Bombay Talkies, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, lootera, Ship of Theseus... Bollywood is now getting under our skin with filmmakers choosing stories that have a human touch and are far from being formulaic, writes Rinku Ghosh
Perhaps Bombay Talkies, the film that brought commercial, middle-of-the-road and arthouse together to celebrate 100 years of cinema, could very well have its place in the timeline for the next 100 years as ushering in a new age.
An anthology films, it had dream merchant Karan Johar, the intrepid Zoya Akhtar, the realist Dibakar Banerjee and the edgy Anurag Kashyap come together to tell short stories of the magic of cinema and their impact on ordinary Indian lives. Johar took up the issue of a gay man in a closet, his dilemmas and predicament encapsulated beautifully by a lilting black-and-white classic song, “Ajeeb dastan hai yeh, kahan shuru kahan khatam,”playing in the background. The turmoil and angst of a closet gay and the naked aggression of the one who is glad to be out may have been maudlin in treatment but when the protagonist got a moral lesson from a street kid, “Jhooth bolna boori baat hai,” it exemplified not only his hypocrisy but perhaps also Johar’s frankness in admitting he didn’t need gossamer flourishes to be an honest filmmaker. That a flawed but rounded character can be the whole. Banerjee’s retelling of the classic Ray story about an ordinary man’s wish to be a good even if unrecognised actor, Akhtar’s little star-struck boy — Sheila ki Jawaani being his Peter Pan moment — who dances like Katrina Kaif to raise money for his sister’s school trip and Kashyap’s ode to the tenacity of the Bollywood fan, all acknowledged the human condition.
In a way, the Hindi film industry is now getting under our skin with new-age filmmakers choosing character studies and ordinary lives, panning emotions and conflicts and turning formula on its head. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that both Johar and Kashyap were equal in hailing the new indie filmmaker on the block, Anand Gandhi, promoted by the Kiran Rao and Aamir Khan productions no less. Even as this goes to press, Ship of Theseus has wowed critics and won laurels at film festivals abroad.
Based on the philosophical paradox that the original structure remains as true to grain if it is retrofitted over time, the film looks at three characters who need organ transplants. The visually-impaired photographer who gets a corneal transplant finds her world not the same though vision was her El Dorado all along. A Jain monk is faced with the moral dilemma of accepting a liver transplant and modern treatment, campaigned as he has against pharma majors and animal testing. Is the non-violent not committing violence on his own body by trawling a suicidal pathIJ Or, can the stock-broker, recipient of a donor kidney, ever tally numbers in a world of illegal “kidney tourism”IJ These sharp questions about ethics and struggles to make difficult choices, the irony and paradox of life,
the matrix of self-introspection, are all too immediate to our reality in a changing India. Perhaps, we are not seeking so much suspension of disbelief, but an assertion of belief in who we are as a people, warts and all. The “honest-to-heart” approach is defining much of our indie as well as mainstream offerings.
Real-life character studies have spawned the phenomenon of biopics. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra humanised athlete Milkha Singh from being a record book statistic, bringing alive his very real struggles, where staying ahead of the race was not so much about passion as about a desperate attempt to not let an opportunity go by.
Over the next few months, honest story-telling is all set to rule our hearts. There’s Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly, a take on 40-something urban Indians who are failures because they chose survival over their calling. They are at the crossroads, wondering whether they have wasted or whether their half-life is still good enough to make amends. Kashyap has called it a film that will be a mirror to many of us and peel us, in his words, “noch noch ke”. His ownBombay Velvet, with big star Ranbir Kapoor, attempts to humanise and personify Bombay in its journey to becoming a metropolis — a cocktail of aspiration, love, greed, violence, in the mix of emotions of birthing an identity. If the gangsters of Wasseypur could be empathised with, so can the fortune-makers of Bombay, with a bit of jazz.
Made on a budget of Rs 3 crore, producer Rohit Khaitan’s Prague is a psychological thriller, the city with its landscape of vibrancy and darkness becoming a perfect prop for its conflicted characters.
Women as a determining demographic are pushing a niche of their own. Actor Kalki Koechlin may have scented commercial prospects with her go-get-it character in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani but she is kicked about Shonali Bose’s Margarita, With a Straw, the story of a girl who falls repeatedly in love, yearns to have sex and wants to be a Bollywood songwriter although she is wheelchair-bound as a cerebral palsy patient.
The physicality has given way to the flight of the mind. The same goes for Vikas Bahl’s Queen, where Kangana Ranaut plays a solo woman traveller criss-crossing Europe and coming of age in the wide world.
Then there are real tales from India’s heartland, debutant Soumik Sen’s Gulaab Gang, about vigilante women of Uttar Pradesh played by Madhuri Dixit and Juhi Chawla and Abhishek Chaubey’s Dedh Ishqiya, a black comedy thriller with filled out characters and a woman who plays men and revels in her crookedness of pursuit.
Nobody articulates this better than Vidya Balan, who shared her takeaway from Cannes as a jury member, with us: “I discovered that all of us — be it the world’s best filmmakers, Steven Spielberg or an Ang lee, a Nicole Kidman, a Christopher Waltz or me — were looking at films as human beings. I kept thinking that I was not technically sound or qualified at all to be an effective jurist. But to my surprise, not once did a technical conversation come up. It was about whether the film touched you and it was about what you felt. So I have realised that everyone watches films as a human being and expect human stories. That for me has been the most reassuring and validating discovery.”
As somebody who has redefined the woman protagonist in the commercial space, she found a kind of ‘genderlessness’ in the portrayal of women protagonists. “I was watching two to three films a day. There was not a 50-50 demarcation in terms of the stories having men and women as central protagonists. But I have to say that their presentation of women is a lot like the new cinema that is evolving in India. It’s about women as people, as human beings. Take Blue is the Warmest Colour, which got the Palme d’Or. It is a lesbian love story. Now, initially you wonder if there’s extensive sex in it. And you’re wondering if they’re exploiting the fact that it is a lesbian love story. But by the end of it you’ve forgotten that they are two lesbians, you just see two human beings. That’s the beauty of it because normally it’s a subject that can be exploited so easily. It had the most graphic sex I’ve ever seen but when I left the theatre, all I carried was the image of the heartbroken lover. And having seen her intensity, you so just wanted to mend it. So you’re just seeing her as a human being. The film could easily have been about two men or about a man or woman.”
Indian cinema may not recreate a golden age, it is all poised to create an age of understanding.