Few Hindi films have lodged themselves in the collective memory quite like Ijazat, and fewer still linger in the mind the way its melodies do, long after the screen has gone dark. Directed by Gulzar — a filmmaker whose visual language remains unmatched — the film unfolds with a patience that modern cinema has largely forgotten. There is no urgency here, no impatience with the audience, none of the narrative shorthand that demands a story justify itself in its opening minutes. Gulzar trusts the silences as much as the dialogue.
The film opens on a river winding through the mountains, accompanied by a song that speaks of a small story, filling a valley the way rain fills the monsoon — and, without quite knowing why, filling the heart and welling up in the eyes. It is in this unhurried, almost meditative register that we first encounter Mohinder (Naseeruddin Shah), arriving dishevelled at an unnamed railway station in the middle of a downpour. A woman notices him — and works visibly hard to avoid being noticed in return, hiding behind a magazine with a gesture so understated it says more than dialogue could. Fate, inevitably, throws them together anyway, and the audience is made to feel like an accidental witness to something deeply private. A single look passes between them, and the past reasserts itself: in a darkened room, Mohinder develops a photograph of himself and Sudha (Rekha). The film cuts back to the present, where Sudha wordlessly hands him a set of keys — clearly a familiar ritual — and in that one gesture we understand the quiet, proprietary claim they still hold over one another.
Excavating the Past
Mohinder retreats to the bathroom, and the narrative opens outward into memory. We meet Daadu, played with warmth by Shammi Kapoor — a Brahmin by conviction but liberal by temperament, strict without ever being unyielding, the family's moral centre without being its tyrant. Mohinder, we learn, has spent two years living with Maya, and it is to Sudha — not Daadu — that he first confesses this. He is direct about it, holding nothing back. Sudha, in turn, urges him to be equally honest with Daadu, certain that the old man will understand.
Sudha herself had been raised by Daadu, who arranged her betrothal to Mohinder. Her mother, meanwhile, is drawn as one of countless anxious, dependent women we recognise from our own lives — women whose entire sense of security rests on one figure, in this case, Daadu. When a desperate Mohinder finally goes looking for Maya, true to her name, she has already slipped away. He returns, resolved to build the life Daadu had always envisioned for him, and Sudha — for reasons the film leaves unspoken — agrees to take him back.
A Marriage Haunted
What follows is Sudha's quiet, competent effort to build a home: a tastefully kept house, everything in its place, everything idyllic on the surface. But beneath that order, Maya is everywhere. Sudha finds her first in Mohinder's wallet — and here Gulzar stages one of the film's most quietly devastating scenes, in a railway waiting room, where Sudha checks the photograph inside without the audience ever being told whose face she finds. Maya's belongings and letters remain scattered through the house, and Sudha oscillates between composure and vulnerability, at times honest with herself, at other times consumed by an obsession with her husband's former lover. The trouble is that Maya isn't really a former anything — she is a shadow still stretching across their present.
Mohinder tries, in his own limited way, to make the marriage work, and Sudha tries to release her jealousy, choosing instead to live moment by moment — katra katra. But life, as it tends to, has other plans, and all three are tested past what their resolve can bear. It is a very ordinary kind of tragedy: people swept along by circumstance, blameless yet unable to stop themselves from losing something they value.
Three Portraits
Mohinder is a talented, free-spirited man, a little careless but never unlikeable, carrying a charm that survives even his weaknesses. Over the course of the film he visibly ages — the unruly curls thin out, the forehead lines deepen, the cheeks hollow, diabetes sets in, and the old sparkle in his eyes fades. He is a man suspended between his past and his present, gambling with his future, and forever leaning on Sudha to rescue him from the very messes he creates. Of the three, his is the most difficult character to resolve, and perhaps the most human for it.
Sudha is conservative and precise, someone who takes her responsibilities seriously and recites her daily rituals without fail. She married Mohinder with full knowledge of Maya's existence, only to discover that accepting an idea and living beside its reality are two entirely different things. She feels for Maya even as she cannot make room for her — because this was never really a contest between equals. It was, simply, wife against girlfriend, and no wife could be expected to navigate that gracefully. It is Sudha, in the end, who breaks the deadlock, recognising her own limits and what she actually needs. Every detail of her presentation — her clothes, her hair, her jewellery, her bearing — is exact.
Maya is impulsive and undefined, a girl without a plan, unwilling to be tied down by any of it. Something in her past — never fully explained — seems to have soured her on marriage altogether, driving her repeated flights from Mohinder. What she actually needed was patience, stability, a home — and her life offered none of it.
Craft in the Details
The narrative moves non-linearly, dense with symbolism, and every performance is precisely calibrated. Gulzar's lyrics are given room to breathe within the songs, and R.D. Burman's compositions match that patience note for note. The film's use of props and lighting reinforces the sense that we are not watching a performance so much as glimpsing something through a half-open window: the wallet, the wardrobe that goes from full to empty, the motorcycle, candles and the shadows they throw. Sudha's domesticity and Maya's restlessness sit in constant, quiet contrast, with Mohinder helpless between the two.
Costume becomes its own form of characterisation. Mohinder first appears in a threadbare, unkempt jacket — denim, boots, a mop of curls, a mustache — every inch the drifter. At home with Sudha, he settles into a kurta-pajama in the evenings; with Maya, he reverts to loose jeans and cut-off T-shirts, the clothing itself charting how thoroughly each woman reshapes him, and how little control he has over his own shifting self.
Sudha is always immaculate — starched cotton sarees with broad, defined borders, narrow necklines, her mangalsutra resting visibly at her collar. Her hair stays tied up except in private, with her husband; even her bindi sits fixed precisely between her brows, never allowed to drift. Every choice signals a woman who lives by clearly drawn boundaries, whose personality — like her palette of strong, earthy colours — admits no blurring, however much she occasionally wishes it could.
Maya, by contrast, drifts through the film in muslin and chiffon, drawn to airier, Western silhouettes that mirror her unmoored, undecided nature. She wants desperately to belong to someone, yet cannot bring herself to commit — her loose hair and long scarves lending her an intrigue that Sudha can't help but be pulled toward. The two women's wardrobes sit at opposite poles, just as their temperaments do.
A Story That Stays
Every performance here feels lived-in rather than acted, which is precisely why the story earns belief. Ijazat is, at its heart, a small, character-driven tale — ek chhoti si kahaani — but it fills the viewer completely, leaving behind an aftertaste worth sitting with long after the credits roll.
