I have never appreciated her more than in this one movie where she was allowed to display her potent charm fully and given enough screen time for us to bond with her, not as a minor character, but as a girl with a story of her own!
[WATCH ONLINE: this is a good site, and the only one I could find with the full-length movie shown in decent quality video.]
Her irrepressible charisma captured me from her very first scene, when a mute admirer brought her a yellow rose for her hair and she sweetly thanked him. As the village belle with a crush on the handsome Ravi (Shammi Kapoor) she created a sweet and appealing character who took advantage of any opportunity to get Ravi's attention, whether it's by limping across the street to get him to give her a lift or by sitting atop a tree, waiting for him to drive by and call him for rescue.
Ravi treated her as he would an exasperating and impish child. He answered her calls for help and laughed ruefully when she swore up and down that she was telling the truth.
Unlike other movies where she was too often the vindictive vamp, even her jealousies here were cute and understandable. If Sheetal (Hema Malini) hadn't existed, and if the 70's Hindi Cinema wasn't completely predictable, I would have totally been rooting for her to get the guy.
Unfortunately, Badal, Ravi's worthless half brother came home after getting rusticated from college and decided that he wanted the enchanting and fiery Mahua (Irani) for himself. His equally loathsome friend and he devised a plan to trap her.
I think it was the saddest thing. If not for her crush on Ravi she would never have answered a summon to his house (conveyed by a traitorous servant) and gone skipping happily through the woods to meet the man she loved. Badal and his evil friend lay in wait and accosted her as soon as she was deep enough into the forest, so no one could save her.
I've been thinking a lot about that one desperate scene, the last of her hope, atop a cliff over looking a distant road. She had run as fast as she could, she had struggled up the hill but was at last trapped by a sheer fall. As much as I admired her just then for not jumping off, what happened was so very heart wrenching, I wish she had.
She saw Ravi's jeep in the distance and screamed for his help- hope lighting in her desperate eyes for a few moments. Then Ravi smiled, shook his head, and drove away refusing to fall for yet another of her tricks. She kept swearing on god that she was telling the truth, but Ravi's jeep didn't stop- he didn't believe her.
That last scene keeps haunting me. Mahua being dragged away from the edge of the cliff, her molesters hidden below the incline, invisible to us, and her hopeless, despairing whisper that she was telling the truth, this time she really was.
I don't really have the heart to review the rest of the movie, but then I don't need to. There are many blogs that have already done justice to the usual filmi wonderfulness of Andaz, and primary among them is http://memsaabstory.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/andaz-1971/#more-14951.
The screen caps above are from a different movie [Caravan (1971), I think] and I promise to rectify that as soon as I can. Below are the posters and screen shots from the rest of the movie..........
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