(Article contributed by Subroto, and *I* get to add my comments as editor's notes!!! Hahahaha!)

Phase transitions constitute a very important class of phenomena where a substance in a given physical state abruptly, and at times not so abruptly, makes a transition to a different physical state with different properties. In the world of films, face transitions are the analogue of these phenomena, where character A disguised as character B abruptly transforms into his (or her) original form by tearing off a mask of character B's face. Tinsel wisdom dictates that a person's physiognomy is his (or her) only unique feature and hence, this ploy often works in hoodwinking the other characters in the film and in some cases the audience as well.

The Mission Impossible films provide wonderful examples of this where Tom Cruise disguises himself as Jon Voight, Dougray Scott and others and then at opportune moments rips off the masks revealing his true face and also the well disguised holes in the patchy scripts. A similar thing happens in the recent Hindi film Aks where Amitabh Bachchan and Manoj Bajpai take turns disguising themselves as each other and rip open their masks to jarring background music. Unlike the Mission Impossible movies however, there are no holes in the script to rip open here simply because there is no script worth talking about.

Face transitions are not a recent phenomena in movies. One of the most vivid displays of face transitions is from the Hindi film The Train made in the early seventies with Kakaji (one time matinee idol Rajesh Khanna, for the uninformed), Nanda and Helen in the lead. This movie shouldn't be confused with the The Burning Train, the mamoth seventies disaster film that combined the histrionic might of Roopesh Kumar, Om Shivpuri and Navin Nishchol. Incidentally, The Burning Train also starred Dharmendra, Vinod Khanna, Jeetendra, Hema Malini and Parveen Babi. The Train was a thriller, a genre of films Kakaji had a fondness for and dabbled in occasionally, when he wasn't busy playing people dying from various forms of cancer or prancing around trees in safari suits with overweight heroines (editor's note: come on, Subroto! They ain't heavy, they be Asha Parekh! I think her problem can be summarized as 36-24-36000). His first film Raaz was a thriller, followed by B. R. Chopra's overrated Itsafarce, sorry Ittefaq. Red Rose, in which he played a sex maniac under the able tutelage of the disabled Satyen Kappu also belonged to this genre (editor's note: the Tam version of this movie features the histrionic might of the great Kemal Saar) and in more recent times, he acted in a thriller starring the ever dependable Chunkey Pandey (editor's note: YEAHHHH!!! We love you, Chunkey! Come back from Bangladesh! India needs you!) and Sonu Walia in which (surprise, surpise!!) Sadashiv Amprapurkar turns out to be the murderer. I have forgotten the name of that film.

Coming back to The Train, the story was roughly like this-Our hero (Kakaji, who else) is a cop on the trail of a gang of train robbers who rob rich passengers in first class compartments travelling from Bombay. Nanda (don't wince, it could have been Asha Parekh or Mala Sinha) plays his lady love and Helen, true to stereotype plays the vamp secretly in love with you know who. The robbers use the ploy of getting a woman to seduce the passenger and entice him to get off at a station while they make away with his belongings. What did you expect, a guy in military fatigues with a grenade launcher threatening to blow away the passenger and half the train? Get real dude, we are talking seventies bollywood here. Anyway, the twist in the tale occurs when you are told that the woman in question is not the vamp Helen, but Kakaji's sweetheart Nanda. Our hero decides to get to the bottom of this and disguises himself as a passenger on the train (This isn't the face transition we are going to discuss). It's a different matter that his brilliant disguise makes him look like either of the Thompson twins from the Tintin comics after they have taken a dose of the secret formula that suddenly makes them start growing a lot of hair. His partner in this daring caper is that nauseating little pest from the sixties and seventies (editor's note: said pest has been replaced in the nineties by Johnny Lever), Rajendranath.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, Nanda boards the train in a slinky green outfit, lures our hero out of the train and just when the train is about to leave, he takes out his gun and points it at Nanda. The villain's henchmen (they are always around in the 17th reel of a Hindi film) start shooting at Kakaji and in the ensuing melee, the femme fatal(e) in green gets shot. Kakaji is about to put on his stock mournful expression (editor's note: and also ready to preach the evil begets evil speech to his love who betrayed him), when suddenly, Nanda raises her hand and digs her fingers deep into the skin on the corner of her face. A perceptible cut!, a new scene and voila, it's now Helen who's in the green outfit slowly relaxing the killer grip on her facial skin and gearing herself for the mandatory pre-mortal monologue. If this ain't face transition, what is? A bewildered Kaks takes a little time to realise what's going on and by the time he does, it suddenly dawns on him that he has to catch the criminal mastermind and so his stunt double goes chasing after the villain.

So, remember, the recipe for a good face transition is: two people, who need not bear any resemblance to each other but have similar clothes, a strong grip and tug on the skin of one person's face which almost threatens to tear the whole face off, a very perceptible cut and the other person in the same clothes and position lowering his or her hand from his or her face and a constipatedly bewildered expression on the faces of those looking on. Shucks, if the Mission Impossible guys had watched this film, they would have saved zillions on special effects.

Incidentally, while on the subject of special effects, The Train had a scene where Kakaji is driving a car in a very disturbed state of mind along a road. You see a stream of street lights moving along the screen as he drives, but instead of moving in the opposite direction to that of the car, they seem to be moving in a direction perpendicular to it. Wow, some special effects!! Wonder why they needed special effects for a scene like that. Don't tell me our Kaka Cola didn't know how to drive. Maybe it was a shot symbolic of the orthogonality of thought and action, but somehow I'm rather disinclined to believe that.