Ittefaq (1969)
Director: Yash Chopra; Writer: B.R. Films Story Dept, Akhtar-ul-Iman; Producer: B.R. Chopra; Cinematographer: Kay Gee; Editor: S.B. Mane, Pran Mehra; Cast: Rajesh Khanna, Nanda, Sujit Kumar, Bindu, Gajanan Jagirdar, Madan Puri, Iftikhar, Shammi, Jagdish Raj, Alka
Duration: 01:45:15; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 28.784; Saturation: 0.157; Lightness: 0.202; Volume: 0.154; Cuts per Minute: 7.011
Summary: Low-budget, songless suspense drama in which the hero Dilip Roy (Khanna), accused of having murdered his wife and pronounced mentally insane, escapes from an asylum and finds refuge in the house of a young but married woman. He sees the corpse of her husband in the bathroom, but it disappears. Shot mainly on sets, the taut editing keeps the whodunit plot enigmatic until the ending resolves the suspense. It is one of Khanna’s pre-Aradhana (1969) hits. Apparently, he appeared unshaven in Raj Khosla’s Do Raaste (1969) because he had to be unshaven for Ittefaq and was shooting the two films simultaneously.
artist
criminal psychopathology
Dilip Roy's head starts spinning when he encounters his dead wife for the first time. His profession as an artist is important in an understanding of the symptoms of mental imbalance - the artist-as-genius is a familiar category of 'the afflicted'.
mental health
psychiatrist
Rajesh Khanna
A stylised/symbolic representation of how Dilip behaves erratically before the law and is sentenced to time in a mental asylum.
Psychiatrist Dr. Trivedi talks to public prosectutor Khanna and Inspector Dewan about Dilip's 'paagalpan'.
Dilip rails against Dr. Trivedi and Prosecutor Khanna for leaving him no choice but to either be an imprisoned criminal or a lunatic confined to an asylum. This is an interesting representation of the tradition intersection between the institutions of the prison and the asylum, particularly in the context of the history of mental health in the colonial period in South Asia.
Dilip "recognises" his madness after being led to believe by Rekha that he imagined the dead body of her husband in the bathtub. 'Gaslighting' as a technique to further madden the mentally unwell.
Dilip's yearning to leave the city and go off to an unknown place is a symptom of an emotional malady (melancholia? depression?) wherein he seeks to escape the complex of metropolitan urbanity and the pleasures it affords, associating them with the inability to live sanely.
Inspector Khan tries to analyse Dilip's behaviour in terms aligned with narrative descriptions of the illness (common to presenting case studies in psychotherapy) and differentiates between 'paagalpan' and 'gussa'.
PPF police
Dr. Trivedi diagnoses Dilip with schizophrenia.
Rekha commits suicide - unusual in a Bombay film for the lead female protagonist to be psychologically driven to a decision like that because of her guilt over committing a crime.
schizophrenia
Indiancine.ma requires JavaScript.
