A new-age Bollywood

I had this in mind for a very long time, but Mr. Sottai insisted I go ahead. Here you go:

Move aside Mr. Johar and Mr. Chopra. Make way for a new breed in ‘Bollywood’ filmmaking—a breed that is not afraid to tell stories, to express desires, to flaunt psychotic tendencies and to show-off creativity.

‘A Wednesday’, for me, is one of the path-breaking movies in this respect. With a screenplay tighter than a corsette, it moves flawlessly, beckoning the audience to be encapsulated in an urban thriller digressing towards a moral dilemma. Furthermore, it might be one of the few movies where the protagonist is nameless, a representative of the middle class, yet an individual who is willing to take action. What marks it out from the rest of the lot, is the simplicity with which the story is told—there is no time wasted on the rituals of character explanation, and leaves it up to the audience to decide the nuances.

While all this talk of a new Bollywood breed is on, let’s not forget the harbinger—Mr. Kashyap, who, unfortunately, has taken up for himself to be the torch in this new Statue of Liberty. But the torch wavers; it flickers in the gale of commercialism and an inability to deliver the premise of the film. For example, ‘Gulaal’, probably post-2000’s only mainstream revolutionary film, if we discount the beautiful ‘Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi’ as a parallel cinema, fails to show the path that it amazingly lights up in the first half. With an array of the most interesting characters to have graced Indian screens and in a setting that has never been touched in cinema, Mr. Kashyap should have had the good graces to not tumble down the lowly slopes of romantic intrigues and femme fatales. Instead, he does. And the movie, instead of becoming a ground-breaking film, ends up a jamboree of characters who do not know where to proceed, now that they have gone two hours into the film.

A bit about ‘Dev D’ here—which, of course, has been hailed as the ultra-chic and an in-your-face film that has no holds barred. Yes, it is an interesting twist to the traditional Devdas tale. Yes, it shows a deep psychological insight into the characters, as never before. No—it does not work as a reflection of the cesspit Mr. D falls into—the result of a broken heart. Why—because, simply, his relationship with Paro is not defined. His relationship with Paro is a culmination of boyhood fantasies which border on sexual release and the display of machismo. And, most importantly, his relationship with Paro does not appear to be obsessive enough for him to digress into a path of supposedly ‘moral decay’, as marked by Aronofsky and Kashyap’s new best friend Danny Boyle-dedicated 360 degree camera turns and neon lights blinking revealing a drug trip.

But forget the media hype for now. And instead, watch ‘The Stoneman Murders’. Indeed, it has its flaws. There was no need for a lingerie-clad madam to be performing a traditional ‘item’ number. Neither was the concluding scene. Rather—watch it for it represents—an edge-of-the-seat thriller that twists and turns into a maze of cat and mouse, where you never know who the predator is and who the prey. Notice the film posters on the walls—the details are all in there—keeping in mind a basic point of filmmaking: the time and place should not be anachronistic to the event on the screen.

It’s not as if our big budget starrers are not trying to break the mould. ‘Luck by Chance’ is an example—spoofing the inherent tendencies of Bollywood’s obsession with stars and not with actors.

That draws me to an interesting concluding question—is Bollywood getting over the hype of the star, and instead, focusing on the story and the actor? Or is it just a phase—like the time we thought ‘Lagaan’ would show us all a new Bollywood?

Whatever it is—just promise me one thing, all ye directors: never put me through the trauma of another ‘Delhi 6’.