Crossing over another year

MARQUEE

Some Bollywood trends of the past year...and what they showed us about our attitude to movie-watching.

By most accounts, 2006 has been an important year for the Hindi film industry. I'm not in a position to hold forth on which films did well and which didn't; at any rate, it's become difficult to meaningfully discuss these things at a time when so much money is being made away from the box-office (through franchises, product placement and so on). But what strikes me is that some of the year's most high-profile films, in one way or another, took audiences out of their comfort zones "" making us reexamine our ideas about mainstream Hindi cinema and our own attitude to movie-watching, and perhaps even in nebulous ways pointing the way to the future. Observations on some trends:

EVEN IF IT AIN'T BROKE, MAKE IT AGAIN
Remakes can turn even casual viewers (the ones who claim they watch films "only for entertainment") into nitpicking critics. Long before Farhan Akhtar's remake of Don hit our screens, a large band of moviegoers had already made up their minds about the film. "What's the point of remaking a classic?" was a common refrain, built on the laughably Golden Ageist idea that the clunky original Don was a masterpiece that mustn't be tampered with. Inevitably, by the time Akhtar's Don came out, many viewers were responding to a hypothetical film, not the one that was actually unfolding before their eyes.

This was a pity, for the new Don had a lot going for it, not least its clever inversion of the morality code embedded in the original movie and its handling of a theme that was never satisfactorily treated in its precursor "" the idea of a nearly omniscient protagonist. Nor was enought attention paid to Akhtar's subversive little touches (e.g. the casting of Kareena Kapoor, a girl from a famously conservative family that once discouraged its women from entering the "kanjar" profession, in an item-number role originally played by Bollywood's most famous vamp), many of which reflected in Bollywood's mindset in the last few years. Even after making allowances for the technological superiority of today's cinema over the 1970s, Akhtar's film was in many ways smarter and more provocative than the Amitabh starrer was. At any rate the average Hindi-film audience, still largely unfamiliar with the idea of remakes, is on its way to learning that no film (no, not even Sholay) is so sacrosanct that it can't be given a new twist and redefined for a contemporary audience.

The attitude to sequels (Lagey Raho Munnabhai, Krrish, Dhoom 2) was more tolerant, though sequels can be bummers. Revisiting the much-loved 2003 hit Koi Mil Gaya, about the tribulations and eventual triumph of a mentally challenged boy, may no longer be so much fun once you've discovered (by watching Krrish) that the loveable idiot Rohit spent the next 20 years held captive in a suspension chamber.

STYLE: THE NEW MORALITY?

The Don remake was also unapologetically about style, entirely in keeping with the present-day Bollywood ethos where the winner (and the character the audience must root for) isn't the chap who's nicer but the chap with more sang-froid. The twist at the end was an example of the cheerful amorality increasingly seen in some of our movies. Clearly, we're moving away from the days when furious discussions (in media and among the moviegoing public) would take place each time a leading actor played a character with negative shades.

The debate used to centre on whether the character was an out-and-out villain (whatever that term means) with no redeeming qualities or a victim of circumstance, whose actions were justified by past misfortunes. But in at least two of the biggest films of this year, morality wasn't even an issue. When Hrithik Roshan played a "master thief" in Dhoom 2 near the year-end, his calling was defined in the same terms as any other profession. Abhishek's the cop, Hrithik's the robber, and having dispensed with that bit of incidental information let's get down to the more important thing: which of them is Cooler? (Answer: Hrithik.)

Films like Dhoom 2 are taking the cult of the Star Personality to its logical conclusion. For some time now, many mainstream Bollywood films have included at least one token scene that exists purely as homage, as self-reference. This is often in the form of a "friendly appearance" by a well-known actor, usually playing a beacon of hope for one of the film's principals, and the impact of such a scene depends on the viewer's knowledge of who this actor is. (Even Lagey Raho Munnabhai couldn't resist bringing in Abhishek Bachchan for a two-minute climactic appearance that would make little sense to an untrained viewer.)

Now at last we have an entire film built on this principle. Here's Hrithik, we're supposed to gasp each time he shows up, and there's Ash, and Abhishek, and Bipasha, and don't they all look so bronzed and chiselled and gorgeous ...and oh, there's that Uday Chopra chappie. What's he trying to act for? Why can't he just walk towards us in slow-motion?

SERIOUS ISSUES, LIGHT TONE

The art-vs-entertainment division is a tiresome one at the best of times, throwing up equally pompous views from both the straightforward snobs and the inverse snobs. But two of this year's most celebrated movies managed to strike a nice balance between masala and message.

Good comedy is very difficult to do on its own terms, but it takes special talent to mix comedy (sometimes even low comedy) with situations that have traditionally been treated as sacrosanct; and this is what Rajkumar Hirani has managed in his Munnabhai films. Lagey Raho Munnabhai repackaged the principles of Gandhism and even had a tapori address an ectoplasmic Gandhiji as "Hi, Bapu!" but it was done so good-naturedly that no one could possibly take offence. Quite an achievement in a country that doesn't have a particularly developed sense of humour (at least, in terms of laughing at itself) and gets self-righteous about its sacred beef very easily.

By comparison, Rang De Basanti was a more self-conscious, affected film, but it managed to 1) be a crowd-pleaser and 2) make a significant proportion of the audience reflect on the things that are going wrong in the country today. The film's more extreme conceits (that Evil can be ended by gunning down corrupt ministers, for instance, or by emulating the example of revolutionaries of the past) were plain silly, and it went seriously downhill in the second half, but there was a lot to savour in its more subtle moments.

Honorary mention in this context to Khosla ka Ghosla, a film that started small (and is unlikely to ever be as well known as LRM or RDB) but gradually developed a cult following. This excellent serio-comedy took on an issue no less substantial than the dispiritingly complex layers of corruption that are embedded in nearly every aspect of our everyday lives (and in which all of us are implicated) but did it with commendable lightness of tone.

BREAKING WITH THE IMAGE

Saif Ali Khan led the pack, with two roles that were so different it was easy to forget that the same actor was playing them: the foul-mouthed desi Iago Langda Tyagi in Vishal Bharadwaj's powerfully directed Omkara and the young urban drifter in Homi Adjania's visually striking but overwrought Being Cyrus.

Two of Bollywood's biggest stars, Shah Rukh Khan and Rani Mukherji, also tried something different by playing whiny, unassertive "losers" in Karan Johar's much-reviled Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna. Shah Rukh will never be as malleable an actor as Saif (which is fair enough; he probably wouldn't have become such a popular star if he were) but the fierce criticisms of his performance in KANK were quite telling: one got the impression that he had made the audience uncomfortable about his character, which was at least part of the idea. Maybe we still aren't ready to see weak leading men in mainstream movies?

NOT QUITE CROSSED OVER YET

Being Cyrus provided a rare instance of actors speaking in English throughout a film and looking comfortable while doing it, as opposed to seeming like elocution-school graduates. Aishwarya Rai, on the other hand, was definitely the Elocution Maiden in the disastrous Mistress of Spices, a film in which she enunciated lines like "What are you warning me about, chillies?" and "Have I betrayed you, cinnamon?" with all the emotional depth of teakwood. The supposed "crossover" is still waiting in the wings.

(jaiarjun@gmail.com)