tommydan55's video: Harano Sur - Bengali - Uttam Suchitra

Harano Sur, 1957 Director: Ajoy Kar Music: Hemanta Mukherjee Lyrics: Gouriprasanna Majumdar Playback: Geeta Dutt, Hemanta Mukherjee Cast: Suchitra Sen, Uttam Kumar, Pahadi Sanyal, Dipak Mukherjee, Utpal Dutt, Sisir Batabyal, Dhiraj Das, Preeti Majumdar, Sailen Mukherjee, Chandrabati Devi English subtitles included. The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema says this about Harano Sur: The amnesiac Aloke (Kumar) is rescued from the asylum by doctor Roma (Sen) who takes him to her father’s (Sanyal) edenic country house. They marry, but a second accident, and a new bout of amnesia, makes him forget her and recall instead his earlier life as a rich businessman in Calcutta. When Roma follows him there, he does not remember her, but he hires her as governess to his niece, causing her considerable anguish. Moinak Biswas characterised the film as a domestic melodrama of ‘a subordinate woman winning over her boss’s heart’, in the genre of English novels such as Richardson’s Pamela (Biswas, ‘The Couple and Their Spaces: Harano Sur as Melodrama’, 1995). Roma keeps trying to stimulate the hero’s memory, using e.g. the refrain of their wedding song (and the film’s musical hit) Tumi je amar, but is unable to reply when Aloke, haunted by her presence, asks ‘Who are you?’. The plot provides a schematic version of the classic Kumar-Sen romance with a medical angle (cf. Sagarika, 1956; Deep Jweley Jai, 1959), many lavishly mounted scenes of windswept expanses, fluttering curtains, incense and mnemonic objects such as a bunch of tube-roses, countered by two abrupt eruptions of realist outdoor locations (when Aloke first recovers his memory, and when Roma follows him into his Calcutta office). The film was adapted from Mervyn LeRoy’s Random Harvest (1942). It also says the film is 162 minutes long, so this version is missing a whole lot. One long missing part - probably a whole reel of film (15 minutes or so) - occurs after Uttam and Suchitra marry and she sings a cut off version of the main song (Tumi Je Amar). They begin their married life but then he's in another accident where he forgets everything that occurred after the first accident and goes home to Kolkota to resume his previous life. We pick it up again when he's about to head home. Another missing part occurs after Suchitra follows him to Kolkota, finds him, and goes to his office. There's a break in the plot - probably another whole reel - and then she's been hired as a nanny and encounters him in the middle of the night. And the Hemant Kumar song is also missing. It's disconcerting but the film is haunting, nonetheless.