People Who Were Like Us - Chhoti Si Baat.....
Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee were the two middle class men of the seventies.They eschewed mainstream melodrama for rather undramatic settings.Amol Palekar,small and slight,was the hero of choice.The heroines wore clothes,not costumes.Utpal Dutt and his Shakespearean mustache made frequent appearances.These films had a gentle rhythm,rather than a pace.
Hrishikesh was the more famous and multi talented of the two,and Basu's been somewhat overlooked as a result.Their similarities obscured the concrete differences in their work.Mukherjee's films were placed in a particular social milieu while Chatterjee's was of it-his aim was to present a microcosm of a particular social stratum.In Chhoti Si Baat,it's bourgeois Bombay's working youth.
Arun and Prabha share the bus to and from work everyday.They're clerks working in old Parsi-owned industrial Bombay.Arun's attracted by Prabha and and wishes to impress her.in his hilarious daydreams,he's an appropriately suave,dashing,forceful character who can make any girl swoon.In reality,he can barely pick up the courage to pluck at her sleeve.She's aware of his admiration and likes him too-but his lack of initiative impedes all further progress. In swoops Nagesh-he literally carries Prabha away in front of Arun's eyes.Desperately,he journeys to Khandala and meets the magnificently names Colonel Julius Nagendranath Wilfrid Singh.Col Singh is an all round superman who can solve any problem and he vows to transform the mouse into an assertive,confident adult.how Arun wins over Prabha and beats Nagesh at his game is the crux of the film.
This slight story is charming in its detailing of its characters' undramatic lives.The daily bus,Arun bashfully following Prabha everyday(at a safe distance),Nagesh's loud yellow Lambretta,the restaurants,roads and offices of a less cluttered and infinitely more charming Bombay.
P.S.Mukherjee and Chatterjee?what beautifully rhyming names....
Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee were the two middle class men of the seventies.They eschewed mainstream melodrama for rather undramatic settings.Amol Palekar,small and slight,was the hero of choice.The heroines wore clothes,not costumes.Utpal Dutt and his Shakespearean mustache made frequent appearances.These films had a gentle rhythm,rather than a pace.
Hrishikesh was the more famous and multi talented of the two,and Basu's been somewhat overlooked as a result.Their similarities obscured the concrete differences in their work.Mukherjee's films were placed in a particular social milieu while Chatterjee's was of it-his aim was to present a microcosm of a particular social stratum.In Chhoti Si Baat,it's bourgeois Bombay's working youth.
Arun and Prabha share the bus to and from work everyday.They're clerks working in old Parsi-owned industrial Bombay.Arun's attracted by Prabha and and wishes to impress her.in his hilarious daydreams,he's an appropriately suave,dashing,forceful character who can make any girl swoon.In reality,he can barely pick up the courage to pluck at her sleeve.She's aware of his admiration and likes him too-but his lack of initiative impedes all further progress. In swoops Nagesh-he literally carries Prabha away in front of Arun's eyes.Desperately,he journeys to Khandala and meets the magnificently names Colonel Julius Nagendranath Wilfrid Singh.Col Singh is an all round superman who can solve any problem and he vows to transform the mouse into an assertive,confident adult.how Arun wins over Prabha and beats Nagesh at his game is the crux of the film.
This slight story is charming in its detailing of its characters' undramatic lives.The daily bus,Arun bashfully following Prabha everyday(at a safe distance),Nagesh's loud yellow Lambretta,the restaurants,roads and offices of a less cluttered and infinitely more charming Bombay.
P.S.Mukherjee and Chatterjee?what beautifully rhyming names....
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