The tunes that bind

MARQUEE

remake with Shah Rukh Khan in the lead role.

"Teaser" might be a better word, since the entire thing was built on the principle of keeping SRK's face hidden from the audience for as long as possible while revealing the rest of him from various angles (it was a bit like those multi-part Godzilla trailers of yore, where you caught tantalising glimpses of a giant eye or foot or tail, but never the whole lizard at once).

At any rate, the gleaming visuals, computer-generated effects and sleek black suits on display in this new Don seem to put it firmly in the Matrix/Mission Impossible league; it was hard to relate it in any way to the beloved 1970s Bachchan starrer.

Until, that is, I heard the familiar strains of "Main hoon Don" (even if in an unfamiliar remix format) playing in the background. Suddenly all was right with the world, or almost.

Last year, when plans for the Don remake were announced, I had a minor argument with a friend about it. For some reason (the problems of music copyright perhaps), we had assumed that the remake would have completely different songs. I was shocked by the idea. He wasn't. "What's the big deal?" he said. "Don doesn't have to be all about 'Khaike paan Banaraswaala' or a couple of other songs, melodious though they are."

But in a sense, of course it does. Commercial Hindi cinema of the 1970s was more about a pastiche of eye-popping scenes and vignettes (including song sequences) than about character development or the coherent forward movement of a plot (which is the least important element in such a film anyhow).

When a mainstream Hindi movie has a great, or even reasonably good, soundtrack, it becomes nearly impossible to separate the film from its songs over a passage of time.

Admittedly, when I watched Don for the first time, as a child, the music didn't figure too strongly on my radar "" what mattered was watching Amitabh scowl, saunter, rage, goof and fight his way through the film.

But many years would elapse before I saw the film a second time (on cable television) and in the intervening period I heard the songs very often "" so that they became representative of the film for me.

Consequently, when I did see Don again, I was almost disappointed by the visuals that accompanied the songs: Amitabh was brilliant for much of the film but the vibrant voice in the title track was all-too-clearly Kishore Kumar's; the lip-synching was shoddy and unconvincing.

When Helen gyrated in the "Yeh mera dil" number, I kept seeing Asha Bhosle's face (and Asha Bhosle's face atop a gyrating body doesn't make for a pretty picture).

All this is a way of saying that sceptical though I am about the idea of a Don remake (or an Umrao Jaan remake for that matter), I'm glad they're retaining the original soundtracks (assuming the tunes aren't completely massacred).

Modern-day Bollywood is so obsessed with showing off its glossiness, being better-looking and more stylish than movies from an earlier age, that music is sometimes the only remaining link between originals and their "tribute-remakes".

(jaiarjun@gmail.com)