Sigh. I so wanted to like this film. It’s based on To Sir With Love, which is one of my all-time favorite movies (Lulu! Sidney Poitier! sixties fashions!), and Vinod Khanna stars as an earnest college professor with Tanuja as his love interest. But alas, it threw away all its potential on a bad script: the characters were nothing but caricatures, and all plot opportunities for dramatic buildup and emotional involvement were squandered.
Any film—but especially a Hindi film—in which a dog co-stars is okay with me! Annadata is no exception, and in fact even without the dog it would still be a lovely little fairytale of a movie. Directed by Asit Sen, two great performances by Jaya Bhaduri and Om Prakash embellish a sweet story about love and compassion versus money and greed. The subject is a little hackneyed (poor=love=good and rich=money=bad) but so well done that it doesn’t matter.
It also has very melodic songs by Salil Chowdhury, which unfortunately aren’t subtitled. A movie like this requires song subtitling; I definitely missed nuances in the story. Must…learn…Hindi………
MemsaabStory 