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KUDRAT ("Nature") (1981)
Written and Directed By Chetan Anand
Music: R.D. Burman Starring: Raaj Kumar, Rajesh Khanna, Vinod Khanna, Hema Malini, Priya Rajvansh, Aruna Irani
Running Time: 170 Minutes
CineRating: 6.5 out of 10
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A precursor to both Hong Kong's Dream Lovers (1986) and Hollywood's Dead Again (1991) (with a late plot twist that foreshadows Stir of Echoes (1999)), Chetan Anand's Kudrat may be the least polished of the three films, but take away its slow and uneventful start (and consider that you don't have to deal with a hokey Kenneth Branagh performance) and this reincarnation romance manages to be a fairly arresting slice of cinema with technical merits that were undoubtedly far more impressive during the time of its release.
After arriving in Simla from her hometown of Bombay, a young woman named Chandramukhi (Hema Malini) begins to have vague recollections of having lived in Simla before. She also has unexplained strong feelings for a lawyer named Mohan (Rajesh Khanna), whom she has only just met. After suffering through nightmares in which she chases after a man who falls over a cliff, Chandra is put under hypnosis by her boyfriend, Dr. Naresh (Vinod Khanna). He wants to find out the source of her trauma, but inadvertently sends her drifting back to a previous life when her name was "Paro" and she was deeply in love with a rickshaw driver named Madho. Since Madho looks exactly like Mohan, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that he's Paro's lover reincarnated.
At first, Mohan doesn't take kindly to the idea of helping Chandra unravel the mystery of her past life because he's about to get married to Karuna (Priya Rajvansh). However, he soon comes under Chandra's romantic spell and begins to take her reincarnation gig rather seriously. He breaks off with Karuna, who reacts to the news quite civilly and invites the two lovebirds to a party to break the news to her father, Janak Singh (Raaj Kumar). When Chandra arrives and gets a look at the old man, she shrieks in horror and runs away. Against his better judgment, Dr. Naresh puts Chandra under hypnosis again and soon uncovers a sordid tale of rape and murder.
While Chetan Anand (who passed away in 1997) makes nice use of the film's attractive locations, the real strength of Kudrat is his literate, award-winning script, which begins too deliberately by planting various bits of information that will pay off much later but gathers momentum as soon as Chandra starts hopping back into her previous life, and really hits its stride during a frenzied courtroom battle in which Mohan tries to bring Paro's murderer to justice. The climax is surprisingly gothic in tone and lends this mildly supernatural tale a satisfyingly atmospheric sendoff. While some viewers may find the whole reincarnation motif to be a bag of nonsense, Anand treats it with enough conviction and flights of fancy to persuade non-cynical viewers to ride along with his romantic notions of love beyond death.
The performances are about what you'd expect from an early 80's Indian melodrama -- overwrought but effective, with the doe-eyed Hema Malini making for a likeable if rather timid heroine while Priya Rajvansh surprises with her transformation from mild-mannered daughter to courtroom warrior. (In a bizarre and gruesome irony, Rajvansh, who was Chetan Anand's longtime companion, was herself the victim of a murder plot (in March of 2000) engineered by Anand's two sons, who were upset that their late father willed her part of his estate.) R.D. Burman's musical score is appropriately lush and dramatic, while the song-and-dance numbers are serviceable if disappointingly conventional. Kudrat is no doubt suitable for MST3K heckling with its overripe melodrama and clunky death scenes that border on the comical, but viewed within the context of its times, this is an impressively offbeat piece of Bollywood whimsy that is far superior to the similarly titled 1998 film.
DEI's widescreen DVD boasts vibrant colors but also occasional signs of heavy print wear. The picture is also a bit squeezed horizontally. The English subtitles vanish in the film's latter half during one dialogue-heavy scene and in the movie's last few minutes as one character is in the middle of a monologue.
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DVD Specs:
DEI DVD
All regions
Anamorphic Widescreen
Removable English Subs (including the songs)
No Extras
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