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Wanted: film zara hatke
Bollywood has been so busy packaging Egos that it has forgotten Entertainment
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Deepa Gahlot
Everyone is talking 'different' now. It has already been established that the 'usual' is not working.
Star names are not selling. No amount of hype and promotion is attracting a blase audience. The situation is somewhat similar to the time when the New Wave cinema had come in to challenge a formulaic commercial cinema.
The media had hailed the art cinema movement, which spluttered and died soon enough, at least in Mumbai (it is still alive in other states). Later, the media was accused of supporting even bad art films and speeding up the demise of the movement.
The newspaper reading public came to believe that anything the reviews gushed over must be boring, depressing stuff. By this time, commercial cinema revived itself and that was that. The same thing seems to be happening now. Every time something 'different' comes along, it gets fulsome praise, whether it deserves it or not.
If the audiences then go and see Deham, Danger, Agni Varsha, Yatharth, Leela or Ek Chhotisi Love Story (this one saved by the controversy), or even Yeh Kya Ho Raha Hai and dozens of bad Satya rip-offs, they are put off 'different' for good. And they crave their normal dose of popcorn movies.
After years of watching everything (well, almost) that Bollywood throws up, the conclusion is that the 1950s and maybe early sixties had it right. Mehboob Khan, Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy, Nitin Bose, Amiya Chakraborty, Vijay Anand, Raj Khosla, they made commercial films with songs, dances, stars and all. But nobody could dare call their movies mindless entertainment. Their story lines were strong, their songs were meaningful, picturisations unique (you could identify the director from the shot taking and song picturisation).
Even if there was no obvious 'message' in their films (like in the films of V Shantaram), the audience took something home from the theatre, which often stayed with them for years. Nostalgia is made of this!
By the time Nasir Hussain, Manmohan Desai and the other entertainers came in, the seriousness with which the Masters treated the medium was gone. Gone too was the element of thought, the literary quality of scripts, the genuineness of emotions and the creativity of storytelling. Salim-Javed brought in colloquial language and a streetsmart quality to their scripts, but there have been no writers of note with a consistently high quality of work since.
By the time Kader Khan was done with it, the story-script was effectively dead in mainstream cinema. After the initial success of the parallel film movement, those rebel filmmakers too lost track of the crucial aspect of watchability. No matter who the target audience is in, Bombay (now Mumbai), Bihar or Birmingham, they have to be induced to spend money to buy a ticket (or even a pirated video/VCD/DVD).
That is something even the new 'offbeat' cinema has also overlooked. With ticket prices being what they are, would even the most dedicated movie buff want to spend around Rs 100 watching a director's version of 'The Truth'? If they don't want to see the current star doing the same old pyaar-mohabbat-dosti thing, they are hardly likely to go for some bleak rural saga.
They want their moneys worth of entertainment and no more commercial or artistic con jobs. There is no more loyalty to stars or directors and certainly no desire for punishment in the name of meaningful cinema.
Now the industry is in a fix. For years they had not thought about the films they were making. If the star gave dates, the scene could be written on the set by some underpaid hack or lifted without alteration from a Hollywood film by some overpaid hack.
Now the top stars are sitting home twiddling their thumbs.
Fridays come and go with nobody hitting that elusive box-office bullseye.
The audience now wants genuinely 'different' and all those who talked of their hatke films with a straight face don't know what to do. Unlike the gentler, kinder pre-video and satellite era audience, when today's audience demands different, they won't settle for some bogus truth, NRI angst or Polish rip-off.
They want Entertainment.
Know what? Somewhere down the last decade, the world's biggest entertainment industry was so busy branding, packaging and marketing Egos that it forgot its basic function, Entertainment.
It is time to do some serious unlearning and relearning.
Earlier column
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