MUSINGS
Much water under the bridge
ASHOKAMITRAN
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Understanding the twists and turns of lovers’ lives as seen in films requires patience and a sense of humour.
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Moving experience: Vivein Leigh in “Waterloo Bridge”.
All novelists resort to certain objective things to take forward their fiction and V.S. Naipaul uses Hollywood movies as points of reference. “Waterloo Bridge” occurs in In a Free Country, published in 1973. Not many yo
ung readers will be able to connect the book with an intensely moving movie experience.
Similar plots
It is a happy encounter of the hero and the heroine during World War I. Then the man goes to the front and the woman waits for him but, even after the War is over, he doesn’t return. She is driven to walk the streets. But the man returns and persuades her to marry him. Feeling it wouldn’t be fair, the woman jumps off Waterloo Bridge, where the two met for the first time.
Just four years earlier, in 1936, another movie with a similar plot but with the actors wearing complicated costumes was screened. The author of “Camille” was the younger Alexandre Dumas who couldn’t have imagined that jeans would be the common denominator between the President of the U.S. and the electricians helping to make screen classics like “Rowdy” and “Street Dada”.
Right now, Naipaul may have given up seeing movies altogether. “Waterloo Bridge” had Vivien Leigh play the woman and “Camille” had Greta Garbo. Difficult to reason why the women should die, but die they do.
Waterloo also has a Napoleonic association with the Corsican suffering from an extremely inconvenient affliction during a battle: diarrhoea. He was less than 40 but felt as fatigued as an old man. Anyway Napoleon lost the battle at Waterloo. Hadn’t he seen Elba? (“Able was I ere I saw Elba.”)
Tamil fiction also has stories of women sacrificing their men because they suddenly found themselves unworthy. Kalki wrote a remarkable story titled “Dhanakotiyin Manoratham”; in English it would translate as “Dhanakoti’s longing”. Though after reading the story you might pull out your kerchief to wipe a tear or two, you are also likely to wonder why the woman encouraged the man to the extent that he decides to marry her in the first place. You will agree it is a dangerous trend designed to break male hearts.
Sridhar, the Tamil film director who passed away recently with an unbroken heart, made film after film with the woman dropping her man unceremoniously and, even worse, forcing the man to marry a girl he wasn’t interested at all! Then she would herself marry a third person: a case of FCS (female chauvinistic sadism.)
Oh, how the films made viewers weep shamelessly! Some 50 years ago, every Hindi film had a woman sacrificing her man and then kicking the bucket. There was a famous film with that wonderful singer K.L. Saigal titled “President”. Nothing to do with men like Obama or Musharraf. The president is a lady heading a business enterprise and Saigal is an employee who sings most of the time and works for the company in between.
Sacrifice?
You guessed it right — the President falls in love with him. It should have been all right — boss marrying her employee — but the president has a sister who also falls in love with the singing employee. A perfect situation for sacrifice.
I saw the film as a boy of six and the only Hindi word I knew was mai, meaning I. So when everyone else was weeping his/her heart out, I sat blinking and feeling sleepy. (In those days, people felt cheated if they weren’t kept in the hall for at least three hours.) I believe Guru Dutt started remaking it again as “Baharen Phir Bhi Aayenge” (Spring will come again). He didn’t live to see the next spring; a case of a man sacrificing! His brother completed the film. This time understood every word of it. I also realised we hadn’t moved very far from the Waterloo Bridge.
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