#dushman

[nahinsamne]

Dushman (1998)

[sanjayduttfan]

[nikkicreations]

[bollywoodirect]

20 Years of #Dushman. (29/05/1998)

Dushman is a 1998 Psychological thriller film starring Sanjay Dutt, #Kajol and Ashutosh Rana in lead roles. The film is directed by Tanuja Chandra and produced by Mukesh Bhatt and Pooja Bhatt. The film was well received by critics as well as at the box office and was the seventh highest grossing Hindi film of 1998, winning lead actress Kajol, who was seen in the double role of twin sisters along with Ashutosh Rana quite a few awards, at a number of award ceremonies that year.

The film is a remake of Hollywood film Eye for an Eye.

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[sovietreality-blog]

Soviet soldiers in Afganistan

[dhrupad]

In the second half of Dushman, I put into it a love story that didn’t really belong there. Writing is the backbone of any film, the story idea, the screenplay–but basically the story. You know you can have bad production values, you can have bad acting, you can have bad everything--but if your story works, your movie works.  

Naturally, my personality will pour into the kind of story that I’m telling, you know? The female character will be someone who is urban, who is modern, but at the same time someone who has her own sort of fears, and her own hopes and dreams and at the same time things that trouble her–at the same time [has] her helplessness. Because it’s not as if a woman is you know, a wonder woman. It’s not true that she doesn’t have fears and hopes and helplessness. At the same time she has passion, she is intense. And she has a very definite want.

-- A transcribed excerpt from an interview with director and screenwriter Tanuja Chandra on her first feature film Dushman in the PBST documentary When Women Call the Shots (2001) by Charu Gargi. 

Kajol as Naina in Dushman, Enemy (Tanuja Chandra, 1998)

[nikkicreations]

[dhrupad]

Dushman, Enemy (Tanuja Chandra, 1998)

A transcribed excerpt from an interview with director and screenwriter Tanuja Chandra on her first feature film Dushman in the PBST documentary When Women Call the Shots (2001) by Charu Gargi: 

Well in Dushman I think what I liked most is what I like to see in movies, which is a kind of emotional [drive], a sort of emotional intensity. Which is what, actually, when I watch movies personally as a viewer, that’s what grips me more. So there was this kind of intense subtext in the movie of “feeling” and of the one sister completely getting hit so hard by the tragedy in her life. You know I’ve grown up watching Hindi movies and I’ve always loved Hindi movie songs. Even when I was really little I used to listen to the radio everyday and every night. So Hindi movies have always been my most favorite form of entertainment. The kind of movies that I want to make--I mean resolutely mainstream commercial cinema. Hindi movies [are] what I want to be a part of and what I want to excel at and this where I want to make a mark in. But within the mainstream format, it’s important to me to try and tell a kind of a new story. 

[...] I’m not interested in breaking the form, but telling a kind of story through the eyes of a woman. Which is not to say I’ll never make a movie with a male protagonist, but my special area of interest is where you a see a certain event or something that I’m interested in talking about through the eyes of a woman. Female-oriented films and mainstream commercial cinema are not mutually exclusive. A woman-oriented story can be as commercial as a male-oriented story and I think the audience is very open, provided you entertain, provided you move them in some way or make them laugh, make them cry, make them thrilled. People who are actually against it is a kind of phobia that the distributors have and the producers have, thinking that a woman’s story will not sell, a woman’s story will not go down well with the audience. If a woman’s story does not do well, it’s really because there’s something wrong in the writing, you know, there’s something wrong in the film. Which is not to do with the audience having anything against a woman’s story. But it’s just that that particular story did not work.