|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In Vishal Bhardwaj’s Mumbai underworld thriller, Kaminey, released in 2009, Shahid Kapoor played two identical twins. One was the likeable Guddu, the guy with a stutter. The other was the crooked Charlie, a racecourse punter, who spoke with a lisp. The latter won all the plaudits. Cut to 2014. Ali Abbas Zafar’s Gunday tells the story of a duo of unstoppable gangsters, who control the illegal coal trade in and around Kolkata in the days when the eastern metropolis was called Calcutta. They romance the heroine, sing and dance, fall out with each other, and fight the law to keep their empire of crime intact. Bad boys have always held the Mumbai movie industry and Indian filmgoers in thrall. In 1993, Subhash Ghai conjured up a Khalnayak in the guise of Sanjay Dutt. The actor’s real-life brush with the law bolstered the film’s boxoffice fortunes. The anti-hero in Hindi cinema can be traced back to the 1943 Ashok Kumar starrer, Kismet, produced by Bombay Talkies and directed by Gyan Mukherjee. The persona of the protagonist who rebels against the world in order to right the wrongs that have been done to him or his family quickly found its way into the Mumbai cinema lexicon. The dacoit film — a unique Indian genre akin to the Hollywood western — evolved in the 1960s and 1970s and gave many of Hindi cinema’s leading men like Dharmendra and Vinod Khanna an opportunity to showcase their masculinity on the big screen. The likes of Sunil Dutt (in Mother India), Amitabh Bachchan (in Deewar and Trishul) and Shah Rukh Khan (in Baazigar and Darr), among others, have famously played edgy anti-heroes over the years. Although romance and comedies continue to dominate the Hindi cinema landscape, rebels with a cause have been the rage since Salman Khan slipped into the crisp uniform of the cynical small-town cop Chulbul Pandey in Abhinav Kashyap’s smash hit, Dabangg. A cross between a tough policeman and an invincible street fighter, the character thinks nothing of bending the rules, beating his adversaries black and blue, and making money on the sly. But despite his repeated violations of conventional law, he remains a ‘good guy’ fighting for those that are oppressed and powerless. This is certainly not the same as an Aamir Khan playing a classy Chicago thief in Dhoom 3. It is quite another matter that the antagonist in the plot eventually overshadows the heroes — crime-busters Jai and Ali. When the audience roots for the suave and charismatic law-breaker, it becomes obvious that the lure of the forbidden should never be underestimated. Both screenwriters and actors are increasingly being drawn to the grey areas of morality because it allows for a far more complex exploration of human behaviour than clear black and white characterisation does. It is easy to see why Bollywood actors love playing characters that hover between good and evil and resort to methods that are not always legally or morally acceptable. It enables them to dig deeper into themselves and showcase their versatility. The younger lot of Bollywood stars — Ranveer Singh, Arjun Kapoor and Ranbir Kapoor — have, in fact, built their careers on roles with dark overtones. Ranveer Singh already has four such outings behind him — Ladies Vs Ricky Bahl, Lootera, Ram-Leela and Gunday. Arjun Kapoor, who made his acting debut in Habib Faisal’s Ishqzaade, a version of Romeo and Juliet set in a fictional Uttar Pradesh town, was the ideal choice to play the foil to Ranveer’s bad boy in Gunday. Ranbir Kapoor, too, has had his share of troubled screen characters. The eponymous figure in Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar and the self-absorbed Bunny in Ayan Mukerji’s Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani were anything but conventional Hindi film heroes. Ranbir went a step further with Besharam, where he plays the role of a young man who throws caution to the wind in his attempts to get ahead in life. Pushing the limits of morality is clearly cool these days. And it isn’t just the younger actors that are furthering this trend. Ishqiya and Dedh Ishqiya, both directed by Abhishek Chaubey and produced by Vishal Bhardwaj, have given us Babban and Khalujaan (Arshad Warsi and Naseeruddin Shah), two conmen, who stop at absolutely nothing. Imtiaz Ali’s latest film, Highway, is an unconventional Hindi film in more ways than one. Its central premise is predicated on a complete blurring of the line separating innocence and iniquity. A gangster kidnaps a wealthy young girl days ahead of her wedding and hits the road to avoid being nabbed by the law. As the abductor flees across several states of India with the captive, a bond develops between the two as they discover each other’s scarred soul. In classical theatre, the depiction of the rise and fall of evil is meant to be cathartic, a cleansing exercise, for the audience. Highway is pretty much an extension of that creative logic — it projects a criminal act and its aftermath as therapeutic for both the perpetrator and the victim. Who would have ever though that Bollywood would one day go down that highway?
|
|||
|
|
|||
