Audience strikes back

Quality over cacophony was the dominant Bollywood theme in 2005 as the industry repeatedly defied box office logic with a clutch of unconventional films. Saibal Chatterjee reports

From top: Stills from Mangal Pandey-The Rising, Bunty Aur Babli, Page 3, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi and Parineeta (Left) Indigenously produced animation film, the mythological Hanuman, tasted big-time success

IN 2005, Bollywood made appreciable amends for all the junk that it had brazenly foisted upon moviegoers in the course of the previous year. It was almost as if a section of the Mumbai showbiz was desperate to seek forgiveness and it said sorry with a clutch of remarkable films that provided quality entertainment without pandering to the market’s insatiable hunger for sleaze fests, vacuous designer flicks and doses of putrid masala.

The happy augury was that several of these films, which pushed the creative envelope while staying within the broad parameters of commercial Hindi cinema, were crowned with box office success. It was an extraordinary year indeed. Several small, unfancied and defiantly offbeat releases outstripped many big banner potboilers in terms of box office collection. Those that fell short commercially managed to garner enough critical accolades by way of recompense to make a difference to the overall creative profile of Hindi movies.

Leading the pack was Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s spirited Black. Not many in the trade were willing to give the film a chance. But it beat all odds and marched into movie theatres around the country simply because of the director’s clout post-Devdas.

Black got off to a slow start, then picked up momentum steadily as word of mouth publicity peaked and, by the end of its long and fruitful run, attained the status of one of the greatest Bollywood success stories in living memory.

Black may have been overtly derivative (half the film drew inspiration from Arthur Penn’s Oscar-winning Miracle Worker), theatrical and showy, but it was, all said and done, a marvellously gutsy effort in the Bollywood moviemaking context. Bhansali eschewed commercial Hindi cinema ingredients and employed English dialogues for well over half the film’s running time. Yet, purely on the strength of its emotional energy and visual impact, Black struck a chord nationwide.

Just as wonderfully inventive was Madhur Bhandarkar’s highly original social satire, Page 3. Again, it arrived in theatres amid much scepticism. But within a couple of weeks, the dire warnings of the doomsayers evaporated into thin air. Queues outside the ticket counters lengthened with each passing day and Page 3 quickly graduated from a niche film to an unqualified commercial success.

Who would have thought that a film about Mumbai’s high society party scene and the people who keep it on the boil would click so famously? Page 3 worked because Bhandarkar cleverly enhanced its relevance for his middle-class audience by placing a journalist in the middle of the goings-on. The large and fascinating gallery of characters, viewed from a rookie pen pusher’s somewhat gawky-eyed standpoint, made the fleeting vignettes of vanity, crudity, flamboyance and superficiality seem utterly real and tangible.

A realistic strain ran through Ram Gopal Varma’s taut underworld drama, Sarkar, as well. The film derived its incredible turbo charge from a top-draw Amitabh Bachchan star turn. Sarkar was devoid of song-and-dance numbers, and it had no grand melodramatic sequences designed to showcase Amitabh’s famed dialogue delivery. The Big B, normally compelled by lesser directors to waste his enormous emotive talents on slight material, acted with his eyes and face as much as he did with his famous baritone.

He brought alive the character of a politically powerful underworld patriarch, a la Don Corleone, and left moviegoers speechless in admiration. For a change, Hindi movie audiences, notorious for their inability to spot class when they see it, voted with their feet for Sarkar, making it the first real blockbuster of RGV’s career.

For Amitabh, of course, Sarkar was only one of the many high points of a great year. He played a patriarch in two other big films — Vipul Shah’s Waqt — Race Against Time, which clicked commercially, and Mahesh Manjrekar’s Virrudh, which failed to get going at the box office. He held the two films together with top-notch performances.

Apoorva Lakhia’s thriller, Ek Anjabee, hit the screens even as the Big B lay in his hospital bed. Despite another fine performance from the redoubtable actor, the film failed to enthuse the masses, proving that Indian audiences have matured to a point where neither sympathy nor love for an icon can drive them to ignore the intrinsic merit, or the lack of it, of a film.

Nagesh Kukunoor’s Iqbal went well beyond the confines of commercial Mumbai cinema

A much smaller but equally effective film added a new chapter to the Subhash Ghai saga. Nagesh Kukunoor’s heart-warming Iqbal, bankrolled by Ghai’s newly launched small-scale, off-mainstream production division, Mukta Searchlight, was a winner all the way.

