Pakeezah's Decade-Long Production Was Halted by Its Star and Director's Divorce
Pakeezah (1972) was written, directed and produced by Kamal Amrohi, and by the time it reached cinemas it had been in production for more than a decade, halted by the breakdown of his marriage to Meena Kumari. Kumari, the Hindi film star who was married to Amrohi, plays Sahibjaan, a Lucknow courtesan painfully caught between desire and social convention.
In the BFI's account of the film, the push and pull of that relationship seems embedded in its obsessions with desire, death and entrapment — a reading of the finished film rather than a documented intention behind it.
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A shoot broken off by a divorce is not the tidy story of an auteur's vision; it is closer to an excavation site, where the marriage's push and pull shows up in a film about desire and entrapment.
The marriage is one frame. The other is that Kumari died shortly before release, an untimely death that gave the film a special aura and helped make it a box-office hit — audiences may have been buying a tragedy as much as a movie.