Mera Naam Joker 1970

Mera Naam Joker is a 1970 Indian Bollywood drama,social film released on 1970. The film is directed by Raj Kapoor, produced by Raj Kapoor.

Mera Naam Joker is divided into 3 chapters. The first chapter is about the adolescent Raju (Master Rishi kapoor)where he is infatuated with his teacher Mary (Simi Garewal). Here is where Raju comes to the realisation that he was born to make the world laugh, even through his own troubles.

After his first heartbreak, story moves on to the adult Raju who is working with Gemini Circus as a clown. The circus is owned by Mahendra Singh (Dharmendra). Here he meets Marina (Kseniya Ryabinkina), a Russian trapeze artist and despite the language barrier he manages to fall in love with her, and dreams of a married life with her. But Raju faces heartbreak once again when the circus ends and Marina returns to Russia. It is in this chapter that Raju's mother dies just before Raju's performance, and he has to go up on stage regardless.

In the final chapter, Raju meets Meena (Padmini), a woman who has ambitions of becoming a famous actress. By this point, Raju is a derelict and earns some money through manual labour. Meena befriends him and manages to win his heart only to dump him in the end due to her lust for success by marrying fellow actor (Rajendra kumar)

A mammoth film apparently inspired by Chaplins Limelight (1951), featuring Raj Kapoor as Raju the circus clown in a sprawling tale often seem as the stars autobiographical fantasy. Initially conceive as three seperate films, teh 3-part story abounds with allusions to Kapoors own life and work. It starts with the young Raju (Rishi Kapoor), the son of trapeze artist, falling in love with his school teacher Mary (Simi), and dreaming of becoming a famous clown. In part2 Raju joins a Russian circus where he falls in love with Marina (Rabiankina). The climax of this part comes when Rajus mother (Sachdev), seeing him on trapeze and remembering his fathers fatal fall, collapses, forcing the anguished Raju to finish the routine with a smile. Using the Soviet State Circus and portraying Marina as devoted to the title number of Awara (1951) since childhood, Kapoor intended to signal his gratitude to the USSR for the popularity he had enjoyed there since the 50s. In part 3, Raju befriends the young Mina (Padmini) who, disguised as a boy, pastes cinema posters while dreaming of becoming a film star. The films conclusion shows the three women in his life witnessing, as special guests, Rajus grand circus finale. Kapoor constantly deploys emphatically symbolic images like a clown doll abandoned in the hut where Raju and Mina used to meet, a cracked mirror showing a laughing face, etc. If Kapoors 50s films projected the attainment of political freedom as a loss of innocence and a yearning for a new worl, this film projects an uninhibited infantile narcissim combined with a mother fixation which not only determines his acrobatic demands for affection but also programmes the proliferation of female figures whose approval the leading character craves. Its commercial failure is often cited as the as the reason for Kapoors lapse into cynical use of sexploitation in his post-7os films, as if he rejection of the film had been translated into a vengeful recourse to demeaning images of women thrown at an unworthy public. [Source: Encl] Check out this page for more updates on Mera Naam Joker.