This is the second Bollywood movie I've seen (the first being "Sharabi"), and I enjoyed this a lot more. The following plot points were given in Netflix's summary, and thereby cannot be considered spoilers. Vishal (Dharmendra) and Aruna (Sharmila Tagore) are very much in love. However, when Aruna finds out that she is going blind, she marries her elderly employer (Ashok Kumar) so that she won't be a burden to Vichal, who already has to take care of his handicapped mother (Achala Sachdev). Deven Verma provides comic relief.
The first act of this film is a bit overly melodramatic. It takes a western viewer a while to get used to the in-your-face close-ups and other staples of old-school Bollywood cinema. However, the acting is very good. Dharmendra and Sharmila Tagore are good as two young lovers. Ashok Kumar is quite good as a magazine executive with a heart of gold. However, the best actor does not show up until the beginning of the second act: Leena Chandavarkar as Kumar's daughter. She acts evenly with her whole body, and the fact that she's easy on the eyes doesn't hurt her performance. She simply has the best chemistry with all of her co- stars, especially with Sharmila Tagore. In their scenes together, the unique chemistry that develops when two women the same age take on the roles of mother and daughter is captured brilliantly. Chandavarkar's scenes with Dharmendra are also very good. Even when the script becomes overly misogynistic, Chandavarkar's presence is stronger than her male counterparts. Also, the woman who plays the friend of Aruna in a small role is very good and sexy, but I couldn't find her name.
Even though I'm praising the acting, why am I only calling the movie decent? The story. For starters, characters have a habit of appearing out of nowhere in scenes, particularly Kumar's character. Also, a lot of times the plot is like a soap opera. Sometimes the action depends on events so nonsensical that they ruin the mood. All of this would be tolerable, however, if it wasn't for the dénouement. Without giving anything away, this movie's dénouement breaks the original mood of the film so severely that the last fifteen minutes just become annoying. Everything else about the movie was very good, but the dénouement was so awful that it almost ruined the movie for me.
