The rip-offs are here

Adapting Hollywood hits to Indian tastes and sensibilities to rake in the moolah is considered a safe bet by Hindi filmmakers

This unfunny comedy is a remake of Heartbreakers

Vikram Bhatt’s Ghulam has been inspired by On the Waterfront

IT'S hard to believe, but this week’s unfunny comedy, Bachke Rehna Re Baba, is actually a remake of David Mirkin’s hilarious Heartbreakers with Rekha and Mallika Sherawat altering the original mother-daughter pair into an aunt-niece one.

Even as the Big B flew off to Bangkok to shoot Apoorva Lakhiya’s take on Tony Scott’s Man On Fire, director Deepak Ramsay quietly slipped his take on P.J. Hogan’s My Best Friend’s Wedding into the theatres.

Ramsay’s Koi Mere Dil Main Hai, which casts Dia Mirza as, ahem ahem, Julia Roberts, comes only a week after Bunty Aur Babli that, despite its director’s feeble protestations, is clearly inspired by the Warren Beatty-Faye Dunaway caper, Bonnie & Clyde.

Director Sangeeth Sivan has ripped off Robert Benigni’s sex comedy, The Monster, and turned it into a monstrously lewd hit called Kya Kool Hain Hum.

In the meanwhile, the ever-enterprising David Dhawan is putting his finishing touches to a new avatar of Gene Saks’ 1969 wacky love triangle, Cactus Flower. While Salman Khan plays Walter Mathau, Katrina Kaif is cast in Ingrid Bergman’s role. Sushmita Sen slips into the part that won Goldie Hawn an Oscar.

This isn’t Sushmita’s only brush with Hollywood. In the recent aborted adaptation of Jesse Nelson’s I Am Sam, Sushmita was excellent in a role that Michelle Pfeiffer had played in the original.

That isn’t all. Debutant director Girish Dhamija’s Yakeen, which is around the corner, seems to be adapted wholesale from Wolfgang Petersen’s 1991 thriller, Shattered, in which Tom Berenger played an amnesiac trying to piece together his life with the help of a seemingly devoted wife after a near-fatal car accident.

The script is credited to Vikram Bhatt, who makes no bones about his adaptable vision. Almost all his films, from Ghulam, inspired by Elia Kazan’s On The Waterfront, to Aitbaar (Fear) have been Hollywood adaptations.

"And why not? No work of art is born out of nothing. The greatest of films and filmmakers have searched for inspiration somewhere or the other," says Bhatt.

"Wasn’t Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay inspired by Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai and wasn’t Mani Rathnam’s Nayakan in the same league as Coppola’s Godfather? Cinema is about interpretation, not originality. Give me an engaging adaptation rather than a boring original film any day," Bhatt maintains.

Apoorva Lakhiya, currently in Bangkok, makes no bones about the source material for his new film, Ek Ajnabee.

"I’ve no problems with admitting the source for my film. Yes, it is Man On Fire with Mr Bachchan cast in Denzel Washington’s role. Better that I admit it before critics jump on me after the film’s release," Lakhiya says.

"I made a very original film, Mumbai Se Aaya Mera Dost. I’ve a number of other original scripts. But I was advised by my well-wishers to do something safe. If a Hollywood adaptation is considered a potentially safe bet then I’m all for it. I’d rather be successful than original," he adds.

Makes you wonder. When will the dream-peddlers of Bollywood get over their fixation with American films? We seldom see Hindi films being copied from European or German cinema.

Hollywood, with its vast network of self-projection, gets on DVDs and into Bollywod’s dream factory in no time at all.

And in spite of a shift in screenplay, evidenced by original Indian films like Madhur Bhandarkar’s Page 3 (the most original Hindi film in recent times) and Onirban’s My Brother Nikhil, Hindi cinema continues to be unabashedly cannibalistic.

So, are original screenplays a dying breed in Hindi films? Not quite. Karan Johar’s next directorial venture, Kabhi Alvidaa Na Kehna, is something we’ve never seen before.

Says Karan: "I wouldn’t know if anyone else has attempted such a plot about urban relationships. But I can assure you Shah Rukh, Preity, Rani, Abhishek and Amitabh Bachchan have never been cast the way they are in my film. In fact, I see a lot of very original films happening in Bollywood, like Page 3, My Brother Nikhil and my favourite Black which some people find unoriginal. That’s okay. People will crib even about Mona Lisa’s smile being copied. You can’t please those who are constantly looking for reasons to put a frown on Mona darling’s face." — IANS

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