`Irrepressible raconteur
BY ANITA JOSHUA
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Enchantment of the Mind: Manmohan Desai's Films, Connie Haham, Roli Books, Rs. 395.
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`IRREPRESSIBLE raconteur' who has been frequently imitated but never equalled is how Amitabh Bachchan remembers Manmohan Desai. And, the Big B should know; having worked in eight of the 20 films Desai made in a career spanning 28 years.
From 1977 to 1988, the Desai-Bachchan duo cast a spell on cinephiles; making the impossible seem possible in the still-watchable "Parvarish", "Amar Akbar Antony", "Suhaag", "Naseeb"... As a toast to this association, Bachchan has penned a moving foreword for Connie Haham's book on Desai's films — Enchantment of the Mind. Having worked so closely with the filmmaker — on whose sets ("Coolie") he himself faced near death and made a true celluloid-like recovery — Bachchan seeks to explain why the audience loved Desai's films which found little currency with reviewers.
That an American teacher of English in Paris should have undertaken this exercise is in itself a testimony to the reach of the Manmohan Desai brand of cinema. Introduced to Desai through "Amar Akbar Antony", Haham found it to be a mixture of "Shakespearean comedy with unlikely chance meetings... Yiddish stories with touching mother-son scenes... and Three Musketeers spirit of camaraderie".
Though she watched all Salim-Javed, Ramesh Sippy, Yash Chopra and Prakash Mehra films and was acquainted with classics such as "Diamond Queen", "Mother India", "Shree 420", "Awaara", "Gunga Jamuna", "Pyaasa", Desai's films held such a special attraction for Haham that she set out to study his work.
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