Iqbal went against received commercial wisdom by turning the spotlight on to a deaf-mute rustic cricketer determined to play for India. But it had nothing in common with Black. While the Bhansali blockbuster focussed fair and square on the disability of its protagonist — a Helen Keller-like deaf-blind girl — Iqbal played down the physical handicap factor by using it merely as just another element to underscore the minority status of the eponymous hero.

The strapping Iqbal belongs to a village, is a Muslim and cannot speak or hear. The odds are obviously loaded heavily against the boy and that’s what makes his battle even more dramatic and his eventual triumph even more rousing. Iqbal wasn’t a three-handkerchief sob story. It was a feel-good drama that went well beyond the confines of commercial Mumbai cinema. The film sent producer Ghai’s stocks soaring far higher than they have ever been before.

Another surprise hit of the year was Sudhir Mishra’s political drama Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi. With actors like Kay Kay Menon, Shiny Ahuja and Chitrangada Singh in the cast, it wasn’t a film that could have been described as a surefire box-office draw. It located its narrative in the upheaval of the political twists and turns of 1970s — the years of the Emergency clamped by Indira Gandhi — making its appeal even more niche.

Yet, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi gave bigger releases a run for their money and went on to become one of the top five films of the year, no matter how you look at it — critically or commercially.

Not so surprising, however, was the success of the Vidhu Vinod Chopra-produced Parineeta, directed by first-timer Pradeep Sarkar. A millennial reworking of a Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay literary classic, it was a perfect mix of a great story, wonderful performances, riveting visuals and catchy music. Parineeta was the sort of film that gave Bollywood a good name without really ending up rewriting the rules.

One of the biggest Bollywood hits of the year was Shaad Ali’s Abhishek Bachchan-Rani Mukherjee starrer, Bunty Aur Babli. To bolster the film’s prospects, the Big B played a grouchy cop in relentless pursuit of a pair of confidence tricksters, but as it panned out, the script had enough steam in it to click at the box office for reasons other than the presence of some of the biggest stars of the industry.

Bunty Aur Babli had foot-tapping music, great lyrics and wonderful comic set pieces. It was a love story, a cop-and-robbers adventure and a zany comedy all rolled into one, which made it completely different from your average boy meets girl caper.

Surprise of surprises, the year 2005 also saw an indigenously produced animation film, the mythological Hanuman, taste big-time box office success. A land that has had to make do with Hollywood cartoons all these years found reason to cheer what was clearly a major breakthrough.

Several other unconventional Hindi films — Onir’s My Brother Nikhil, Assamese veteran Jahnu Barua’s Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Maara, debutant Shoojit Sircar’s Yahaan and Prakash Jha’s Apaharan, which opened in the last month of the year and so a clear verdict on its box office performance is still awaited, earned generous accolades for their quality, emotional energy and creative integrity.

Of course, the year had the usual complement of commercially successful masala-laced potboilers, designer films and skin flicks — Salaam Namaste, Kya Kool Hain Hum, Maine Pyaar Kyun Kiya and No Entry. But during a year when quality made a welcome and long-awaited return to Bollywood, they represented eminently forgettable drops in the ocean. But by the end of the year, such films seemed to have lost their popular buy-in as several of their ilk — Deewane Huye Paagal, Ek Khiladi Ek Hasina, Neal ’N’ Nikki, Garam Masala and Shaadi No. 1 — bombed at the box office.

Interestingly, among the most discussed films of the year was one that wasn’t exactly a success story. The much-hyped release of Ketan Mehta’s long-awaited magnum opus, Mangal Pandey — The Rising sent the trade into a tizzy. The sort of play that the film got in the media — during the process of its casting, its initial planning, its actual making and, finally, its arrival at the theatres — was phenomenal, to say the least.

The reason was pretty obvious. Mangal Pandey was Aamir Khan’s first release in four years. Unfortunately, it did not quite live up to its promise. If The Rising did not quite rise to the occasion, it was because the attempted marriage between Bollywood narrative conventions, complete with item numbers and mujras, and the rigour of a world-class historical epic was a complete non-starter.

The moral of ‘2005 – The Bollywood Story’ was pretty clear and simple: you can take the audience for granted only at your own peril. The message went out loud and clear to anybody who cared to listen. Those who did reaped rich dividends. Those who didn’t paid the price.

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