'Vertigo' and 'Madhumati' and the twain do meet

One of the side-effects of obsessively watching many different types of films is that you start to see whimsical connections. Often I’m struck by a resemblance between two or more movies of different vintage, style and language, so that they effectively start to have a conversation with each other in my head.

Sometimes this doesn’t serve a purpose beyond personal amusement, but at other times it helps me engage a little more deeply with the films in question — to think about what they are trying to do, how they do it, and how superficial similarities might conceal important differences between plots and philosophical positions.

This happened most recently when I revisited the Bimal Roy classic Madhumati and was reminded of another movie released that same summer of 1958, on the other side of the world: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Consider the facts of the case.

Hitchcock’s film has a detective, Scottie (James Stewart), becoming fixated on a woman named Madeleine (Kim Novak). They fall in love, but then she dies (or so he thinks) by falling from a great height, and he comes to believe he is responsible. Shortly afterwards, he meets Judy, who bears a strong facial resemblance to Madeleine; he emotionally arm-twists her into dressing up as his lost love so he can lose himself in his own fantasy.

This study of obsession and remaking — which also paralleled the director’s own interest in a certain type of blonde actress — has fascinated critics for decades now, making Vertigo one of the most written-about films of all time. And these writings often take place outside the realm of movie criticism: for instance, the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik once did a thoughtful piece invoking Vertigo in a poignant, personal context — the death of his daughter’s beloved fish, and Gopnik’s efforts to replace it with another fish that looked exactly the same.

In Madhumati, a tragic love story is also followed by an attempt at recreating and play-acting. Anand (Dilip Kumar) falls in love with a village girl named Madhu (Vyjayanthimala) but loses her (like Madeleine, she falls from a tall building) and wallows in grief and guilt until he meets Madhavi, who looks just like his lost love. He persuades her to dress up as Madhu.

There is a strong resemblance in plot trajectory then, but there is a big difference in the two men’s personal imperatives and in the nature of the love depicted in the two films. The obsessed Scottie believes that Judy, by dressing and behaving like the dead Madeleine, can somehow become her, and his “love” has an ugly element of control or possession in it. Madhumati takes a more sentimental position. Once Anand realises that Madhavi is someone else altogether, he doesn’t display the slightest romantic interest in her; he asks her to pretend to be Madhu only so he can trap the story’s villain into a confession.

The point is clearly made in a scene where Madhavi comes to meet Anand in his cottage. Here is a flesh-and-blood woman who strongly resembles the dead Madhu, and who is sympathetic to his plight — yet he leaves her mid-conversation and dashes outside because he has heard the song of Madhu’s ghost. Like Scottie, it might be said Anand is chasing a shadow, a woman who doesn’t exist — except that in the world of Madhumati the ghost does exist. A big difference between the two stories is that Roy’s film believes in the supernatural, and this allows it to posit an eternal version of love, built on the theme that Anand and Madhu are soulmates destined to be forever together.

The motif of climbing towards a height, and then falling from it, feature in both films too (and in different ways suggest the vertiginous feelings that accompany romantic obsession). Both are beautiful visual accomplishments — one in colour, the other in black-and-white — and the cinematography has a self-consciously ethereal quality: in Vertigo there is a scene in a cemetery where Scottie sees the enigmatic Madeleine from a distance, as if through a mist; when Judy first emerges from the bathroom having “transformed” into Madeleine, she seems ghostly too. In Madhumati the mist is a palpable presence almost throughout, and Madhu is sometimes presented as an apparition, as someone not quite of this world.

In both films, a tree plays a central part in the lovers’ assignations: Madhu and Anand use a tree’s shadow falling across a rock to mark the time of day they will meet; Madeleine counts the rings on an ancient redwood as she reflects on the briefness of human lives. That might seem a minor detail, but the redwood scene is also a reminder of the big divergence between the films: Madhumati is based on the idea that nothing ever “ends” — if Anand and Madhu can’t be together in this life, they will have another chance in the next one — while Vertigo suggests that there are no such second chances and that an attempt to artificially construct one can only result in tragedy. Lives are finite, and too often wasted in pursuing an ideal rather than in appreciating what is in front of you.

And finally, a pleasing coincidence. Last month I happened to see two films that were dramatized stories about real-life directors. One was Hitchcock, and the other was Meghe Dhaka Tara, about Ritwik Ghatak — who was the story-writer of Madhumati. Which brings me to a final irony in the Vertigo-Madhumati association.

Hitchcock — the “commercial” director — made the more hardheaded film, a cynical work with many scenes that make a viewer feel like he has bitten into a sour lemon; while Roy and Ghatak — both archetypes of the “socially conscious” artist — created a lush melodrama (I don’t use the word pejoratively) about stormy nights, wandering spirits and immortal romance. It’s a pleasing reminder of the limitless possibilities of cinema.

The author is an independent journalist who writes on cinema and literature.