Silsila

1981 182’ col Hindi d/co-sc Yash Chopra pc Yash Raj Films st Preeti Bedi co-sc Sagar Sarhadi lyr Javed Akhtar, Rajinder Krishan, Hasan Kamal, Nida Fazli, Harivanshrai Bachchan c Kay Gee m Shiv-Hari lp Amitabh Bachchan, Shashi Kapoor, Jaya Bhaduri, Rekha, Sanjeev Kumar

Shobha (Bhaduri) is in love with the air force officer Shekhar (Kapoor). Shekhar’s younger brother Amit (Bachchan) writes poetry and plays and woos Chandni (Rekha). Shekhar dies in the war, leaving Shobha pregnant. Amit sacrifices his love for Chandni to marry Shobha and save her reputation. Chandni marries a doctor (Kumar) in the town where Amit and Shobha live. The ex-lovers meet in an accident in which Shobha loses her baby. Amit and Chandni have an affair while their marital partners suffer in silence. The lovers elope after a highly stylised confrontation between the two women (the two rivals standing back to back). The film features Bachchan’s alleged offscreen lover Rekha and his wife Bhaduri (who came out of retirement to play the part). Several scenes appear designed to fuel or to exploit the gossip journalism which underpins and surrounds film careers. In the end, the sanctity of marriage triumphs and the original married couples are restored. Bachchan sang his own songs and declaimed numerous poetic couplets addressed to Chandni, fully exploiting a key aspect of his star persona: his deep baritone voice. Songs picturised in Dutch tulip fields help promote Rekha’s image as a glamorous but unattainable object of desire.

Film