Parinda (1989)
Director: Vidhu Vinod Chopra; Writer: Shivkumar; Producer: Vidhu Vinod Chopra; Cinematographer: Binod Pradhan; Editor: Renu Saluja; Cast: Nana Patekar, Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Kamal Chopra, Suresh Oberoi, Anupam Kher, Anang Desai, Jackie Shroff, Tom Alter, Sameer, Hitesh, Mohan, Shweta, Jatin, Vilas Shinde, Imtiaz Hussain, Gautam Siddharth, Anil Kapoor, Atul Dabhuwala, Vishnu, Anil Davda, Madhuri Dixit, Sameer Khakhar, Dilip Kulkarni, Sailesh Thakkar, Probir, Ayub Baloch, R. Bhatt, R. Udupa, Deepak Pawar, H.L. Saluja, Niranjan, T. Kalpana, Gurucharan Bhatia, Hashim, Ashok Sharma, Sanjay, Humayu, Shabnam Sukhdev, Ravindra Mehta, Coomi Sethna, Achyut Potdar, Uday Chandra, Noor Mohammad, Probir Dutt, Shivkumar Subramaniam
Duration: 02:27:33; Aspect Ratio: 1.900:1; Hue: 48.466; Saturation: 0.052; Lightness: 0.231; Volume: 0.210; Cuts per Minute: 14.299
Summary: Chopra’s biggest mainstream movie, known mainly for his thrillers (Sazaaye Maut, 1981; Khamosh, 1985) and the famous Pepsi commercial announcing the multinational’s entry into India. A spectacular, lyrical opening introduces the viewer to Bombay in this postmodern variation of the Hindi crime movie. With low-angle tracking shots and swiftly changing volumes in the image, the film tells of a mentally unbalanced villain, Anna (Patekar) and his henchman Kishen (Shroff) who supports his innocent brother Karan (Kapoor). Karan is used as a bait to trap the cop (Kher) and is eventually killed on his wedding night. Elder brother Kishen, until then divided between his responsibilities to his brother and to Anna, finally turns against his employer and sets him on fire. The film flopped but was critically acclaimed for its soundtrack, its use of CinemaScope and for Patekar’s streetwise performance.
From Ranjani Mazumdar: 'Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City' (University of Minnesota Press, 2007, pp 161)
Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda weaves an intricate plot that deals with the underworld’s overpowering capacity to destroy ordinary dreams and pleasures of city residents. Karan (played by Anil Kapoor) returns from America after completing his education, full of dreams and roman- tic feelings for his childhood sweetheart Paro (played by Madhuri Dixit). These dreams are shattered when Anna (played by Nana Patekar), the eccentric underworld don, gets Prakash, a police officer (Paro’s brother, played by Anupam Kher), killed when he meets Karan at a favorite spot from their shared childhood. Kishen (played by Jackie Shroff), who works for Anna, tries to dissuade his brother Karan from appearing as a witness for the state. Unable to work through the law, Karan gets in- volved with Anna and strikes a deal with a rival don to kill the three men responsible for Prakash’s death. Subsequently, Karan marries Paro and decides to leave the city for their village. On their wedding night, Anna kills Paro and Karan. Unable to save his brother’s life, Kishen finally kills Anna. The ordinariness of Parinda’s revenge plot is ener- gized by a complex evocation of space to show urban terror. Parinda does not use many location shots; instead, the limited use of space is fragmented further through a skillful editing pattern that combines film- noir cynicism with Eisensteinian montage and Hitchcockian terror.
censor certificate
Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City
Parinda develops the image of the city as ruin through a peculiar articulation of the “architectural uncanny.” Anthony Vidler suggests that the notion of the uncanny as an older private form transforms itself into a public experience in the modern metropolis (1992, 6). The metropolitan uncanny was commonly associated with all the phobias related to spatial fear, particularly claustrophobia. The uncanny therefore works metaphorically to articulate a “fundamentally unliveable modern condition” (Vidler 1992, x). The interpretive force of the uncanny is best captured in film, where the “the traces of its intellectual history have been summoned in the service of an entirely contemporary sensibility” (Vidler 1992, x). In literary and cinematic forms, the uncanny emerges within a tense space where the yearning for a home and a fear of home- lessness constantly impinges on desire and freedom. Thus, the homely, the domestic, and the nostalgic are constantly placed under threat (Vidler 1992, 10). Memory, childhood, nostalgia, claustrophobia and primitivism coexist in the uncanny city of the imagination, to produce a distinct form of spatial anxiety. Destroying the myth of the rational planned city from within, “this modern uncanny always returns as the labyrinth to haunt the City of Light” (Donald, 73).
