Up loaded on November 21st, 2022

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Cinema Paradise 

 

 

It started so early for me.

Penge is in the darkest reaches of South East London. Somewhat suburban but still reeking of the the darkness that exudes, like a an oily leak, from any location south of the river. We moved there when I was somewhere around two to three years old. In those days the local Asian community, oh, and I grew up in a time when the term “Asian' referred to people from the Indian sub-continent rather than the Americanised usage referring to people from East Asia,which millennials have adopted. Anyway, in those days, on a Sunday, the local Asian community would hire the local cinema and show Indian films. Nowadays everyone uses the term 'Bollywood' for mainstream Indian movies and to be fair the template for almost all the Indian films I watched as a kid is still the same – they are ALL essentially musical-rom-com-action-thriller-tradgedies. Almost every single movie I watched on those Sunday's had songs, huge dance routines with multiple dance troupes, a baddie with a big 'tache (usually Johnnie Walker) and a vital scene featuring the mother of the young hero crying her eyes out for some reason. This Crying Asian Mother was a trope based very much on lived experience. In fact, it is an Archetype. Trust me on this.

So I'm basically still a toddler, and I can remember being held in my step father's arms waiting in the queue. I call him my step father for historical accuracy. I always called him Dad, and I never really thought of him as a step anything, even though we never really had a meaningful conversation about anything, but even that means nothing because I really never had a meaningful conversation with any of my parents, and most of my siblings at that. Although that has changed quite dramatically recently. Anyway, we went to the Indian flicks every Sunday and amongst the entertaining musical-rom-com-action-thriller-tradgedies were some truly remarkable movies – Boot Polish, Haathi Mere Saathi (roughly translates as An Elephant By My Side) and the one that I love to this day and a classic of Indian cinema – Mughal-e-Azam. Made in 1960 and starring people who are absolute legends of Indian cinema history - Dilip Kumar, Madhubala, Nigar Sultana and Prithviraj Kapoor it's the story of a Prince who, like any good prince, falls for a court dancer, leading to a war between him and his disapproving father. To this day one of my favourite scenes of all the movies I'be watched is the incredible scene where the two women vying for the prince's attention, backed by a throng of singers in what can only be described as an early version of a rap battle, sing a profoundly poetic song about the nature of Love, alternating stanzas for and against.

The white clad sexy villainess opines 'meh, what use is Love, it only hurts?” whilst the beautiful court dancer smiles while she puts forward the thesis that yes, love really hurts and sometimes it feels so bad that you could slit your wrists, your blood is spilling all over the floor, but every second of the pain is worth it to feel love and to be loved. I am sort of paraphrasing. These translated examples from the web don't really do the performance justice.

 

“The story of people in love is that
They secretly torment themselves, they take deep sighs, they suffocate and die
Someday we'll see this entertainment with a smile and see what happens”

“I agree that love totally destroys your life

But is it less that even after your death, the world remembers you?

For the sake of someone's love, I'll sacrifice the world and see what happens.”


The song and the rhythm of the tabla, the improvised vocal cadenzas, the humour, all got me even as a somewhere between three and six year old, and I'm pretty convinced that the music in the Indian films of my toddler stage are what made me fall utterly in love with music, films, dance routines and movies with songs and dancing in them.

It's hard to describe the levels of beauty in this scene. The lyrics are wry, sardonic, funny but beautifully poetic, the hand gestures that accompany the song help to expand on the lyrical content and are part of traditional Indian dancing styles, the facial expressions on the two female protagonists run from flirtatious to deeply chilling and the refrain used to hand over the baton of debate to the other contingent “ then we'll see what happens” as each group mimes en mass 'your go next” It's full of joy, humour, melody, rhythm and tenderness.

There are many clips of this song, Teri Mehfil Mein (roughly translated as something like We Gather In Front Of You) on YT, some from the colourised version, but I'd recommend the original black and white version accompanied by this page where a reasonable translations of the lyrics lives - copy and paste this link :

https://www.filmyquotes.com/songs/1738

And here's a good clip from YT -