efforts at rehabilitating Kajli, a very different approach to the Pygmalion-esque elements of the tale. Mausam also works because Sanjeev Kumar is one of the finest actors in Indian film. His controlled touch ensures that the film remains sensitive even as Dr. Gil leans heavily toward the paternalistic. Gil is wounded and confused; he comes to Darjeeling hoping to ride off into the sunset with his beloved Chanda - not to rescue from brothel life a daughter he never knew Chanda had. Sanjeev Kumar's nuanced performance preserves Gil's pain and uncertainty as he navigates the unexpected twists in his own fantasy. It also makes plain Gil's implicit sexual attraction to Kajli, who is after all the doppleganger of her mother as Gil last saw her. There is an everyman quality to Sanjeev Kumar that makes his portrayal of human pain that much more effective and real; this is as evident in Mausam as it was in Silsila, in which he stole the show from stars with much more conventional charisma.

Dr. Gil (Sanjeev Kumar), a successful doctor and marketer of an eponymous pain remedy, arrives in Darjeeling for an extended vacation - with a mission. His objective is to track down the love of his life and seek forgiveness for abandoning her nearly a quarter of a century before. In flashback we are shown the nascence of that old romance, between the young medical student Gil and the the village pharmacist-healer's daughter, Chanda (Sharmila Tagore). As the middle-aged Gil follows the trail of Chanda's life since he left her, he discovers that she has died after a prolonged descent into madness brought about, Gil is horrified to learn, by her miserable pining over the false promises of her faithless lover. Forced into an abusive marriage, Chanda left behind a daughter, Kajli (also Sharmila), who Gil finds plying the world's oldest trade in a coarse, ratty brothel. Gil - without revealing his connection to her mother - buys her time indefinitely, dresses her in good clothes, and attempts to mold her into the upstanding girl her mother had been when he knew her.

For all the zany masala and bombast of Hindi film in the 1970s, there is a subtler side as well, a delicate strain of films that explored the raw places where human emotions intersect. Setting the standard in this kind of sensitive cinema are films by the likes of Hrishikesh Mukherjee and the brilliant Gulzar, who was the auteur of Mausam ("season").

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