Pushpak (Srinivasa Rao, 1988)IMDB LinkI spent around twenty minutes looking for subtitles for the movie until I read somewhere on the net that the film did not have any dialogue.
An Indian film without any dialogue? That sounds absurd! Silence has never exactly been a Bollywood trait, so it did not cross my mind that a 1988 film was made without dialogues! Strange.
The film is comedy and for a while the film is pure gold. We are introduced to a university graduate, who is unemployed, and very poor. Some of initial scenes were hilarious. The man cannot afford to pay for a full cup of tea, so he only gets half a cup, and he drops in buttons and other junk in it, to raise the level of the drink, to make it appear full.
Eventually, the film goes for its main plot. The man finds a millionaire drunk on the roads, so he takes him home, and ties him up. He then uses the millionaire’s hotel key and lives in the hotel room, and uses the millionaire’s money to change his life. In the process he falls in love with a magician’s daughter and is followed by a hitman that is mistaking him for the millionaire. At a length of more than two hours, the film tries too much. Even a no-dialogue Indian film seems to fall in Indian cinema’s biggest mistake, which is trying to put too much in a film.
By cutting out the dialogue, the movie would have benefited from some other restraints. The hitman subplot could have been completely removed and the film probably had 45 minutes of it chopped off, and the finished good could have been a timeless comedy. Unfortunately, it’s not.
3/5
