Navrang Analysis

Navrang (1959)

Directed by: V. Shantaram

The film is about a disillusioned artist and it has a weird premise - poet Diwakar fantasizes his wife to be an angel and finds a new muse in his fantasized version of his wife. Here, the issue is infidelity - it need not be physical, fantasizing someone else is also infidelity - although in this film it's a little complicated because he imagines his own wife, but a different version of her. So it's not him cheating on her physically, he's probably cheating on her as a person - I don't know if this is making any sense but this is how abstract the idea of the film is. It's actually interesting - because after a point in a relationship, the excitement wears out and it's not the physical aspect, it's probably that you don't have much to look forward to after you know everything about the other person, which is why he muses on an imaginary version, which he doesn't want to know everything about. It's a weird idea.

The film is set in pre-independence India. They use background score conventionally - to direct the audience to feel the emotions. Dissolves are used well, to depict his imaginary muse and also in some scenes when things go haywire. The ending is a conventional happy ending, although I didn't get how the wife actually understood the difference between him singing for her real self and for his fantasized version of her. It's interesting so see that such complex ideas were being executed back then, without technology and resources - reinstating what Kubrick said - if it can be thought or written, it can be filmed.