This week, Guest Star Allan Mott writes about a Hindi adaptation of The Parent Trap!

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There are a lot of things to love about Bollywood cinema, but for me its chief appeal has always been the irony of how its impulse to be as commercial and audience-friendly as possible allows it to achieve its own unique authenticity. Rather than feel like cynical pandering, this desire to please comes across as a gesture of hospitality in which the audience is more an invited guest than a paying customer. But it’s also fair to say that as nobly intended as this impulse often is, it can lead the filmmakers into forcing their stories into some wild directions to indulge what they imagine their guests may want to see. And in many cases the films where this is most obvious are Bollywood remakes of non-Bollywood films.

As a western viewer, noting the often dramatic changes between a Bollywood remake and the Hollywood original can be baffling in a way that is as often exciting as it is confusing. “Wait, are they actually going there with this?” you find yourself thinking as the story you know suddenly veers into a direction you never even considered possible–and then veers even further than that. For me, one of the more fascinating examples of this is Rajiv Mehra’s Pyar Ke Do Pal (1986), an unofficial remake of David Swift’s The Parent Trap (1961) that cares a lot less about the story of two identical twins who learn they were separated at birth and attempt to reunite their estranged parents, and is instead much more preoccupied with their parents’ story.

The basis of both films, Erich Kästner’s children’s novel Das doppelte Lottchen, has a long history of film and TV adaptations. Which makes sense since he originally conceived the plot as a film treatment in 1942 before novelizing it in 1949. He actually wrote the first film version (under its original novel title) for German audiences, which was released in 1950. A year later saw the release of a Japanese adaptation of his book called Hibari no komoriuta (Hibari’s Lullaby) and in 1953 the novel was adapted in Britain by Emeric Pressburger as Twice Upon a Time. 

But none of these three films had much, if any, impact in the United States or Canada, so for many North American viewers the 1961 Walt Disney adaptation served as their introduction to Kästner’s story.* Titled The Parent Trap, the adaptation was conceived as a chance to capitalize on the success of Pollyanna (1960).which first paired writer/director David Swift with child star Hayley Mills. While the three previous adaptations had cast real life twins as the sisters, the studio decided Mills’ newfound bankability justified the technical challenges presented by casting her in both roles. It was a canny decision that led to the film hitting the 6th spot on the year-end box office list (behind two other Disney smashes, 101 Dalmations and The Absent-Minded Professor, which ranked 1st and 5th). 

Given the longstanding tradition of lost-twin/doppleganger narratives in South Asian cinema, it isn’t surprising that The Parent Trap’s success led to many different adaptations in India’s various “-woods.” First came the Tamil-language remake Kuzhandaiyum Deivamum (1965), which was enough of a hit to inspire the Telagu Leta Manasulu (1966), the Hindi Do Kaliyaan (1967), the Malayalam Sethubandhanam (1974), and the Kannada-language production of Makkala Bhagya (1976). These adaptations differed from the American version by investing a lot more attention on the backstory of the parents and how they ended up separated. In Do Kaliyaan, the sisters don’t actually meet until around the halfway mark of the 163-minute movie.

 Pyar Ke Do Pal (hereafter, PKPD) is also much more concerned with the parents’ story than the American film, but while Do Kaliyaan essentially splits the story into two acts–before twins and after twins–PKDP follows the basic structure of David Swift’s script until it doesn’t. And the “doesn’t” is where things take such a turn that PKDP ceases to be a (perhaps overly weepy) family film and becomes instead something very different entirely.

Growing up, my big issue with Swift’s film was my annoyance over how everyone just accepted that the decision to separate the twins and hide their existence from each other was the right choice at the time it was made. The inherent selfishness of this choice and the way it treats two individuals as chattel to be divided up like any other household item has always made it difficult for me to enjoy the film’s “happy” ending. Add to that, the fact that when the film does explore the reason for the parents’ divorce, it trivializes actual violent, abusive behavior and turns it into a joke. We learn, after we see Maureen O’Hara punch Brian Keith in the face, that he struggled with her “Irish temper” and this violence is what led to their separation. In the 1998 remake with Lindsay Lohan, which often uses Swift’s script word for word, this is slightly changed to an incident where Natasha Richardson once angrily threw something at Dennis Quaid. In both American films, this violent behavior is played for laughs rather than for dramatic stakes–it’s used as an indicator of the character’s passion rather than serving as a major red flag that these people should not be together and that it makes no sense for them to reunite without any evidence that they have resolved the issues that were so severe they caused them to separate two sisters for over a decade.

