(The Bengal Post, September 18, 2011)
Once upon a time heroes were heroes and a vamp did a little seducing. The big screen came alive with stereotypes and no one ever wondered why the bad guy was doing good things, or even if the bad guy was bad, after all. Which is what happens when I watch a movie made in Bollywood – with apologies to a stalwart named Amitabh Bachchan, who decries the use of that terribly useful term to describe an entire industry that is based in Mumbai, even though the B in Bollywood actually came from the old name of the city: Bombay. Be all that as it may, I sometimes long for the day when I knew what was going to happen next in a film, and enjoyed not just the strangely expected twist in the plot, but every cliché and predictable catchphrase that was part of the dialogue, the story and the song sequences. Today I never know who is going to do what and why, and who will run around which tree with whom but end the movie with someone else…or something like that, anyway. I miss that good, old-fashioned and totally trite progression of a film from introductory scene to the climax. And I feel huge amounts of nostalgia when I see the good guys being bad, the bad guys being heroes and the heroine wiggling and jiggling somewhere I between creating merry mayhem in the emotional well-being of men and women alike with no real reason to do so except sheer wickedness and a need to make some noise at the box office.
Thus it was, a long time ago, maybe even as far back as last year. The hero and the heroine were good people, young, carefree, happy, dealing with family, education, stress and growing up with a lovely insouciance that made me, as a viewer, as happy, carefree, ad infinitum. The closest that we have come with any degree of significance to that in recent times is a funny little film called Ajab Prem ki Gajab Kahaani, starring the charming Ranbir Kapoor and the lovely Katrina Kaif as well as a host of other people who came and went as the plot dictated and never really did much beyond being able supporters of the main leads. The two danced, they sang, they played games, they fell in love – not necessarily with each other – and eventually, after some trial, error, twists and turns, got married to – I hoped – live happily ever after. There was really no lesson presented to be learned, no moralistic sledgehammer, no cause promoted. It was a happy film, not commenting on social issues or presenting a doom and gloom scenario that reeked of reality. I laughed when I was supposed to, and I knew when that was; I also understood when I was supposed to be sad and though I may not have cried, I did see that I was not really meant to. But Ajab Prem… is a rare instance of a totally clichéd and feelgood film that did its job as well as it could be done. Since then, there have been others, from F.A.L.T.U. to Delhi Belly, with so many shades in between many of them not many in any way special, that came, made a lot of noise and left, without telling me just what was going on and why. I am left feeling sad at the vacuum.
I liked it the way it was. I liked it when Bindu or Helen or Padma Khanna or even Mumtaz, in her very young days, heaved her bosom and sang seductively to lure the men on and off screen in to watch her. While the heaving bosom was not the charm for me, the ambience of the scene as it unfolded, was. There was magic when Helen stood on the bridge holding a parasol and singing Mera naam hai Chin Chin Choo, as much enchantment as when she cavorted, insisting that Yeh mera dil, around a grim Amitabh Bachchan in Don, dressed in a white and gold cut out frock and showing off every overblown curve. And when she did her best to distract the leering Gabbar Singh with her sinuous moves in Mehbooba oh mehbooba, I brushed sand out of my eyes and waited for the action to begin, since I knew that a fight sequence after an “item song” was like toast and butter, lightning and thunder, the Internet and Google, an inevitable partnership. And what Helen did, no one else has been able to, not even the chameleonic Kareena Kapoor in the Farhan Akhtar-Shahrukh Khan version of Don, where the lady wriggled on a shag rug (no pun intended, honestly) wearing a glittery gold dress (Kareena, not the rug, of course).
There was another spell being cast alongside the music and Helen. The whole egg-chucking, bottom-bashing, water-spraying, broom wielding way of the filmi world, so wonderfully epitomised in films like Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi, Ishq, Hum Hain Rahi Pyaar Ke and so many David Dhawan-Govinda productions has yielded to far more intellectual humour, as seen in Waisa Bhi Hota Hai II, Tere Bin Laden and the aforementioned Delhi Belly. There is a brand of slapstick in movies like Golmaal and its successors, Ajay Devgn’s Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge, Double Dhamaal and so many other more recent films that have not rung firebells at the box office, but have done enough to make filmmakers consider more. But many of these rely on a brand of funny that is plain sly, not cleverly so, based heavily on sex and potty-jokes rather than the straight out bashed-on-the-head-with-a-balloon genre, which is a lot more fun, a lot more innocent, a lot more straightforward and a lot more watchable with a general audience.
And then there were the stars. Salman Khan kept it more or less clean, but spawned his own brand of saleable Hindi cinema, with a nice combination of self-deprecating humour, intensely muscular humour and shirtless body-beauty with a babe clinging to his arm style, which worked fabulously with the masses but somehow never gets critics happily clicking away with reviews and reports. He is not the Prem of Maine Pyaar Kiya or Hum Saath Saath Hain or even Hum Aapke Hain Kaun any more, all of whom I liked as real people. As he gets older, his stunts get madder and his fans get happier. Shahrukh Khan, on the other hand, is starting to take risks, do experiments, play with his look and plotlines and acting, even though the ‘romantic hero’ tag sticks firmly on him. Saif Ali Khan tries to do more than he started out with and has been successful in proving himself as a capable actor, but I miss that chocolate boy I liked in Yeh Dillagi, for instance. Akshay Kumar appealed more in the long-ago Dhadkan, with his glasses and preppie look, than in any of the silly films he has been part of more recently, be it the highly popular Singh is Kingg or the flop show Chandni Chowk to China. And Sunny Deol, the jingoistic, speech-yelling, Pakistani-bashing hero of Gadar has vanished into the filmi woodwork, surfacing only rarely with a not-great product and then sinking back into obscurity.
So where has the larger than life Hindi movie that I grew up with vanished to? Is life only about Salman’s pectorals and SRK’s NRI appeal? Since everything that goes around comes around, or so I am assured, I am looking forward to the good old days soon becoming the good new days again. Bollywood zindabad!
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