Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959)

People are voting emotionally.

Gripping story with well-crafted characters

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

If a director dares to keep a title re-using the famous title phrase of a classic Guru Dutt film in a questionable comic manner then he himself is inviting some harsh avoidable criticism from all corners. And further when the film turns out to be so amateurishly executed with not even a single impressive scene in its thankfully short duration then he should be ready to feel the burns even more severely for the immature product offered to his paying audience.Giving nothing much to write about in details, KAAGAZ KE FOOLS actually begins stepping on the wrong foot right in its first sequence itself when you find both Mughda Godse and Saurabh Shukla speaking in all forced Punjabi dialogues with a pretty bad accent. In fact the hamming acts beginning with the first scene only painfully continue till the end along with many immature sequences revolving around a decent writer and his struggle to get his works published. The story doesn't make any sense even when the film gets over and one keeps guessing that what exactly the team led by directorAnil Kumar Chaudhary wanted to convey in their film.The technical department of the project doesn't come up with anything worth writing too including the cinematography, music, background score or editing. Plus apart from the sincere 'Social Writer' act from Vinay Pathak, every other participant in the supporting cast hams more and acts less with a highly artificial and irritating Punjabi feel. In other words, a film loses all the possibilities of making any kind of fair impression on the viewers if it has some cruelly miscast actors such as Mugdha Godse and the lady playing her mother speaking many poorly written dialogues trying to create the 'Delhi Punjabi Mood' as seen in the masterpiece VICKY DONOR. Raima Sen as the sex-worker also fails to make any kind of connect due to her badly projected character and same is the case with many others in the film adding to the poor show.However mentioning the only impactful dialogue in the film, it looked like something directly taken from a Black and White classic of the past, when a friend tells Vinay Pathak, "There is an old saying that when LAKSHMI is coming into your house then keep SARASWATI aside and don't let her interfere in the proceedings." And replying to it Vinay says, "My grandfather also used to teach that when LAKSHMI is coming into your house then take an extra care that it doesn't result in ignoring or disrespecting SARASWATI pushing her in a corner."Nevertheless ending on another important note, its really strange that at one end many talented directors keep searching for the people who can invest in their projects giving them the much deserving chance. But on the other such avoidable scripts somehow find the way to reach the silver screen unfortunately. As a matter of fact, its these kind of poor, directionless and non-performing attempts only that make it more difficult for all the upcoming small, experimental projects and their talented makers.

Everyone especially my mummy used to tell me as how great is this picture but I realised it today after watching it that none of the adjectives used in the appreciation of this film is an exaggeration. It is a milestone movie as far as Indian Hindi Cinema is concerned. Every aspect (acting, direction, music, cinematography, script ) of this movie is top notch. It's very few of those Indian pictures in which melodrama has no place. Pyasaa, another master piece by Guru Dutt, was my all time favourite movie but after watching Kagaz Kee Phool, I have no option than to downgrade Pyasaa to number 2.A must watch.........highly recommended...

Why is Guru Dutt hailed as one of the all time best directors in the world? See this film and you'll get an answer. Guru Dutt never got his due from the audience or the critics when he was alive. After he died, he was suddenly hailed as this best thing to have happened to Hindi film industry. And today, he is universally regarded as one of the best Hindi film directors. This film too is resplendent with that same irony, hypocrisy and tragedy. There are films and then there is this. 'Kaagaz Ke Phool' is Guru Dutt's extremely personal and almost poetic take on the trials and tribulations of a life of fame and glamor; and especially the aftermath of it. Guru Dutt plays a successful director Ajay Sinha who is looking for a new face to cast as the leading lady in his next film. In the midst of all this, he has a strained marriage wherein his wife leaves him to live with her parents along with their daughter. On a certain rainy day, he meets a girl (Waheeda Rehman). They meet again in the studio. Immediately,Guru Dutt realizes that Waheeda's is THE face he had been looking for and promptly casts her in his next film. Eventually he falls in love ith her but she doesn't reciprocate. Meanwhile, he isn't allowed to eet his beloved daughter too through a court order. As a last straw, his next film is a colossal failure and he suddenly finds that the ones who pretended to be his well-wishers and friends now seem to hate and ignore him. Thus Waheeda, his discovery, goes on to become a successful star while he begins his downward spiral into the deep darkness of ignominy. Subsequently and ironically, after many years, he dies on the same director's chair It is not a perfect film by any means. The screenplay is sometimes indulgent and probably isn't as good as say Guru Dutt's 'Pyaasa' (his other classic). Plus, the whole track involving Johnny Walker is somewhat irrelevant to the film and hence could have been shortened. However, it was incidentally, India's first film to be shot in Cinemascope and hence makes good use of technique but essentially KPK remains a very humane film which moves us without being preachy or overtly sentimental. SD Burman's haunting music and Kaifi Azmi's poignant lyrics add to the mood of this filmIronically, the film was a commercial disaster upon its release (eerily similar to the protagonist Sinha's last film). So, the claims of it being an Autobiographical film also started being made. But, I think it is a case of life imitating art than vice- versa. Having said that it is a fact that Guru Dutt died shortly after making this film and thus KKP remains his last masterpiece and I think its commercial failure can be attributed to one of those rare occasions when the AUDIENCE got it wrong as the film may have been ahead of its time and has since been widely considered to be one of the best and most important films made in India The obvious comparisons with Fellini's 8 ½ are to be expected but to my mind they are unwarranted. Both were different films made for very different audiences. This is a great film in its own right- one of the best Hindi films ever- a bona-fide masterpiece by the prodigiously talented albeit flawed genius called Guru Dutt

A huge disappointment! Dutt's Pyaasa is one of my all-time favorite films; few have moved me so greatly. I didn't think he could top that one, but I also didn't think that his next film would fall so low. I mean, it's a fairly good film, but it really failed to resonate with me. Where Pyaasa was an archetypical plot that aspired to myth, Kaagaz Ke Phool is more along the lines of melodrama. Completely lost is the previous film's visual and aural poetry. The story of Paper Flowers concerns a film director, played by Dutt, who discovers a poor woman, Waheeda Rehman, to star in his new film. The two of them develop a special relationship that approaches love, but is not quite there. Then the director's daughter, Baby Naaz, enters the picture. The director's wife separated (not divorced) from him because her upper class family did not approve of a man involved in the film industry. But the daughter cannot stand to see her father fall for another woman, so she convinces Rehman to quit after the film is done. Disaster ensues for everyone. For this film to work better, I think the characters really needed to be better developed. They are mostly pretty generic. The daughter especially needed a more fully written role, because she basically ruins two lives and we only hastily see how she is affected by this. The movie pulls together a bit by its end, and its last couple of sequences are good, but nothing comes close to the cinematic magic of Pyaasa. Even the songs are far below Bollywood standards; they're too few and far between, and they tend to sound alike. Sometimes I wasn't sure if one song was a reprise of another. I liked a few of them, especially those sung by the actress character (sung, that is, by Geeta Dutt, as the actors tend not to sing in Bollywood). 7/10.