Mohra ["Pawns"] (1994, Rajiv Rai)
A review by David M. Arnold
India has one of the largest movie industries in the world yet its product is nearly unknown to most Western audiences. The staple of Indian cinema is the long, stylized musical, with "musical" the operative word. There are musical comedies, musical romances, musical action flicks, musical adventures, musical thrillers, musical mysteries and no doubt musical war movies. Last year, Indian movies began appearing on DVD. Many include English subtitles and this opens an opportunity for Western audiences to be introduced to this interesting and exotic genre.
I have a deep fascination with and fondess for Indian culture, history and mythology. The last time I visited our local Indian grocery and spice shop, I noticed a stack of DVDs for rent. I selected one, more or less at random, titled "Mohra".
"Mohra", which I believe to be fairly representative of the Indian action genre, concerns a pair of drug gangs in a turf war. Vishal (Sunil Sheety), the anti-hero in a Yojimbo sort of way, is freed from prison as the result of the intervention of journalist Roma (Raveena Tandon), and her boss Jindal (Naseeruddin Shah), a blind media tycoon. Soon, Vishal is playing both gangs against each other and the body count starts to mount. Meanwhile, Roma falls for the film's hero Amar (Akshay Kumar), a police officer assigned to drug enforcement. Amar and Vishal keep crossing each others' paths, until in the end they join forces against a drug kingpin who is manipulating both crooks and police in a grander scheme.
The plot is merely a framework on which to hang the musical numbers and the fight scenes, which occur regularly and in about equal number. Songs are so central to Indian cinema that the DVD includes a separate chapter index organized by song. The songs themselves are of the Indopop variety -- a fusion of classical Indian music and modern pop, and the musical numbers are sumptuously staged and photographed in a way that often seems jarringly disconnected to the rest of the film. The fight scenes are preposterous martial-arts extravaganzas, but I ended up admiring the level of effort, talent and training that must go into staging one of these.
"Mohra" is very much over-acted and over-directed, but I'll have to sample a few more titles before deciding whether or not this is merely a characteristic of the genre. The subtitles were helpful as I don't speak Hindi, but some of the translations were unintentionally humorous ("I don't wish to pressurize you into talking about it").
I was suprised and pleased with the overall quality of the DVD. The image was bright, crisp and clear and letterboxed to 1.85:1 aspect ratio. I suspect that the film was shot in a 2.35:1 'Scope format and a 1.85:1 flat extraction print used for making the video. The colors were vivid, although I saw several instances of poor color timing towards the end of the film. The audio was monaural and a just a little harsh sounding.
I'm most encouraged by the approach that the Indian DVD distributers are taking -- making high-quality, reasonably priced discs that are NTSC standard and Region 0 (i.e. not region locked). These discs are priced so that pirating them simply isn't worth while. Today, (2/2000) Indian discs dominate the foreign film catalog at netflix.com, no doubt the direct result of this open policy. I'm hoping that this strategy proves successful, and that other DVD producers will be encouraged along these same lines.
Essay copyright (C) 2000 David M. Arnold. All rights reserved.
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