Heer Ranjha - Don't Let Pran/Jeevan/Ajit Near A Love Story!

Pran, always eager to meddle in some affairs of the heart!

Yes, please chide me for being a terrible lazy blogger, I have been catching up on sooo many Hollywood movies that I almost forgot about the Masala Pradesh. But the seriousness and lack of the Shashitabh in Hollywood made me come running back.

And the genre I love quite a bit is the star crossed lovers that have had countless remakes from the 40's to the 70's, Heer Ranjha/Laila Majnu/Shiri Farhad/Sohni Mahiwal/and of course Rum Anil! I have managed to catch most of the remakes and redoes, all with a lot of masala such as unnecessary sadness that is actually quite necessary and lots of comic relief via Tuntun, and Mukri!

But this Heer Ranjha i think surpasses all the others because of this man:

Ranjha - the eloquent Raaj Kumar
Raaj Kumar just makes this movie with THAT voice, it just so nuanced and enunciated and by god I could listen to his dialogues all day long!

Getting back to the movie, the dialogues are just a beautiful mix of Punjabi and Hindi, and most wonderful about the whole movie is that it's in verse! Soo poetic and great and its written by Shabana's father Kaifi Azmi. So we start off in Punjab where Ranjha is spoilt by his aunts played with masala cuteness by Indrani Mukherjee, Achla Sachdev, Sonia Sahni, Mumtaz Begum who have a huge haveli where aunt Kamini Kaushal gets to run around upstairs and downstairs! It kinda reminded me of the Sanjay Leela Bhansali movies where Aishwariya and his heroines run about like crazy!

Rebellious Ranjha is from Hazara and defies his aunts and goes to a wedding in Jhang where he sees Heer(Priya Rajvansh)A gorgeously shot meeting!
They meet and Ranjha immediately waxes lyrical about Heer to her friend, Ranjha then becomes a "cowboy" according to the hilarious subtitles, he becomes a farm hand at Heer's estate and they stealthily meet in the night and sing the best song of the bunch "Khoya Khoya" the lighting in the movie is lovely, the blue lights sort of make me think of a Douglas Sirk film, with key colours of blue, peach, and pink, and in this movie its yellow!

On one occasion Heer runs to Ranjha's house, but this is no ordinary run it is the "Waddle RUN" its really quite funny the way Priya swishes her arms around while running through the Punjab fields! Her elbows are stuck to her side, while she flails around her arms, and in one shot as the bhangra band are approaching she almost falls because of her silly running!

THe Waddle RUN - tripping over actresses all day long!
On this same the day the village baddie Pran is stirring up trouble in the town, and in a funny scene during a poetry shoutout in the market, the villagers make fun of Pran, and hell hath no fury a Pran scorned. So he wanders the fields in search of something to mess up, but Pran-style!
So when he spots Heer and Ranjha in a horny hug, he's found something to meddle in!
And meddle he does, he tells Heer's nasty mum who then tells her husband the kindly Thakur(Jayant) who is shocked his daughter could partake in a horny hug where Ranjha sniffs Heer's neck and squeezes her waist! But according to Pran, thats horny and gonna give badnaam to the Thakur! Quickly Pran ties Ranjha to a tree, and leaves him to the crows and beasts in a studio made forest! The Thakur sympathizes with his daughter and unties Ranjha so that he can go back to his village and send for her. Pran doesn't like this and meddles some more and then Heer must get married to this bad man! But during this ordeal she has to endure Jeevan as a bad priest that makes her say Qabool to Ajit when SHOCK she doesn't want to! What will Ranjha do? How will Heer live with that dastardly Ajit? You all know the tragic ending but this movie paces the sadness and love well and I even cried at the end!
But this movie has a warning that soo many of the great character actors show up and each of them have enough scope to make an impact, and my favorite overacting Kapoor, Prithviraj shows up as the the king of the land!
Heer Ranjha is a lovely evocative piece of film, definitely watch it for Raaj Kumar!