Masoom

aka Innocent 1982 143’ col Hindi d Shekhar Kapur pc Krsna Movies Ents s/lyr Gulzar c Pravin Bhatt m R.D. Burman lp Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Saeed Jaffrey, Tanuja, Supriya Pathak, Jugal Hansraj, Urmila Matondkar, Aradhana, P. Jairaj, Rajan, Satish Kaushik, Pran Talwar, Anila Singh

Marital melodrama featuring Shah as D.K. Malhotra, living happily with his wife Indu (Azmi) and their two daughters, Rinky and Minnie, when a boarding school asks him to come and fetch his son. Replying that he has no son, he later realises that the boy Rahul (Hansraj) is the fruit of a brief affair he had with the terminally ill Bhavna (Pathak). Unbeknown to D.K., Bhavna had raised the child. Now she is dead and D.K. and his wife are forced to adopt the boy, shattering the couple’s peaceful life. Indu finally accepts the boy and D.K. at last has a male child in his family. Kapur’s glossy directing debut benefits by the children’s uninhibited performances which endeared the film to a predominantly urban middle-class audience. Although the film addresses the question of illegitimacy in a humane manner, it also sidesteps the knottier aspects of the problem by making the illegitimate child a boy and by requiring the wife to accept the fruit of her husband’s infidelity rather than the other way around.

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