Review of Aaghat
RaviKrishna
You have to pay a price to live in the material comforts of Unites States of
America. That price is that you just don’t get a chance to see good movies.
Regular cinema theaters mostly show junk movies (one such movie “Duplicate” is
releasing soon) and all desi grocery shops have limited stock of movies due to
the pressure of shelf space. Obviously they will keep high moving masala movies
like DTPH.
While scanning through the list of Hindi movies I was pleasantly surprised to
see the name of “Aghaat” (meaning “injury” ).
This is a 1986 movie, then dubbed as an art movie and it promptly met its fate
at the box office. Directed by Govind Nihalani, the film starred Om Puri ,
Nasiruddin Shah (guest appearance), Gopi (Malayalam movie star), Sadashiv
Amarpurkar, Amrish Puri, Salim Ghouse,Pankaj Kapoor and some routine art movie
actors like K K Raina , M K Raina etc.
The communist leanings of Govind Nihalani is quite obvious.
The film deals with the subject of trade unions in a factory. Om Puri
(brilliant as usual) is the leader of a moderate trade union party who find
themselves challenged by a militant rival gang of Nasir. Gopi acts as
Krishnan, the trigger happy stooge of Nasir who resorts to violence at the
slightest provocation. His atrocious Hindi, spoken with heavy south accent, far
from being funny, actually makes him menacing. Sadashiv Amarpurkar is a
senior level manager in the factory and K K Raina is the personal office under
him. The whole story is told through the eyes of K K Raina. Pankaj Kapoor meets
with an accident while working and how both the trade union parties use him as a
pawn is told very interestingly. Om Puri’s guru is Amrish Puri, a theoretician
who always guides Om Puri.
The best part is the character of Rustom Patel played by Nasir. He is not shown
in the film till the last scene and there is always a curiosity factor about
him.
However the film was not without its flaws.
(a) The ending was bit abrupt.
(b) Usage of very pure hindi. Even the title of the film is ultra pure hindi.
Usage of words like tatasth (impartial) is not only difficult to understand but
also makes it unnatural. No one uses such words in day to day life.
All in all , a great movie. It showed the standard to which Hindi movie is
capable of raising.
Ravi Krishna
PS: For bay area residents, the movie can be found in Spiceland, Santa Clara.