Shabana Azmi

Smita Patil

Naseeruddin Shah

Amrish Puri

Kulbhushan Kharbanda

Saeed Jaffrey

Sreela Majumdar

Neena Gupta

Gita Siddharth

Aditya Bhattacharya

Om Puri

Harish Patel

Soni Razdan

Ila Arun

Anita Kanwar

Ratna Pathak Shah

Sunila Pradhan

Pankaj Kapur

K.K. Raina

Satish Kaushik

Annu Kapoor

Khokha Mukherji

Athar Nawaaz

Raj Narasimha Rao

Aslam Farshuri

Sita Ram

Swadesh Paul

Milena Marques

A. Laxmi

Monisha Banerjee

Aruna

Abdul Aziz

Azim Aziz

Bela

Lila Bai

G. S. Deshmukh

Quddus Ahmed

Murli

Ashay Chitre

Shyam Benegal

Jethu Maliramani

Raj Pius

Vijay Bhope

Mir Taqi Mir

Hari Roy

Manish Bhatt

Samir Chandra

V. Govekar

Ajit Vengurlekar

K.B. Kamat

Dilip Bhopale

Paltu Sharma

Bahadur Shah Zafar

Ghulam Abbas

John

M. K. Shah

Uttam Singh

Jagdish Mohite

Deepak

Hemant Bhagat

Sudarshan Dheer

Kalpana Lajmi

Asha Bhosle

Raj Khatri

Kersi Lord

Mallika Samuel

Joy Roy

Makhoom Mohiuddin

Silloo Fali Variava

Bhishum M. J. Bijlani

Miriam Samuel

Mangesh Desai

Hitendra Ghosh

Vanraj Bhatia

Dev Benegal

Saba Zaidi

Bhanudas Divakar

M. H. Kalsikar

Satyadev Dubey

Dayal Nihalani

Nitish Roy

M. A. Bhatia

Sarwar Danda

Priti Sagar

Ashok Mehta

S.R. Shekhar

Freni M. Variava

Lalit M. Bijlani

Shama Zaidi

Comedy

Drama

Romance

मंडी

Blaze Film Enterprises

India

हिन्दी

The Market Place

Based on a short story from an Urdu short story called "Anandi" by Ghulam Abbas, Mandi is presented as a black comedy about a group of prostitutes, led by Rukminibai, who struggle against the 'morality-police' forces in the city that want them thrown out, and their brothel destroyed to make room for 'development'.

This film is among Shyam Benegal's best work. Benegal assembles some highly professional actors, with Shabana Azmi excelling as the crude, selfish, yet likable "Bai" (madam) of the "Khota" (brothel), Smita Patil as the beautiful, gentle-looking, but rebellious Zeenat. The movie rests on their strong performances, and also on Naseeruddin Shah's, whose character reveals a lot about the 'khota' and about the relationships between its inhabitants. The relationship between Rukminibai and Tungrus is deceptively simple, for underneath all their interactions there is a deep concern they share for each other. This is why we see Tungrus being excessively critical of her during the opening scenes; he worries for her.

The relationship between Rukminibai and Zeenat is one of the main focuses of this movie; Rukminibai loves Zeenat like a daughter, but feels threatened when Zeenat wants to assert her freedom, and becomes addicted to 'taking care' of Zeenat and keeping her under her control. She eventually alienates herself from all the women who work for her, and her seemingly strong personality disintegrates, and right when she is on the verge of breaking down, and when the possibility of starting afresh and maybe beginning a reflective process of self-recovery appears, she tragically falls into the cycle of selfish-love/'motherly' control again.

Other interesting facets of this movie include the 'social worker', Shanti Devi, who is concerned about the moral degradation of the city, and fights the unrelenting prostitutes to claim back lost honor. There is an especially emotionally frustrating scene where Shanti Devi speaks about how a woman should be respected and not sold, while addressing a crowd, and proclaims that she will persuade her 'sisters' to give up this lowly work. Some prostitutes respond with, "And where will we get our bread?" Shanti Devi, the great, compassionate womens-rights espouser coldly says, "Bread isn't everything in life." One of the women casually reply with bursting frustration: "you must get it for free." 

The prostitutes' fate feebly dangles in between these powerful forces--on the one side, there is the moral, 'feminist', social-worker, who is so superficially attached to her 'cause' that she cannot relate to real women and their struggles, and on the other, there is the powerful industrialist, Gupta, who buys their brothel with the intention of razing it down, but continues to mislead them.

Other female representations include Gupta's extremely-inhibited, mentally-restrained, child-like daughter, for whom he strategically arranges a marriage with the son of another powerful figure who also ties-in with the prostitutes in another manner. Aditya Bhattacharya plays the innocent, young Sushil, engaged to Gupta's daughter, but attracted to the liveliness and beauty he perceives in the unpretentious Zeenat. His attraction to her soon proves to be problematic, however.

This movie very subtly points out how morally-lacking these surrounding forces are, and how the prostitutes, who seem more real and bound by morals than the other, rather snobbish, 'respectable' people, ultimately are forced to take the blame for 'moral degradation' and are forced to leave the city (their struggles don't end there). This theme is at the heart of the recurring song (Rukminibai hums it often, and also asks Zeenat to sing it), "Zabaane Badalte Hain Har Aan Khubaan.. Yeh Sab Kuch Hai Bigdi Zamaane Ki Baatein."

The Market Place

производственные компании

Актёрский состав 39:

Recommended films

Trailer

Sequels and Prequels