Chashme Buddoor (1981)

User Rating:

8.4/10   

Director:

Sai Paranjape

Writers:

Sai Paranjape (dialogue)
Sai Paranjape (screenplay)

Release Date:

30 April 1981 (India)

Genre:

Comedy | Family | Romance

Plot:

Two womanizing slackers, Omi and Jai (Rakesh Bedi and Ravi Baswani respectively) attempt to woo the new girl in the neighbourhood...

Plot Keywords:

Friendship | Roommate | Delhi India | Classical Music | Motorcycle

Cast

Farooq Shaikh	...	Siddharth Parashar
Deepti Naval	...	Neha Rajan
Saeed Jaffrey	...	Lalan Mian
Rakesh Bedi	...	Omi
Leela Mishra	...	Neha's grandmother
Ravi Baswani	...	Jai Lakhanpal (as Ravi Vaswani)
Vinod Doshi	...	Neha's Dad
Ranjan Grewal	...	Neha's Brother
Amitabh Bachchan	...	Himself
Rekha	...	Herself
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Veeni Paranjape Joglekar		(as Veeni Joglekar)
Kamiya
Vinod Nagpal	...	Music instructor
Kamal Nathani
Partha Rai
Rajendran		(as Dr. Rajendran)
Shiva Rindani		(as Shiva)
Madan Sharma
Ravi Kiran Shastri
Vikram Vij

Also Known As:

Chasme Buddoor
Shield Against the Evil Eye
Touch Wood

Runtime:

145 min

Country:

India

Language:

Hindi

Color:

Color

Certification:

UK:PG

Company:

PLA Productions

Movie Connections:

Remade as Paavam Paavam Rajakumaran (1990)

Soundtrack:

Kahaan se aaye badra

Brilliant movie about the Bollywood movie

This is entirely charming. A simple and amusing romantic comedy story provides the structure for a lovely movie about the conventions, tropes, whatever you would like to call them, of the Bollywood movie (i.e. popular Hindi language movies made in Bombay). The story's fun on its own, but the real anticipatory pleasure has to do with getting the jokes and looking forward to the next one.

Two of three guys sharing a room in university days have their eye on a pretty neighbor girl - the third is too serious a student to bother. You can guess which one gets the girl.

Each of the first two makes a try at getting to know her by visiting her house on some ruse. Neither succeeds - one runs away, one is beaten up by her brother - but both tell tales of their success which are picturized entirely in Bollywod "love story" conventions:

- In the first guy's story, he takes her on a romantic boatride (singing, of course), which is filmed with every Hindi movie boy-girl-boat-on-river cliché you can think of, including flights of birds, light glistening on water, cows going for a dip -- and also a non-clichéd real bite, done by the pretty teeth of Deepti Naval - and the movie lets you see the actors having fun doing it. I wonder if it was even in the script - in any event it's "actually" sexual, and so not Bollywood-y at all! --

-In the second guy's story, which culminates in a filmi-style fight of hero and random guys, at least eight very very well-known film songs are picturized, among them the main song from Mughul-E-Azam, with our guy as Dilip Kumar (costume included), and Aap Jaise Koi, with Deepti in a delirious disco setting.

And when the true couple gets together in a park in Delhi, they comment that in a movie, they'd be singing and swinging around trees - and then they do, in a third supremely terrific loving parody song. Oh, and look out for the (real) trained bear.

The two jerk roommates wreck the relationship and then have to help their friend repair it, so they contrive a situation in which he can "rescue" her the way our heroes rescue their movie heroines.