This late 1980s thriller was a rare non-horror film from the Ramsay Brothers and while predictable, and, at times even insipid, it featured an A-list cast that interestingly managed to break some stereotypes while playing to the gallery.
In Bollywood, any actor’s ease in repeating the same role or being typecast and yet adding a tinge of something different often becomes a yardstick to gauge brilliance. It’s very rare that a successfully typecast actor gets a chance at doing something different (remember Iftekhar playing the villain ‘Black Cobra’ in Khel Khel Mein (1975) and rarer still for a star. Another variation of this very typical Bollywood trait is to cast actors that suit the role, but sometimes a film comes along that uses all the standard formulas but ends up achieving a different result. Although largely forgotten today, Khoj (1989), a late 1980s thriller and mystery film, was a semi-disappointment even when it released but in spite of all its shortcomings, it remains an enjoyable experience thanks to actors that were perfectly typecast and still managed to break the pattern.
Khoj starts with a mild-mannered businessman, Ravi Kapoor (Rishi Kapoor) flying back to India for an important business meeting in the middle of a vacation with his loving wife and daughter in Nepal. Ravi returns immediately to Kathmandu but finds that his wife is missing. He looks all over, tries speaking to the police and even serenades the hollowness caused by her sudden disappearance, but nothing seems to give. The seemingly callous police inspector Balbir (Naseeruddin Shah) even suggests that perhaps his wife must have walked out on him. Just when Ravi is about to lose his sanity a priest Father Anthony (Danny Denzongpa) calls him and informs that his missing wife, Anita (Kimi Katkar), has been found in the church. When Ravi reaches the church to meet Anita he doesn’t recognize her and claims that she isn’t his wife. While Ravi keeps on harping that this woman isn’t his wife, everyone seems to recognize her and everything in Ravi’s own house such as photos, etc. suggest that Anita is, in fact, his missing wife. Even his own daughter and the family dog, too, recognizes Anita, but Ravi refuses to budge. What is it that Ravi knows that convinces him that Anita is an imposter?
By the time Khoj released in the late 1980s the old world order was changing and even though Kapoor enjoyed hits regularly he had reached an end of sorts as far as his glorious run as a romantic lead went. Kapoor was perhaps the only actor who managed to carve a place for himself in the shadow of the 1970s action phase, the Amitabh Bachchan one man industry years, the arrival of the next generation of star kids such as Kumar Gaurav, Sunny Deol and Sanjay Dutt, the rise of Anil Kapoor and even Aamir and Salman Khans, who were redefining the lover boy template. In spite of all this Kapoor very rarely got roles that could give him a shot at breaking the image that he had been typecast in and Khoj, while using his well-established screen image as a McGuffin.
At the time of its release, Khoj garnered some praise for its taut screenplay, which while highly reminiscent of Chase a Crooked Shadow (1958), where a rich heiress refuses to accept a man everyone’s convinced is her missing brother, managed to keep you hooked in spite of pointless songs. Additionally Khoj is also inspired by a TV movie called One of My Wives is Missing (1976) in which the policeman’s character played by Shah is more prominent, and piqued the other and somewhat ‘truer’ inspiration of Chase a Crooked Shadow, Dhuaan (1981) where Mithun Chakraborty returns as Rakhee Gulzar’s lost brother that missed the mark simply because of Rakhee’s bored performance. The other actors in Khoj such as Naseeruddin Shah, Danny Denzongpa, Kimi Katkar all have author backed roles and well-defined nuances, which after a while border between passable and over the top, but the film rarely suffers thanks to Kapoor’s earnestness. His haggard husband resonates with some of his popular roles from that era especially his family drama series with director Kalpataru such as Ghar Ghar Ki Kahani (1988) and Bade Ghar Ki Beti (1989) and if one were to forget the mystery angle then Khoj’s Ravi Kapoor shows the origins of Shekhar Gupta in Damini (1993), one of Rishi Kapoor’s best performances.
- Gautam Chintamani is the author of the best-selling Dark Star: The Loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna (2014) and Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak – The Film That Revived Hindi Cinema (2016) | Tweet him – http://www.twitter.com/gchintamani
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- Osianama - http://osianama.com/film-titles/khoj-1989?search=Khoj%201989
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