Parinda’s Bombay is fragmented into dark, morbid spaces with all the characters framed within a light and shadow zone. Rarely in the film do we see a riot or a spectacular display of color. There is a peculiar obsession with the night and with fragmented, darkly lit interior spaces as opposed to the panoramic vision one usually sees in Hindi cinema. The city appears decrepit and Spartan, with no directorial gesture toward conventional cinematic spectacle. Modern life, said Jean-Paul Sartre, increasingly appears like a “labyrinth of hallways, doors, and stairways that lead nowhere, innumerable signposts that dot routes and signify nothing” (cited in Polan, 252). Parinda’s alleys, closed spaces, ordinary sites, elevators, dark staircases, peeling walls, and streets are ubiquitous. The city is dark, crowded, and ruthless; its human form is Anna. Anna is the center of the city and his social net connects him to the police, other underworld rivals, factories, politicians, and more. Anna’s eccen- tricity or “madness” is central to the way the city’s lawlessness and decay are portrayed. He is ordinary and spectacular, human and inhuman, powerful and vulnerable. Like other noir films, Parinda offers a combination of the themes of excess, the bizarre, cruelty, madness, innocence, and a fascination with death. Death here acquires a ceremonial quality that is elaborately staged, but it is not associated with martyrdom, as in the case of the classic antihero. Rather, death is the culmination of a series of failures. Central to the narrative of death is the noir-like dark- ness of the city.
Parinda opens with long shots of the city of Bombay in twilight as the credits appear without the loud, spectacular music usually associated with Hindi film credits. An eerie sense of danger is evident from the staccato music. As twilight turns into night, a sense of expectancy and mystery surrounds the city. The credits end with the director’s name appear- ing on the long shot of a house with light filtering out of the window. Here, the music sound track is mixed to introduce a mechanical sound. In the next shot, the sound is identified as we see a little toy moving on the floor. There is a clear association here with a child, but we see no child as the camera tilts to show Anna standing before a photograph of himself, a woman, and a child. We hear a woman’s tortured singing on the sound track as Anna folds his hands to pray before the garlanded portrait. The strangeness of the scene is evident; the portrait on the wall seems to evoke the death wish of a tortured yet powerful man.
This initial introduction is suddenly interrupted by the sound of the phone, and Anna turns to walk toward the sound. He picks up the phone and curtly says, “Anna.” We then hear the sound of a scream and the profile of a dead man’s face, shot in close-up. In the next cut, we see the face of one of the three men who killed the man whose scream was just heard. The men, close associates of Anna’s, wipe the blood off their weapons. The close-up of weapons and faces in low-key lighting give this murder the appearance of a ritual killing. The discontinuity in the editing imbues the killing with a level of grandeur, ritual spectacle, and primitivism. This aesthetic framing of death is repeated several times in the film. As in the classical form of Eisensteinian montage, the act of killing is never shown directly but is instead projected through an effective editing pattern.
'Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City' (pg 161-164)
All annotations from Ranjani Mazumdar,
'Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City'
(University of Minnesota Press, 2007)
Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City
Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City
Childhood impressions and experiences connect all the characters, including Anna, as orphaned children. Childhood images are woven together through songs and a few conversations. Childhood is a state of homelessness. Living on the “footpath” is brutal and cruel, but also full of hope. Images of the children singing on Bombay’s Marine Drive are presented against the magical backdrop of the Nariman Point skyline.
The city is represented here as the city of dreams. This mythology of the city is linked to the idea of childhood and dreaming. The city never appears magical in the adult life of the characters. Karan and Paro’s relationship also develops during childhood, at a neighborhood foun- tain—an image that is recalled in their adult life, only to be destroyed by the violence around the site. The twilight hue of many of the child- hood sequences invests the past with a certain beauty, magic, and inno- cence. Yet Parinda’s childhood images are like snapshots, dislocated and unresolved. They do not provide us with a well-developed chain of events. Memory in Parinda appears like a series of unfinished moments. Recalling the past of childhood homelessness seems to be the only way to deal with the terror in the city.
