Can Ramu re-ignite the flames?
He has now turned his attention to the biggest blockbuster of them all, Sholay.
Having delivered the first authentic runaway hit of his career with the taut and riveting Sarkar, the unstoppable Ram Gopal Varma has now turned his attention to the biggest blockbuster of them all, Ramesh Sippy’s curry western, Sholay.
Ramu has let on that the proposed remake of Sholay will be titled Ram Gopal Varma’s Sholay and will be set in the mean streets of the Mumbai underworld instead of dusty, rustic Ramgarh. So are we looking at yet another gangster flick from the RGV Factory?
Well, this one promises to be a different kettle of fish: Ramu’s Sholay, despite reportedly retaining the entire original gallery of characters, will seek to combine the sweep and drama of the Ramesh Sippy mega hit with the grinding grit of Satya and staccato rhythm of Company.
Sounds like a truly wonderful idea on paper. How the depredations of a Gabbar Singh-like mafia don actually pans out in a pared down contemporary crime drama will depend entirely on how well Ramu manages to pull off his rural-to-urban and the 1970s-to-the-new-millennium narrative transference.
Make no mistake. There will be no dearth of passion in Ramu’s new project. It was after all Sholay that, by his own repeated admission, ignited his desire to be a filmmaker. He remembers standing in the queue outside a Hyderabad movie hall to catch up on Sholay and running his eyes over the “Directed by Ramesh Sippy” credit line.
That was the defining moment of Ramu’s life. Ambition swelled in his heart and his greatest fantasy was born. He wanted to see his own name on the marquee one day. He did not have to wait very long. His first film, Shiva, was released in the same Hyderabad theatre a decade and a half later.
Another decade and a half on, Ramu is now ready to repay his debt to the film that gave Hindi cinema and him a new benchmark to aspire for.
Ramu’s Sholay will be a rare occurrence in the context of popular Hindi cinema history, which is replete with instances of a single literary source being tapped for the screen several times over. But rarely does an original Hindi film set in a village receive an urban makeover decades after it first hits the theatres.
Offhand, one can think of no more than just two such instances. Nitin Bose’s Ganga Jamna was adapted against an urban backdrop in Yash Chopra’s Deewar, while the Rajshri stable made a killing in the mid 1990s with the chocolaty Hum Aapke Hain Koun, a feel-good, modernized, designer reworking of an earlier low-budget pastoral love story, Nadiya Ke Paar.
But neither Deewar nor HAHK was made for quite the same purpose for which Ramu has opted to remake Sholay: to pay a tribute to a classic. Moreover, with Ramu, one can be sure that the new product won’t be a blind imitation.
Sholay was a classic commercial Hindi film. It presented a conventional good versus evil saga that blended the conventions of the Hollywood western with the principal ingredients that go into a Mumbai movie – songs, dances comedy, action and high drama. It moved on several tracks.
Ramu’s version of Sholay can be expected to speak the new cinematic lingo that RGV has patented with a single-track tale about good guys and bad guys arraigned against each other in the big bad Mumbai underworld.
Don’t be surprised if Ramu’s Sholay singes the screen. But will the flames leap high enough for the golden glow of success to traverse across an entire generation? Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay has nothing left to prove. It is Ramu who will have to do the entire running from now on. The fire has been lit.