Sharmila Tagore on missing out on Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani with Dharmendra, “I fell ill and couldn’t do the film”

“We shared the same birthday. He was my co-star in seven films. I knew he was not keeping good health. But the news of his passing is still very saddening,” said Sharmila Tagore, who worked in films as far-ranging as Satyakam and Chupke Chupke with Dharmendra. She reflected on their screen togetherness. “We first worked together in Devar and then during the same year in Anupama. Two very serious subjects, followed by an out-and-out commercial film Mere Humdum Mere Dost. Shooting with him was a breeze. He was as effortless on screen as he was off it. He was never ‘The Star’ on the sets, always his natural self. There was nothing put-on about him.” Sharmila Tagore recalled her first meeting with Dharmendra. “Before we worked together, we met when I was shooting with Yash Chopra’s Waqt. I don’t know in what context he was there. But I remember he was dressed… how shall I put it… not like a star at all. When s...

Reconstruction review – teens re-enact crimes for state-driven pantomime in communist Romania

Lucian Pintilie’s grimly ironic 1968 film is based on real events, in which delinquents are forced to act out their brawl in front of government cameras

Lucian Pintilie’s Romanian film from 1968 is a bizarre and wayward political satire that at first involves just a handful of people – and finally unveils a dreamlike crowd scene with hundreds of non-professionals swarming across the screen, their expressions of incomprehension and incredulity pressed into service for fiction. Yet the whole thing is stranger than fiction – more metaphorical, more metatextual than fiction – and, of course, taken from real life.

Pintilie co-wrote the screenplay with Romanian author Horia Patrascu, based on Patrascu’s novel about an extraordinary event that took place in the early 1960s. Two drunken, hapless youths were caught brawling at a riverside cafe and were made to re-enact the event in detail for a solemn instructional film produced by the communist party authorities to be shown in schools, offices and clubs as a terrible warning against alcohol and anti-social bourgeois delinquency. The two stars of this strange film are moreover tacitly expected to redeem their offence, to expunge their sins moment-by-moment, by recreating their lives in the service of state-sponsored morality. (The actual official film that inspired this, on which Patrascu worked as a crew member, presumably exists in an archive somewhere.)

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