Some films become cult for the right reasons. That they were hidden gems, unappreciated for their plots and performances. That they had zeroed in on the high and low notes of the times they were set in. That they were lost in the slew of surrounding films, and “paarkhi darkshaks in later dashaks” gathered them up in fervent embrace.
Despite its starry wattage — with Raveena Tandon and Karisma Kapoor playing the female leads, along with a whole bunch of popular comic actors — the film disappeared without having let off any noticeable firecrackers. It’s only much later that it was dusted off, and appropriated: Thirty years on (the film released in early November 1994), it is truly baffling why it is such a darling amongst those who worship at its altar.
I watched it again after all those years, and of course it hasn’t aged well — it’s determinedly mid qualities are even more glaring. It feels like it was assembled as it went along, the way so many Hindi films used to be, back in the day. The lads and lassies, the former in colourful shirts and mullets which switch lengths, continuity be damned, and the latter in bright orange and pink lipsticks and big hair, jump about Ooty’s hillsides. The villains show up as and when, in and out of their den.
What struck me most, all over again, was its anti-classist cheap-and-cheerful aesthetic. Everyone in the film exists to tell us that regardless of the exigencies of the thing that passes for a plot — heiresses looking for true love, layabouts in search of purpose, lookalikes switching identities, and a bag of diamonds — all will end well. That happiness is just around the corner. And most importantly, nothing matters as much as silliness: If there’s an ode to silly, it is Andaz Apna Apna. When you can celebrate silliness, life is still worth living.
The ’90s was a decade when movies were in recovery mode. Except for a handful of films, with home entertainment having nearly steamrolled theatrical outings, Hindi cinema had sunk from B grade to C. The back-to-back success of two youthful romances — Aamir’s Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988) and Salman’s Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) — brought the “gentry”, and optimism, back to the movies.
Santoshi himself was coming off the success of serious dramas like Ghayal (1990) and Damini (1993), and was looking to make a “light” film: Andaz Apna Apna felt like such a 360 degree turnaround that it was hard to believe that it was from the same director who had made movies toplining the hard-knocks-hero-and-heroine and their grim struggle to stay afloat.
There is nothing grim about AAA. It spreads only grins. Yes, you can groan, like I did, at the non-stop carousel of lame jokes – Salman revealing an ability to carry a line lightly, even more so than Aamir, even though both played well with each other — but you can’t help cracking up in some places. How else to react when Shakti Kapoor, immortalised as Crime Master Gogo, the nephew of the legendary Mogambo (one of the endless hat-tips to beloved filmi characters), leaps out from behind yet another bush, his patently false moustache straggling off a lip? Paresh Rawal who may have invented the serio-comic baddie in Bollywood has a double role, and his yearning-for-riches Teja remains a rumpled classic.
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I did feel distinctly uncomfortable at Aamir’s Amar falling all over Raveena’s Raveena in a few songs-and-sequences (almost a precursor to the 1995 Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge with Shah Rukh Khan doing ditto with Kajol in the back of a Eurail compartment), but again that is a post-facto insight — 30 years ago, as in the previous decades, heroes and heroines were routinely bracketed in ways which would be considered strictly off-limits these days.
Which is really the thing — this is very much a 1994 film, presenting a time of idealised innocence, teetering on the brink of a just-liberalised India, when two callow gold diggers who had clearly never seen the inside of a gym, and whose six packs were well into the future, could make you believe that they were really after, what else, sachcha pyaar.
Finally, it is all about the candyfloss nostalgia of a bygone era when you could happily wallow in the nonsense surrounding those markers of unserious menace, Mark and Teja. And in the belief that Amar and Prem were forever.
shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com
