Chaudhvin
ka Chand
(Moon of the 14th Day, i.e. Full Moon)
(1960) Hindi, 169 minutes
Produced by Guru Dutt for Guru Dutt Films. Directed by Mohammed Sadiq. Screenplay
by Saghir Ushmani, from his story “Jhalak” (“A Glimpse”).
Dialog by Tabish Sultanpuri. Music by Ravi Lyrics by Shakeel Badayuni. Cinematography
by Nariman Irani.
Starring: Waheeda Rehman, Guru Dutt, Rehman, Minoo Mumtaz, Johnny Walker.
[Notes by Corey K. Creekmur]
The exquisitely produced Muslim social Chaudhvin ka Chand seems relatively
neglected within the pantheon of Guru Dutt’s late films. Perhaps because
it appeared between the now-undisputed masterpieces Kaagaz ke Phool (1959)
and Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (1962), the former the last film Guru Dutt
is officially credited with directing, and the latter the final film he produced,
Chaudhvin ka Chand shines less brightly in its setting, surrounded by
striking gems. Nevertheless, the film was (following the box-office disaster
of Kaagaz ke Phool) Guru Dutt’s biggest box-office hit, and his
first to play in an international film festival (Moscow, 1962, which Guru Dutt
attended). But even Guru Dutt’s greatest champion, Nasreen Munni Kabir,
describes Chaudhvin ka Chand as “most conventional in story and
in treatment” in her seminal Guru Dutt: A Life in Cinema (Oxford,
1996). However, the film is in many ways a remarkable work that deserves critical
rediscovery and reevaluation.
There remains some speculation surrounding the production circumstances of the
film, though Kabir’s critical biography clears up most of the facts: though
the critical and commercial failure of Kaagaz ke Phool may have prevented
Guru Dutt from signing his name to another film, he seems to have chosen M.
Sadiq to direct this film because he simply felt that a Muslim subject demanded
a Muslim director, though Dutt supervised the picturization of the film’s
songs, employing color cinematography for the first time. (Dutt’s offer
to Sadiq was also a generous way to help the commercially unsuccessful director
improve his career and finances.) The project also perhaps derived from Guru
Dutt’s desire to make a film based upon a qawwali story, as the
director adored the Sufi musical form. In any case, while behind the scenes
a number of new names were assembled for this production, the film’s cast
again gathered many of the performers who had become closely associated with
Guru Dutt’s increasingly tragic vision of the world.
As the Encyclopedia
of Indian Cinema notes, the film “pivots around the Islamic practice
of purdah, which forbids women to show their face to men outside their immediate
family.” In fact, the film richly expands and complicates this basis in
a cultural practice by constructing an extended study in vision and veiling,
treated in both comic and tragic variations that structure the film’s plot
of misidentifications and misunderstandings as well as its rich stylistic pattern
of blocked and obscured views. Recent film critics invested in the power and
erotics of the gaze would do well to discover this veritable treatise on the
subject of focused looks and momentary glimpses, which intersects the essential
looking of cinema itself with the specific visual conventions of Muslim India.
The film initiates its focus immediately, when we meet a nawab, Pyare Miyan
(Rehman) and his comic friend Shaida (Johnny Walker) on the streets of Lucknow.
Though Shaida is chastised for peering at women, his more sophisticated friend
is thunderstruck by his glimpse of the face of Jamila (Waheeda Rehman) when
she lifts her veil. Our own view of the striking face of one of Indian cinema's
most beautiful stars has the effect of immediately implicating us in the film’s
moral tensions: we have paid for our right to gaze freely upon the faces of
cinema’s stars, yet this undeniably erotic look – and others the camera
will offer us – occurs within the dramatic and cultural context which forbids
such invasive views. And while the film is obviously set in a world that supports
male privilege, it often complicates matters by regularly shifting its point
of view between men and women. In the first elaborate musical number, as the
nawab peeks at the women gathered in his home for his sister’s wedding
party, the women recognize his presence and watch their watcher. As he hides
– blind beneath a sheet – in his room, Jamila and a friend comically
dissect his painted portrait which “watches” over the room. Thus begins
the film’s rich and varied play with screens, veils, curtains, performances,
and disguises, together rendering all of the film a constant circulation between
clear-eyed vision and (often preferable, or more alluring) distorted views.
