75/100
One of the most striking musicals I've ever seen...which left me wondering, at the end, why it had virtually ceased to be a musical with at least 45 minutes left to go. Not that the home stretch is bad, by any means. Just significantly less glorious, because Dutt's visual imagination, never shabby (provided you're down with shots that boom into screen-filling Academy-ratio close-ups; I definitely am), truly ignites whenever song breaks out. Actually, I should make a possibly ignorant distinction between Pyaasa's proper "numbers," featuring melodies that are identifiable to me (would have no difficulty humming them afterward), and the interludes that see Vijay extemporize poetry in musical form. The latter, to my Western ears, boasts a quality very similar to raga, which basically just means that the tune eludes me despite notes being produced. In any case, it's the highly choreographed sequences that thrilled me, each one boasting its own gorgeously cinematic approach. One, which I'll call "The Luring Song" (all the titles on Wikipedia are in romanized Hindi, so I'm not sure which is which), sustains a weirdly coquettish hypnotic tension for several minutes, as Gulabo entices Vijay to what I assume is meant to be a brothel of some kind. Another consists of an elaborate fantasy, complete with grand staircase and fog machine, that's situated within an extended flashback (and concludes with Vijay discovering a Dear John letter next to him when he snaps out of it, Meena having split while he was imagining their romantic song and dance), which flashback is itself triggered by Vijay looking at Meena's distorted reflection on an elevator's metal wall. There's a goofy comic number featuring gangly Johnny Walker, who I'd never seen before. (Indeed, all of the main actors were new to me, except that Waheeda Rehman apparently had a role in Deepa Mehta's Water.) And as a filmmaker, Dutt had a superlative understanding of how to create emotional effects via varying proximity, in a rapid-fire succession of static shots like this:
Those five shots occupy all of ten seconds (immediately following a push into him and a pull out from her, which also contribute to the rhythm but aren't static), yet they feel sedate rather than hectic. And while "Let's signify the distance between them by moving the camera further away" doesn't require a genius, most filmmakers lack the compositional acumen to use e.g. that slanted overhang as a key element that breaks up the frame.
One thing that did puzzle me early on: We meet Vijay lolling around in a park, observing nature's beauty, mentally composing (we assume; it's heard in voiceover) a poem that as subtitled is replete with lines like "These smiling flowers / These fragrant gardens / These paths dipped in color and light / Drinking the nectar of flowers, the bees sway," etc. But then the very next scene consists of a publishing house's manager (or whatever) complaining that Vijay's poems are depressing crusades against social injustice and demanding that he instead write graceful poems about flowers and songbirds. Which is what we just saw him doing! Maybe that's meant to be him trying and failing to give the people what they want, as he does conclude the nature poem by asking "What can I give to you, o splendid nature? All that I have is a few tears, a few sighs." Still, odd order if so.
Anyway, Pyaasa kicks off as the story of someone trying to write the poetic equivalent of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Sturges, not Coens) and encountering resistance at every turn, then gradually introduces both the sting of a failed romance (his beloved dumped him and married an unscrupulous publisher of non-bummer poetry volumes) and the tang of a potential romance (with a sex worker—right? it's never quite stated—who purchased his poems as scrap paper and fell in love with them, and by extension with him). All of it developed so beautifully via the various musical numbers that around the midpoint I became genuinely uncertain which of the two women Vijay would or should end up with. After Vijay's mother suddenly dies (offscreen), however, the film shifts gears into almost Fuller-esque melodrama, as Vijay becomes suicidal, gets confused with a vagrant's corpse, and winds up trapped in an insane asylum even as his poems become so "posthumously" celebrated that fans threaten to burn bookstores down if they don't immediately order more copies. And then both the unscrupulous publisher who married his former beloved and his two asshole brothers (meaning both the publisher and the brothers are subjects of the verb to follow this parenthetical ass-covering, not that the publisher married the brothers, you follow me, just heading it off) discover that Vijay's alive but falsely claim, for fun and profit, that it's not him. I actually rather like this nutty third act, but it doesn't even remotely feel like a natural conclusion to the movie that we'd been watching, as both women and poetry become secondary to an escape plan. And the musical numbers all but disappear after Vijay's lament for the state of India (meaning how things are going, India-wise, I haven't mistaken India for a U.S.-style state rather than a country, you follow me, just heading it off).
So basically what we have here is about 90 minutes of a film I love, followed by another near-hour of a film I mostly enjoy, with the latter sorta clumsily grafted onto the former. It's slightly and frustratingly unsatisfying to me as a complete work, but there's hardly a moment of it I wouldn't happily rewatch right now. Pretty much a pure 75 (see also The Nightmare Before Christmas, Welles' Othello, Band of Outsiders, etc.).