In 1975, the year of the optimum blockbusters in Hindi cinema from Sholay to Jai Santoshi Maa, director Asit Sen (Safar, Khamoshi, Mamta, Sharafat, Anokhi Raat) dropped the worst film of his career.
Anari featured the flop pair Sharmila Tagore and Shashi Kapoor, with Moushumi Chatterjee chipping in with a role that makes almost no sense, much like what happens in the rest of the film. This is hands-down the most disjointed film from the great director’s repertoire, projecting him as an artist on the downslide, which he probably was by then; if we look at Asit Sen’s work during the final phase of his career, we see duds like Maa Aur Mamta and Bairaag, the Dilip Kumar fiasco.
Anari is a disaster in a different league. It seems to have been shot in fits and spurts, and some of the screenplay was not shot at all. There is this excruciatingly awkward chasm in the storytelling where Sharmila Tagore, playing Poonam, a girl who desperately wants to get away from her poverty, tells Vikram (Kabir Bedi), a biker with his foot in crime, that she just met the hero Raja (Shashi Kapoor) and he refused to recognise her.
The sequence Poonam describes to Vikram is not in the film! This project is about an innocent hero, Raja, who gets into a criminal arrangement with a charlatan (Utpal Dutt, in a Raj Kumar wig) by posing as the heir of a wealthy family. Since the patriarch of the wealthy family (Harindranath Chattopadhyay) is blind and since they haven’t seen Raja for years, the Charlatan and the Hero think they can get away with the scam. This is the second, and the messier, section of the film.
In the first part, Sharmila Tagore plays a girl from an impoverished home, looking for escape. Poonam wants to alchemise her love for Raja for a brighter future for both of them, and nothing wrong with that. Except that Raja is burdened with family responsibilities after his elder brother (Kader Khan, unrecognisable) is murdered for his union activities. Bahen ki shadi, maa ke sapne, and all that jazz.
I don’t know what Samaresh Basu’s original story was like. But the screenplay is a riotous mess, with characters so stilted and aimless, they seem to be puppets without strings. The most interesting character is Sharmila Tagore’s Poonam. She wants to escape from her destiny. She gives her boyfriend, Raja, several opportunities to “rescue” her. But how can she be rescued by a man who needs to be rescued himself?!
Anari had the potential to be a powerful take on the wages of borderline bankruptcy. Director Asit Sen seems bogged down by receding funds and a storyline which doesn’t seem to respect its characters. The actors struggle with situations and lines that appear absurd for the want of anchorage. What, for example, is Moushumi Chatterjee playing? Is she not quite there? Or is she an afterthought waiting to know where she belongs?
Even the songs by Laxmikant-Pyarelal are uncharacteristically droopy. During the year when they excelled with songs in Prem Kahani, Pratiggya, Aakraman, Apne Rang Hazaar, Chaitali, Dulhan, Mera Sajna, Ponga Pandit, Zinda Dil and Naatak, L-P came up with one of the worst scores of their career in Anari.
When things go wrong, even the gods fail.
