Lamhe

An Indian film set in Rajasthan and London. Viren grew up in London. His family has land in Rajasthan and he is going there for the first time. He sees a woman there. Pallavi is older than him and known in the district. Viren falls in love with her. She does not know. She loves someone else and marries him. Viren goes back. Word comes after a while. Pallavi and her husband died in an accident. A baby is left. Viren takes responsibility for the child but does not see her. Her nurse Dai Ijja raises her. From there the film jumps years. Pooja has grown. She comes to London, to Viren. She resembles her mother. Her face, her voice, her movements. And she is in love with him. He cannot accept it. He sees her mother in her and cannot separate that feeling from the person in front of him. What the narrative is interested in is not love but substitution: its idea is that Viren has loved a dead woman for years and that the person before him lives in that shadow. Pooja knows it. And insists anyway. Sridevi plays both parts. She builds mother and daughter differently; one measured, the other quick. Yash Chopra made this in the middle of his career and the subject was contested at the time. The film failed commercially in India. It did well abroad and over the years came to be counted a classic. The music is by the Shiv-Hari duo and the album outlived the film. The images set the Rajasthan desert and the English countryside side by side. Anil Kapoor, Sridevi, Waheeda Rehman and Anupam Kher are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes Indian melodrama and mainstream films that enter unusual subjects. Who it is not for: anyone who does not want to be unsettled; the difference in age and role at its centre is still argued over.