Last Saturday I had almost nothing to do. In the morning I sweated it out at the gym and felt proud – I had done 2 days’ exercise. Later at home, I took a Mills and Boon book
(I didn’t buy the dumb thing. I’d got it free with some magazine) and sat down in front of the TV. Kalaignar was showing one of those early 80s movies.
The movie starred Sridevi and Rajnikant. It had the typical rich girl falls in love with poor boy story. Girl has a millionaire Dad with a pipe stuck in his mouth and an expressionless face. Her mommy is a ‘glammy’ (I was tempted to coin that word). The parents are straight out of Bollywood films of that era, and both of them are thinner than their daughter.
Sri marries Rajni, but later they break up due to ------------------------------ (you guessed it!). She goes back to her ‘porandha veedu’. A couple months later she is found to be pregnant. Her papa wants to have the child (actually a doll with the front side hidden in the first few scenes, as you may have expected) put in an orphanage and does it – by putting it in a cradle on the porch of the orphanage in the middle of the night. Rajni sees this and after the daddy leaves, looks into the cradle to find the child missing. While checking the vicinity for the child, he finds his wife’s ex-beau holding a weapon over the child’s head to kill it. Our man somersaults in the air with a sound effect and attacks the ex-beau, and then obviously gets the kid.
Rajni brings up the kid – in one shot, he’s a model father, with one hand brushing the sleeping kid’s hair off his face, and a bottle of liquor in the other (no prizes for guessing why he is drinking) while singing a Bollywoodish song. Drinking remains his favourite pastime even after the kid has grown and become a
Meanwhile, Sri’s been lying in bed with a problem in her head all these years (I presume, as they showed her lying in bed ;-)) with a bomma paappa in her arms (expectedly!). Papa has given up on trying to getting his daughter out of the mental trauma. When she’s asleep, he pulls her doll out of her hands and throws it dramatically on the floor. Of course she wakes up and wails for her baby. Papa utters some dumb dialogue that ends with ‘I say!!’ (which Rajni who mostly speaks ‘thooya tamil’ in the film also says earlier. It must have obviously been a fashionable phrase then). After the dimwitted dialogue, Papa throws something against the bookshelf. A couple of books tumble out and a photo of a heart that Rajni and Sri carved on a tree in Ooty falls out. Sri grabs the photo. A doctor who visits later says that the picture has affected her a lot (which we all can see, u dumb ass doctor! Err… u dumb ass dialogue writer!). The doctor says they should take her to the place, which is in Ooty.
In Ooty millionaire father has a run-in with Sri’s son. The son later meets Sri near that tree (he has earlier heard the tree singing in her voice! – how ridiculous can things get?) and identifies her (Ha ha ha ha) but keeps things to himself (and doesn’t even let the viewer know, from what I saw.. ;-)). Sridevi gets attached to the boy and can’t bear to leave without him. She goes to his house and ------------------------- (you know).
So Rajni starts dialogue vuttufying in pure Tamil, not forgetting to add a sentence in impeccable English (gawd). But the dialogue actually serves its purpose and they unite.
Meanwhile, I was flicking through the Mills and Boon, revisiting my teenage infatuation episodes, while actually taking in the story of the dumb movie, laughing like crazy and passing comments in between. My, how the purpose of these movies have changed! Would the inept director and film crew have imagined this? Hehehehe. Mildly entertaining morning, but I am hoping for great Saturdays.