The unfolding of the plot moves from the misidentifications of Shakesperian
comedy to the misunderstandings of well-intentioned people that result in tragedy.
The nawab’s ailing mother is anxious to see her son married, and has arranged
his marriage; still seeking his briefly glimpsed Beatrice, he asks his poor
friend Aslam (Guru Dutt) to marry the girl his mother has secured – who
is of course Jamila. The film will then trace the series of errors and obligations
that complicate this situation and results in the three friends understanding
the prices they have paid attempting to insure one another’s happiness.
The film’s long-delayed revelation, when the nawab finally realizes that
the woman he desires is his best friend’s wife, is a brilliant sequence
that shifts our attention between visual perspectives (as well as external and
internal voices) that are intricately composed through reflections in mirrors.
The scene summarizes the film’s catalog of visual structures as well as
the moral consequences that they generate.
If the extended misunderstandings seem implausible (despite their grounding
in a social system that isolates men and women from casual contact), the emotions
that link the characters to one another and motivate their attempts to perform
extreme sacrifices feel plausible and real. Although Jamila is central to the
plot, the film concentrates on the obligations of male friendship (dosti),
one of the great topics of popular Indian cinema but rarely given the depth
and sincerity of this example: as in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam this film’s
ostensible “happy ending” for a couple is outweighed by the painful
cost of such joy. (One continually senses that the three friends at the center
of the film are playing out their off-screen, longtime affection as well: Johnny
Walker’s comic role is especially tempered by moments of convincing affection
for his suffering friends.) Friendship forces these fellows to take action by
acting: attempting to play the part of the wayward husband that will allow the
wife he adores to divorce him and marry his best friend, Aslam’s joyless
visits to a brothel make him resemble Devdas, the great Indian romantic
anti-hero (Guru Dutt fans will recall that the ill-fated film being made in
the ill-fated Kaagaz ke Phool is a remake of Devdas, a story of
self-destruction that Guru Dutt’s own life seemed to sadly replay.) Shaida,
on the other hand, approaches his roles – and costume changes – with
great relish, disguising himself as a elderly holy man to photograph women in
the bazaar, and finally donning the uniform and self-important mannerisms of
a police inspector.
As in all Guru Dutt films, the song sequences are notable highlights, featuring
the voices of perhaps Hindi cinema’s three greatest playback singers, Lata
Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, and Mohammad Rafi, the latter shifting effortlessly
between Guru Dutt’s heartfelt and Johnny Walker’s comic songs. Two
numbers are given special treatment by being filmed in color (see note below),
and Guru Dutt’s tendency to advance his story through songs, with the rhythm
of music and editing in collaboration, is as strong as ever. For example, the
first major number, Sharma Ke Ye Kyon … (“Why do these women
adjust their veils?”) cuts between the nawab and women peering at one another
while the lyrics comment upon this action (and the tradition of purdah), all
within a tightly organized interchange of sound and image. If this film doesn’t
finally achieve the overall impact of an earlier masterpiece like Pyaasa,
the technical skills that made Guru Dutt one of the masters of Hindi cinema’s
golden age, and unsurpassed in the art of song picturization, are still on display
in this penultimate work.
[Chaudhvin ka Chand is available on DVD from both Yash Raj Films and Eros/B4U. The image quality of both versions is generally very good, through both include some rough spots and choppy transitions. The subtitles on both copies are fairly straightforward but necessarily fail to capture the rich texture of the original Hindi-Urdu dialog, though the Eros copy may be somewhat more accurate (it at least correctly identifies the final swallowed object as a diamond, not the “poison” that the Yash Raj copy provides.) However, the Eros DVD does not subtitle the film’s songs, and its subtitles tend to slip off of the bottom of the screen. A more significant difference between the copies is that the Yash Raj DVD includes only the title song in color, whereas the Eros DVD includes both the title song and the brothel number “Kabhi Raazi Mohabbat” in color . (The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema claims that these two color sequences appear in “later release prints … although designed for b&w,” a rather confusing claim since the sequences were clearly filmed in color.) The Yash Raj DVD, like all of the company’s Guru Dutt Collection titles, also includes Nasreen Munni Kabir’s illuminating documentary “In Search of Guru Dutt.” Guru Dutt fans may be fated to owning both versions, since each provides something the other lacks.]