If there is a singular thread that binds the historic partnership of screenwriters Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, it is that a mother’s love is eternal. Through their enigmatic storytelling, these men repositioned the landscape of Hindi cinema in the ’70s from the brooding romantic to the borderline oedipal ‘Angry Young Man’. Their simplistic declaration, “Mere paas maa hain,” delivered through the eyes and voice of Shashi Kapoor in Deewar (1975) continues to reverberate almost half a century later, signifying that if you’re lucky enough, this is indeed enough.
In a tender portrait of the epochal writing duo titled Angry Young Men released on Prime Video this week, long-time editor and debutant director Namrata Rao lays her gentle feminine gaze on the creators of these wrathful heroes who themselves lost their mothers at significantly young ages. Through Rao’s lens, these men are anything but angry, although the viewer doesn’t see them in the same frame until the very end—a conscious decision made by Rao and her diligent editor Geeta Singh. Salim-Javed’s split of 1982, which rattled the film industry, hasn’t been dramatised in the three-part series either.
Instead, the camera acts like a mirror for their deep-rooted respect for one another, which has endured even after all these years. “I wasn’t interested in a hagiography. As a woman, my whole curiosity was what led them to make the characters they made, and then paint a portrait of them as artists,.