PKPD completely ignores this part of the original film and instead puts all the blame for the separation on a gold digger so monstrous she makes Joanna Barnes and Elaine Hendrix look like Disney Princesses in comparison. In the 1961 and 1998 films, Barnes and Hendrix exist to give the twins a ticking clock for their mission. The threat of them as evil stepmothers primed to send the girls away to boarding school also helps to take focus away from the concern of reuniting two people who obviously should not be together. But in PKDP, Simple Kapadia’s Rajni goes far beyond those films’ standard fortune hunters and is transformed into a creature of such malicious evil that she seems spawned more from a horror movie than a family film. Instead of simply taking advantage of the situation for her benefit, the film spends a lot of time showing how she was responsible for it all happening in the first place.

In the beginning the changes made to the story by PKPD’s filmmakers have been obvious, but cosmetic. Instead of twin 13-year-old girls, PKPD gives us twin 8-year-old boys, Sunil and Anil (Ashutosh Thakur). Instead of opening at the camp where they meet, it opens with Sunil and his possessive, rage-filled father at the ranch. Instead of taking pains to show how their different upbringings have shaped their personalities, the film presents the twins as essentially the exact same kid in two different bodies. Instead of both parents being people of privilege, Ashok (Disco Dancer icon Mithun Chakraborty) is independently wealthy, while his wife Geeta (actor turned politician Jaya Prada) is an orphan whose parents were killed by terrorists before she was taken in by a kind friend of her father’s. It’s only when Rajni is introduced into the plot nearly an hour into the film that things take a very hard and surprising turn.

Take a breath, because this is going to get really complicated.

In a flashback memory, Geeta relates to Sunil, who she thinks is Anil, how she became estranged from his father and we see her and Rajni run into each other at the airport. Childhood friends, Rajni expresses admiration for Geeta’s success, but insists she’s not envious of her. “I’ll never be able to get my hands on your husband,” she says in a clear bit of foreshadowing.

At Rajni’s flat, Geeta learns that her friend is engaged to a wealthy older doctor who doesn’t know she is pregnant with the child of her lover. If Rajni’s fiance learns about the pregnancy, the wedding will be called off and she’ll be destitute. She’s decided to get an abortion, but needs Geeta’s help to find a doctor to perform the procedure.  Geeta believes abortion is a sin, but wants to help her friend, so she arranges for an appointment at the local clinic. Their plan takes a turn when it turns out Rajni’s fiance is also at the clinic for a checkup. Unable to tell him the truth, Rajni tells him and his doctor that Geeta is the one getting the abortion because she already has twins, which her fiance thinks is wonderful news. “In this age, every woman should think like you do,” he tells her.

Rajni’s fiance is so weirdly thrilled over the idea of Geeta getting an abortion that he shows up after the procedure is performed on Rajni to give Geeta flowers, forcing the two women to quickly switch places in Rajni’s hospital bed. Things take a further turn back at Rajni’s flat when her lover shows up and threatens to send her fiance the love letters she wrote unless she gives him 50,000 rupees. Rajni doesn’t have the money, but her lover sees the diamond on Geeta’s hand and tells them he’ll accept it in place of the cash. At first Geeta refuses because it’s her wedding ring, but since she’s a saint, she takes it off her finger and hands it over to him. Geeta’s generosity immediately comes back to haunt her when Ashok runs into Rajni’s fiance’s doctor at a party. The doctor congratulates him on his wife’s sensible choice to have the abortion and later on that evening Ashok confronts her about this news. Geeta tells him what really happened, but Ashok doesn’t believe her and goes to the clinic, where he finds out the abortion was performed on a patient with her name. Driven to drink away his feelings, Ashok coincidentally sits next to Rajni’s blackmailing lover at a bar and sees his wife’s wedding ring on the man’s finger. When he asks how the man got it, the evil jerk tells him he got it as a present for keeping a secret. Ashok comes back home convinced that Geeta has cheated on him, gotten an abortion and given away her ring to silence her lover. Geeta tearfully phones Rajni and begs her to tell Ashok what really happened, but Rajni–-now married–-is in the same room as her husband and in the evil bitchiest of evil bitch moves calls the friend who risked everything to help her “a liar, a fraud and a betrayer.”

Betrayed by her friend, Geeta is banished by Ashok from their home and forced to move in with her kindly adopted brother. The film doesn’t really justify why Ashok, in his fury, allows her to take Anil with her beyond the fact the film’s premise demands that she gets one of the twins too.

