Lal Patthar - Jungian Dream
Thoughts On: Lal Patthar (Red Stone, 1971)
A haunted old man tells of how he lost his throne and mind to love.
A tremendous classic of the highest melodrama. A masterpiece of Jungian narrative and psychology, Lal Patthar, is about a man - a king - trapped in the shadow of his unconscious. Undeveloped in spirit for the metaphysical loss of his mother and father, he grows into a man possessed at first by his animus; a destructive man of the jungle. As this creature, he finds himself a tigress and makes her his mistress. He cannot tame her, nor see her humanity - let alone his own; he has not the patience, seeking only inebriation. Such is a consequence of his denial of his father and the imago he represents within his unconscious soul. As this split man grows old and weary, he is possessed again - but this time by his anima. He dreams of his mother in heaven, and finds an angel upon her light. But he cannot trust her, nor see himself to be hers; her humanity, as his again, unrecognised in the shadow of his soul. In such, he comes across a man who is spiritually integrated, a man better than himself in control of his anima and animus attached to she he makes his queen. Torn apart by his lack of self-integration in face of the man he cannot become, the king falls mad under the possession of his anima, the imago his wife, a queen - an extension of his angelic mother - representing a symbol he dare not approach in all his unworthiness. And so the king manifests destruction, spiralling forever into the shadow of his supreme meaning, tethered to reality only by the tigress he sees not has become tame; his curse as a lost child born to a father he rejects and a mother he could never stand to be the son of.
A tale spun with pure brilliance of archetypal understanding, with sumptuous songs and vibrant cinematography, Lal Patthar is another new personal favourite and one of the most brilliant classics of 70s Indian cinema I have come across. I am intrigued to one day see the Bengali original from the 60s of which this is a remake.
