Wednesday 5 October 2011

Parinda [1989]


Made four years after Khamosh, the well-made whodunit, Parinda is considered the movie that begun Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s foray towards ‘mainstream’ cinema. It is also considered among the earliest Hindi movies to provide a deglamourised, non-clichéd look into not just the Mumbai underworld, but underworld in general. Love and revenge are the themes of this dark and brooding gangster film, the name of which is a reference to freedom and liberty, or ‘free birds’ to be precise. The principal characters of the movie are Anna (Nana Patekar), a ruthless and sociopathic local mobster; Kishen (Jackie Shroff), Anna’s hatchet man who took had taken up the job to take care of his younger brother; Karan (Anil Kapoor), Kishen’s good-natured brother whose best friend, a cop, is killed in front of his eyes; and, Paro (Madhuri Dixit), Karan’s love interest and the slain cop’s sister. The film boasts of a string of strong performances – Patekar and Schroff provided especially memorable turns. The film isn’t flawless by any stretch of imagination – it has its share of implausible plot developments, an inane song-sequence that is completely at odds with the inherent moodiness of the storyline, a comparatively weak character development so far as Karan’s character is concerned, over-usage of its motif of pigeons, to name a few. However, that said, the movie is very well shot, with the city of Bombay managing to be a vital character, grim atmospherics, and a number of marvelously executed sequences – especially the chilling climax.








Director: Vidhu Vonod Chopra
Genre: Gangster Drama/Crime Drama/Urban Drama/Psychological Drama
Language: Hindi
Country: India

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