Childhood remembrance and perceptions are particularly significant in the development of an urban identity. As an adult, these perceptions turn into nostalgia, remembrance, and yearning. In “A Berlin Chronicle,” Walter Benjamin presents us with a series of impressions of the Berlin of his childhood. Contrasting his style of remembering the past with that of autobiographical writing, Benjamin suggests that, while the mapping of time in the classical autobiography tends to be sequential and linear, urban reminiscences are usually discontinuous (1992, 316). The relation- ship of specific locations to time, and the ways in which the city both shapes and in turn is shaped by memory, become the core of Benjamin’s investigations. The space of moments and discontinuities presents the recent past as fragmented, fleeting, and in the form of snapshots. It is this aspect that seems so relevant to the structure of Parinda. For unlike other popular film narratives that create a temporal continuum of past/ present/future, Parinda reproduces the past in flashes, as incomplete and unfinished moments that are relevant only in the adult lives of the protagonists.22 All the characters remain caught in a battle with fate, their past and their future and all are defeated by life in a poignant loss of innocence in the city. The film, however, goes beyond the everyday sites of memory to question the mythic power of the monument, whose relationship to the city has always been complicated.
'Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City' (pg 167-168)
Bombay arguments
Fragmenting the panoramic vision of tourism photog- raphy, which establishes monuments and display sites as beautiful and spectacular markers of the city, the use of montage in Parinda creates conflict and introduces the uncanny shock of the urban. In one of the most dramatic scenes of the film, Prakash is murdered at a neighbor- hood fountain, a site that has traditionally evoked romantic and joyful associations for all the characters, particularly Karan and Paro. The fountain operates here like a counter-monument, a particular site of memory whose use in the film is deployed effectively to show both the yearning for peace and happiness and the impossibility of peace and happiness within the space of the city.
The fountain is the place where Prakash and Karan meet after many years. Just before their meeting, we see them in cars driving through the city’s labyrinth, singing a childhood song. During the song, we are taken back to the past to see childhood shots of happiness, anger, destruction, and love. The Nariman Point skyline is often present in the childhood sequences. These visuals are woven into the song and are important for their depiction of innocence, hope, and a child’s vision of the city “at first sight.” By the time Karan and Prakash finally reach their meeting point, we are aware of their friendship. From here on, the editing and the music change as the car with the killers in it arrives at the site. Parinda’s film editor, Renu Saluja, contrasts action and emotion using a rapid back-and- forth structure. We see the glass panes of the car come down three times, intercut with shots of startled pigeons each time a window comes down. The killers are revealed in this montage just before we hear gunshots and see Karan’s helpless expression as his friend is shot. The entire action is fragmented into minute parts, with close-up shots of pigeons (startled by the sound of gunshots) providing the bridge for the editing pattern. In Saluja’s words, “city films demand a kind of editing where the cutting is visible” (interviewed in Mazumdar and Jhingan, “The Journey from the Village to the City”). Saluja contrasts the editing here with that of a lyrical story line where the cutting is made to look invisible. In Parinda, disembodied shots are put together through a stylized editing technique to produce the shock of the urban. The images are cut to the sound of music and gunshots, creating a montage from collision, rather than linkage.
'Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City' (pg 169-170)
Like the fountain, the Babulnath Temple emerges as a violent space. Karan runs up the steps of the temple to see Paro feeding pigeons. Paro has broken up with Karan, since he refused to be a witness for her murdered brother. Karan walks up and expresses a sense of desperation to Paro, who finally relents, knowing that Karan himself had no role in her brother’s death. A romantic song plays on the sound track. Suddenly Karan spots one of the killers and starts chasing him down the steps, followed closely by Paro. The downward descent introduces a dynamic movement. The spectacularly visual conflict of steps, people, lines of force, and the sound of the temple bell are all linked together through the chase. The chase down the steps stands in contrast to the casual climbing of other temple visitors. Moving from the close-up of run- ning legs on the steps to long shots of all three characters, the sequence appears to combine montage based on the mechanical beat of cutting and montage based on the pattern of movement within the shot. As a statement about a sacred site of the city, Parinda’s temple sequence envelops the city with crime and violence.
'Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City' (pg 170)
Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City
The inability to sustain a personal private world runs throughout Parinda. In what is perhaps the film’s only romantic moment, Karan and Paro go to her house after a scuffle near a temple with one of the killers. We hear night sounds of the city as Paro cooks inside the apartment. Karan is in the veranda. Paro walks up to him and tries to console him. A romantic song intercut with images of their childhood follows. This happy moment is suddenly interrupted when the lights go off and Paro drops her plate. A disturbed Paro pleads with Karan not to leave her. The song resumes, then ends abruptly again when the phone rings. The juxtaposition of these sounds with the song on the sound track introduces a terrifying invasion of personal space. The song resumes after some time and then ends with Kishen breaking into the house to drag his brother away.
'Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City' (pg 165)
Song: Tumse milke aisa lagaa
Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City
The invasion of personal space is developed again in Karan and Kishen’s apartment. When Kishen is shot, Karan brings his injured brother to the apartment. The doctor comes home to treat Kishen, then leaves, promising to send a nurse. Karan uses all the latches to bolt the door. Karan’s fear is justified, as in the next shot the killers talk to the doctor in the darkly lit staircase outside the apartment. The doctor is with the underworld. Just as Karan and Kishen start reflecting on their childhood entry into the city, the doorbell rings again. This ominous sound is intercut with close-up shots of Kishen, Karan, the doorbell, and the staircase outside the apartment where the killers stand ringing the bell. The shots are repeatedly cut to music and end in silence, with the staircase now empty. The doorbell rings again after a pause, and this time Karan, gun in hand, walks toward the door, with Kishen begging his brother not to open the door. Again the film uses a montage of shots and sounds as Karan removes all the latches, to reveal a nurse standing outside. Unknown to the brothers, their private space is already invaded by someone whose real self is not visible to them. The night clock chimes and the nurse injects Kishen. Suddenly, the doorbell rings again. The nurse tries to walk to the door but is prevented by Kishen. Karan again moves, gun in hand, toward the door, as Kishen shouts from his bed. All the latches are again removed, and Paro walks in. In a stressed state, Karan tells her he cannot be a witness because Anna’s men shot his brother. There is an argument and, ultimately, Karan agrees to be a witness.
The incessant use of the doorbell to trigger tension inside the apart- ment is cinematically developed through a Hitchcockian montage. Close- ups of faces, door latches, and the gun in Karan’s hand are regularly intercut with the sound of the doorbell to create a palpable tension within the apartment. The power of the sequence lies in its very cinematic quality, its ability to create a visual and aural language with which a written narrative cannot compete. While the visual appears like a set of fragmented shots, the sound track combines Kishen’s desperate voice with the sound of the doorbell and highly effective music. Fear is now all-inclusive, as terror is omnipresent. The next day at the police station, Karan refuses to be a witness when he learns of the nurse’s identity. As Vidler suggests, “the uncanny emerges as a ‘frame of reference’ that positions the desire for a home and domestic security with its exact opposite” (1992, 12). In Parinda, the cycle of terror encircles the city, the home, and the private world of the protagonists. As a result, the desire for peace becomes a nostalgic yearning for a return to childhood.
'Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City' (pg 165-167)
Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City
The Gateway of India is similarly implicated in the violence of the city. Throughout the narrative, the Gateway is used as a major backdrop. Kishen is shot by Anna’s men near the Gateway, and it is the use of the Gateway during this climactic moment that concretely presents it as a space of terror. Karan and Paro decide to spend their wedding night on a rented boat near the Gateway. The couple want to return to their village. The narrative presents this imagined space of the village as a sign of hope away from the violence of the city. But this is not to be. Anna emerges from the crowds participating in the revelry of New Year’s Eve at the Gateway of India. He appears both as a man of the crowd and as a stranger to that crowd. He boards a little boat that ferries him and his companions to Karan and Paro’s boat. This entire sequence is presented using a back-and-forth editing structure.
We see the Gateway of India, well lit, surrounded by crowds. Anna on his boat moving toward the other boat is regularly cut with shots of Karan and Paro making love. The erotic energy of this sequence is height- ened by its fragmented and expressive quality, which is regularly con- trasted with shots of Anna coming closer to the boat. Just as Karan and Paro reach their climax, with Karan whispering the name of their future son, Anna pushes open the door and releases a volley of bullets. The bed is now covered with blood. The power of the monument as a symbol of the beauty of a city is systematically destroyed as Bombay looks dark and terrifying, a city of death.
While there are many characters who die in Parinda, the cinematic shock in the erotic and aestheticized killing of the newlywed couple after a sensual lovemaking sequence is the climactic moment of the film. With the volley of bullets, the two fall into each other’s arms, united in death but unable to reach their dream. Death here is symbolic at many levels—while a return to the village is no longer possible, a return to childhood is fleetingly posed through a childhood song playing on the sound track. It is this utopian flash combined with deep despair that makes Parinda such a fascinating film about the city. Throughout the narrative, we are reminded of the village, but a return to the village is now no longer possible. Parinda does not try to project a heroic figure caught in an urban nightmare. Instead, every character except Paro colludes in the making of the nightmare. The film’s cynicism is crafted through an uncanny interplay between a constant yearning for happiness and its systematic destruction in the fragmented and dark city of Bombay.
'Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City' (pg 170-171)
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