It’s worth pointing out that PKPD, at 152 minutes, is only 23 minutes longer than The Parent Trap, since this whole sequence runs about 20 minutes. Built upon a series of credulity-straining coincidences and bizarre choices, it’s virtually impossible to watch this part of the movie without your mouth wide open. Beyond just the almost self-parodic brazenness of the melodrama, it’s impossible to forget that all of this is happening in a FREAKING REMAKE OF THE PARENT TRAP!!!!!!

And, honestly, PKDP would be worth checking out if that was its only major change made to the plot, but somehow the filmmakers manage to up the ante even more with an ending that truly goes to places no sensible person would ever be able to predict. After the flashback has ended, we (mostly) get back to the plot we’re used to with a now single Rajni taking on the Barnes/Hendrix role of the gold digger who’s got her claws into the twins’ dad. But unlike the Disney film, PKDP draws out the final revelation that the twins have switched places to near the end, which seems to be a decision made to limit the amount of split screen work required. Though the filmmakers never acknowledged their movie was a remake,** the fact that they went the splitscreen route instead of just hiring real twins definitely gives their game away. Their choice might have made more sense if Ashutosh Thakur was as compelling a child actor as Hayley Mills, but he’s easily the worst part of the movie. Whiny and annoying, he makes it impossible to tell which character is which in any given scene and instead of rooting for the twins, I ended up only wanting them to succeed for the benefit of poor Geeta, who really just has been fucked over 1000 different ways by this point. (I haven’t even gotten to the subplot where she’s tortured by her evil sister-in-law.)

Since I’ve already blown past my word count limit (sorry Carol!), I’ll skip all the machinations that get to the ending and just tell you what you need to know. Rajni and her evil lover are still a couple and they’ve kidnapped Sunil and Geeta. Afraid that Geeta will expose their treachery to Ashok, they decide to permanently ruin her reputation by forcing her to film a porn scene while Sunil hangs by his feet above a brick fire pit filled with burning coal embers.

Family movie!

Fortunately, Anil reveals his identity  to Ashok and convinces his dad to hide while he confronts Rajni, who threatens to kill him while his dad is listening. Now that Ashok knows how evil his hot girlfriend is, he drives a van into the warehouse where Geeta and Sunil are being kept and manages to keep Sunil from falling into the fire pit at the last possible second. Action and mayhem ensues. The twins tie up and smack Rajni around and tell her to beg their mother for forgiveness. Geeta being Geeta, she grants it and tells the twins to untie her. Rajni being Rajni, she grabs a gun as soon as her hands are free and is about to shoot Geeta when the police arrive and shoot her instead. She falls face first into the fire pit while her lover is electrocuted after being punched by Ashok into a fuse box. Instead of dying, she reveals her face is badly burnt enough for her to be a villain in a Ramsey Brothers movie.

Still haven’t gotten to the kicker yet.

With everything seemingly resolved and Rajni’s villainy fully exposed, Ashok and Geeta are still reluctant to reunite (for very good reasons), so the twins decide to force their hand by standing over the fire pit and threatening to jump into it if the two of them refuse to patch things up.Forced to choose between getting back together or watching their sons die horribly, they make the only choice they can make and that’s your happy ending.

By a funny coincidence, the day before I watched PKDP for the first time, I watched Yeh Dillagi (1994) the Hindi remake of Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954) with Kajol in the role made famous by Audrey Hepburn. In that film, Saif Ali Khan gets the happy ending he wants by similarly threatening to unalive himself unless his parents abide by his wishes. Because of this there was a brief period where you could have convinced me that every Bollywood remake of a Hollywood film ended with its protagonists threatening to commit suicide unless they got what they wanted.

Pyar Ke Do Pal  is a must watch for anyone who admires how far South Asian filmmakers are willing to go to give you a good time. Sure, it doesn’t make sense and is often hilariously absurd, but rather than laughing at it, I found myself admiring its chutzpah and willingness to sacrifice any semblance of verisimilitude for an experience I literally cannot forget.

(Seriously, I’m pretty sure that ending will be the last thing I remember when I die.)

*Especially since the English-language version of his novel still read in North America today wasn’t released until a year after the Disney film came out.

**Which explains why it isn’t even listed as an adaptation on the Das doppelte Lottchen wikipedia page.

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Allan Mott is the author of a dozen books, including Scary Movies, Gothic Ghost Stories and Urban Legends. He co-hosts the Cinema Shame podcast and has a long abandoned blog called Vanity Fear but his proudest achievements as a movie buff are being a footnoted reference on the Ms. 45 wikipedia page and being namechecked as having written the best online essay about Slumber Party Massacre II in the liner notes of the original Shout Factory franchise DVD boxed set.