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Tunnu Ki Tina

1994 161’ col Hindi d/s Paresh Kamdar pc NFDC lyr Bharat Acharya, Ramesh Shah c K.K. Mahajan m Rajat Dholakia lp Sunil Barve, Rajeshwari, Virendra Saxena, Renuka Shahane, Rohini Hattangadi

Kamdar’s debut film avoids the pitfalls of the New Indian Cinema’s tendency to rescue ‘commercial’ films by relying on quotations and an allegedly Brechtian self-reflexiveness (cf. Saeed Mirza, Ketan Mehta). The film tells the tale of a middle-class college youth, Tunnu (Barve), and his unfortunate love life. He first falls for an equally middle-class girl (Shahane), but abandons her when the sexy Tina (Rajeshwari) reassures his narcissism. His adventures are intercut with those of his conman father (Saxena), a real-estate tout. In the end, the father comes to financial grief, Tunnu’s sister elopes with a Shiv Sena-type slumdweller and Tunnu’s girlfriend deserts him, leaving him wondering whether she ever existed. Tunnu joins the real-estate business, his optimism undiminished. The film starts with a brief narration of this tale in the ‘Hindi movie’ idiom, set in a hotel lobby and followed by a chase, before beginning its own story. Its main achievement, via numerous double-takes, resides in the way it reduces the entire business of storytelling to its stereotypical function, forcing viewers constantly to doubt the narrative’s truth value even as it wallows in several realist conventions.

Film