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Are these really hits?
None the films that have clicked at the box office over the past two months is great advertisement for competent scriptwriting, says Saibal Chatterjee.
It's raining hits in Bollywood. After an exasperatingly barren half-year, the sudden spate of box office humdingers is surely a welcome development. Ishq Vishk, Bhoot and now Chalte Chalte - add to that list the Akshay Kumar-Lara Dutta-Priyanka Chopra vehicle Andaaz, which is supposedly the biggest of them all - have given the Mumbai film industry much cause for joy.
But is this really the kind of films that will take Bollywood forward? None the films that have clicked at the box office over the past two months is great advertisement for competent scriptwriting. They do not substantiate the argument that only quality cinema works at the box office these days?
Andaaz is, at best, a scrappy "skin flick" that makes capital of the ample assets of two former beauty queens cavorting around in skimpy outfits. But thanks to a well-orchestrated media campaign - one doesn't exactly know where it all began though the needle of suspicion must point to the Friends of Akshay club - the film has been declared a hit. Good Lord!
But is really the kind of hit it is being touted as? I personally do not know anybody who has taken the trouble of buying a ticket to watch this piece of monstrosity. Most of those who have seen the Raj Kanwar-directed film have either been recipient of free entry passes or have walked out of the screening midway. I am probably not the best person to judge the quality of a film like Such films leave me too cold for my own good - and for the good of my thinking faculties. Quality isn't forte, the ability to exploit the susceptibilities of the frontbenchers is.
If Andaaz has indeed soared at the box office (Am I still sounding skeptical? I am.), all the debutant directors who have been lining up their "films with a difference" in order to break the barrier that separates good cinema from commercially viable cinema better pack their bags and returns to all the upcountry small towns they have come from with high hopes.
Haven't we been hearing the denizens of Bollywood harping, of late, on the many virtues of a taut script? But if the insipid, brazenly exploitative Andaaz were indeed a hit, nobody in the Mumbai film industry would ever need a script again?
The industry could as well go back to the Dark Ages when the concept of bound
scripts was only a diversionary idea, not a ground reality. which tells a clichéd story of love and sacrifice involving a hunk caught between two dumb belles, has the sloppiest script one has seen in a long time.
Talking of clichés, they tumble out of every inch of Ramgopal Varma's Bhoot, but to the maverick producer-director's credit, he hasn't made any tall claims about this lowbrow horror film. Bhoot must surely rank as one of Ramu's slightest films. It has clicked at the box office for what it does to the audience rather than what it is.
Bhoot, by Ramu's admission, had set out to scare the moviegoer out of his mind. It has succeeded. But by no stretch of the imagination, has it added up to great cinema, especially in the manner in which Satya and Company did.
While Aziz Mirza's Chalte Chalte, a film that is as hackneyed as they come, has its moments, thanks to the comic banter between Shahrukh Khan and Rani Mukherjee in the first half, but music video man Ken Ghosh's Ishq Vishk has absolutely no alleviating factors except perhaps for the fact that the lead actors Shahid Kapoor, Amrita Rao and Shehnaz Treasurywala - look their age for a change.
It is an abashedly derivative, comic book film that crosses Riverdale High escapades with the flippancy of Bollywood kitsch. The script certainly isn't its strongest point.
In this season of surprise hits, even a complete washout of a film like Govind Menon's is being aggressively promoted despite the fact that the teenaged crowd that it is targeted at has summarily dismissed it. The campaign is obviously driven more by the hope that filmgoers around the country are in an unusually generous mood than by the conviction that the film stands a realistic chance of bouncing back.
Bollywood's latest hits may have momentarily bailed the industry out of a potentially disastrous situation but in the long run they could end up undoing a lot of the good work that has been done by films like Lagaan, Dil Chahta Hai and Chandni Bar.
What Andaaz and Ishq Vishk have shown is that a good script is the last thing a film needs for success at the box office. Welcome back to good, old, mindless Bollywood!
