Amitabh Bachchan

  • Anand (1971)

    Anand (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, January 2021) I approached Anand without enthusiasm—While the film ranks high on a number of must-see-movie lists, my reaction to semi-realistic Indian cinema is not always all that good. The beginning of the film is portentous enough to discourage anyone: This is going to be about a man dying and the doctor chronicling the events. But as it turns out, Anand is the kind of film that builds and builds, keeping its best moments for the end and assembling bits and pieces of the narrative to make up for a powerful conclusion. Rajesh Khanna anchors the film as its title character, while Amitabh Bachchan got his superstar-making role as the doctor treating him. The last few minutes are a bit of a masterclass from writer-director Hrishikesh Mukherjee in how to use humour to talk about a deathly serious topic—the set-up doesn’t make complete sense, but the payoff is worth it. There’s some interest in how the film uses a few lines of English (mostly when characters tell each other to shut up), as there is in portraying 1970 Bombay in the opening moments of the film. While I’m not yet a fan of Anand, the result is a great deal better than what I was anticipating, and I can understand the fuss about the film.

  • Sholay [Embers] (1975)

    Sholay [Embers] (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, December 2019) I wasn’t too sure what to expect from Sholay—my understanding of pre-1990s Indian cinema at this point is fragmentary and overly coloured by the spectacularly dour nature of Satyajit Ray movies. To my happy surprise, Sholay ends up being a crowd-pleaser of the first order, blending genres and situations to create a deeply influential cornerstone of popular Indian cinema. The great Amitabh Bachchan has a young man’s role here, and the film is unusually accessible to western audiences with a good understanding of the western genre: In between train robberies and prison sequences and villagers that must be defended against bandits, if often feel as if we’re on a grand tour of other movies, but made sufficiently different by the Indian setting to be interesting. However, be prepared for a long sit. A very long sit: clocking in at somewhere around three hours and a half, Sholay is also representative of the often-excessive duration of many masala movies. But if you time your snack breaks correctly, the film is a joy to watch during its best sequences, and it’s still surprisingly accessible to modern North American audiences.