Review for

    KHAL-NAAIKAA
        A film review by Mark R.Leeper
         Copyright 1994 Mark R. Leeper

At this writing we are just back from Baltic Europe and I thought you might find of interest some comments I made on my last trip, to India when I went to see a sort of horror film in Hindi.

During the Great Depression when people were working long hours for small rewards, the film industry decided that people need glamor in their lives. Movies became more glamorous and movie theaters became movie palaces. You paid your few cents for a ticket and you entered a world of opulence. Most of the palaces are now history or falling apart. In India, however, where the world's largest film industry still thrives, the concept of the movie palace is still going strong. The Raj Mandir in Jaipur is the second-best theater in all of Asia according to the Lonely Planet guide. It is an impressive building, with mirrored interiors, pink decor, and rounded rampways to higher floors. The theater's capacity is about 1300 people. As we approached, a huge movie board announced it was showing Kumar's KHAL- NAAIKAA. For as little as Rs7 for the front row to Rs18 for the Diamond Box, you can see a film on the big screen (about twenty-five feet high and fifty feet wide). (A rupee is about three cents.) We each got into line. They have separate lines for men and women. No hanky-panky in line! The women's line went faster so Evelyn bought the tickets. We went inside and admired the interiors for a while, then the lights dimmed.

KHAL-NAAIKAA is about two-and-a-half hours long and the plot was not hard to follow even if it was entirely in Hindi. What helped especially was what Evelyn pointed out how familiar the plot actually was. This was Bombay's two-and-a-half-hour musical remake of THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE. Now we never bothered to see this film, but we did hear what the plot was and it was pretty much all there, including the governess's weird motive for her evil and even a greenhouse murder that exactly repeated the scene in the coming attraction for the American film. Just why anyone needs a greenhouse in India would be anybody's guess. Mr. Kumar is not one to take only partial advantage of the unenforcibility of copyright law. He is a very thorough thief. But what about is this about it being a musical? Well, just about all Indian films are musicals regardless of subject matter. This was the very first psychotic killer musical we had ever seen, but we bet others in the audience had seen more than enough psycho-killer musicals. Before I get to the film itself, I want to mention one more thing about the theater itself. The ceiling of the screening room is highly fluted and apparently at least two birds were nesting there and at inopportune times would fly in front of the screen. Kumar was often very creative in how he put in his production numbers. The heroine is singing a production number on television at one point and the villainess reaches into the television screen and pulls out the heroine and the two sing together. A second grab at the heroine causes her to fall back into the screen. All during this scene the Venetian blinds, which are white on one side and red on the other, flash from red to white and back. Rebecca DeMornay is fairly attractive and the part calls for her to be seductive. The Indian woman who plays the same role does fill the bill.

One of the things that helps the understanding is that there is a lot of English language used in the film. Scenes in a doctor's office are in English and a fair number of English phrases are used at odd moments. People say, "I love you," in English. It seems odd to go to Jaipur to see a version of THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE, but you do learn a fair amount about Indian culture from the experience and it is a comfortable and pleasant three hours.

     Mark R. Leeper
     mark.leeper@att.com

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