Flawed flashbacks

Some filmmakers divest their movies of the element of suspense by resorting to the recall technique. However, there are some rare exceptions, writes Surendra Miglani

ONE of the most illogical and unreasonable things witnessed in Hindi films is flashback. Unfortunately, this is also one of the most favourite methods of our filmmakers to tell stories. In fact, flashback is a banana skin on which even some of our most accomplished and intelligent directors and writers have slipped.

We see it in film after film. Some actor recalls some incident(s). What follows are scenes from the past. A person can obviously recall only those events to which he/she was a witness or which were narrated to him/her by someone. But do our writers and directors keep this in mind?

Take the case of T. Prakash Rao’s Vaasna. Padmini gets furious when her son (Akashdeep) comes home drunk. She then tells him what great agony her family had to suffer because of his father’s (Raaj Kumar’s) addiction to alcohol. The whole story is narrated in flashback. We see Raajkumar dying in the climax following a fight with some goons.

Even if it is presumed that Raaj Kumar used to narrate each and every incident of his life in the minutest detail to his wife, how did she come to know about the incidents which took place between the persons who had neither ever met Raaj Kumar nor Padmini? Moreover, how could she know about the incidents that took place in Raaj Kumar’s life after his last meeting with her which he never narrated to anybody before dying?

The inanity of the flashback technique also hit Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s otherwise much-acclaimed Black. Here a blind and deaf girl (Rani Mukerji) recalls all the previous events of her life. But there are incidents which she was, of course, unable to see and still she is recalling them! To elaborate the point, how could she know in what position her teacher was sitting when they were together? And how could a girl reminisce the conversations between various artistes when she had never heard these because of her deafness?

There is yet another undesirable fallout of flashbacks. Normally a viewer is in the dark about the events that are about to unfold in a movie. Every scene is supposed to arouse some curiosity about the coming events. However, some filmmakers divest their movies of this element of suspense
by resorting to unimaginative flashbacks.

The most recent example is of Ramgopal Verma’s ‘D’, released last year. Here, hero Randeep Hooda is recounting the events which have so far taken place in his life. We find that he is constantly chasing someone or someone is chasing him to kill him. Normally, the viewer would have been in suspense as to whether the hero will kill his rivals or would it be the other way round. But the very fact that all these events are being recalled by the hero makes it obvious that the hero survived all along.

Similarly, in Karam, another release of last year, a flashback has a series of events being recalled by heroine Priyanka Chopra. The narrative would often expect us to be on the edge of the seat as to whether she, being in the clutches of villains, would survive or not. But here, too, the viewers knew the ending just at the beginning!

An actor narrating something to another person and the consequent flashback sometimes looks extremely funny if one thinks a bit deeply. Take the case of Ramesh Sippy’s directorial venture Shakti (1982). Dilip Kumar, a retired police officer is telling his grandson (Anil Kapoor) about his past. The flashback is loaded with, among other things, the romance between his son (Amitabh Bachchan) and Smita Patil. So what it logically means is that Dilip is saying : "... after this my son... I mean your father ...went with his beloved to a garden and started singing Jaane kaise kab kahan ikraar ho gaya... While singing the third line of the song, he held her hands and caressed her cheeks...". Imagine a full-blooded Indian telling the romantic moments of his son and his beloved to his grandson!

Amid all these inanities, writer and director Aditya Dutt’s debut venture Aashiq Banaya Aapne (2005), seems to stand out as one of the rare exceptions. The movie begins with three wounded persons (Emran Hashmi, Tanushree Dutta and Sonu Sood) being brought to hospital. The previous events then unfold in a flashback.

But there is no one narrating these events. So the possibility of the usual inanity attached to flashbacks is done away with.

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