The Hindu Business Line : Sitting it out showbiz

The first to come out, just after the strike broke, was a campus caper, starring two newcomers. The other was a raunchy comedy. In the days when sab chalta hai (anything goes) was the norm, both Kal Kissne Dekha a nd Paying Guests would have done average business, and eventually broken even. But now things are different. The strike has impacted moviegoers in a way the disputants clearly hadn’t bargained for: during the two-month deprivation, viewers have had time to become far more discriminatory. Bad stuff is now being outright rejected.

Campus romances have been a Bollywood staple, but it’s one genre which has made almost no progress down the years. For too long, leading actors desperately tried to do the youth thing, looking way past their expiry dates. There have been countless instances of 40-somethings regressing to teenhood, in all their wrinkly glory. Only when Karan Johar showed up in the mid-1990s, and put his trio of trim and tidy stars in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai in Gap tees and Gas jeans, did students start looking their age. It was another matter that the college and the kids in KKHH looked as if they would be more at home in an American high-school. We forgave the director his setting because we were so relieved to see young people play young people, even though Shah Rukh and Kajol and Rani weren’t exactly spring chickens.

Sadly, ‘star collegians’ haven’t changed drastically, even when audience tastes have: students (and teachers) are more likely to arouse merriment than credibility. There was simply no excuse for Kal Kissne Dekha to be the way it was: the main character feels less like someone who’s come to get some education in an institution, than a clueless simpleton looking for romance. Classroom activity is minimal: the collection of bit parts and main actors spend more time sprawling on the steps of a building which is so obviously a set, or singing and dancing on ocean fronts.

Producer Vashu Baghnani has had a long innings of making commercially viable make-believe, but his last couple of movies bombed. Son Jackky, whom Vashu was launching in Kal Kissne Dekha was Young Gen Bollywood, all gym ready and blow dried, all set to showcase his dancing and fighting skills. Leading lady Vaishali Desai, grandniece of Manmohan Desai, also had Bollywood lineage, and the training meant to make people camera-ready. But both father and son forgot two crucial things: films and characters need to be believable, and engaging. Their film was neither.

Paying Guests tried building on formula. Put men in drag, girls in bikinis, throw in a series of off colour jokes, and shake it all up so that it settles in vaguely familiar foreign locations (in this, they are in Pattaya beach), and there’s your movie. There have been a spate of recent films (Dhamaal, Dhol, Krazzy 4, Sunday, Golmaal, and its sequel Golmaal Returns) which have created a format for this kind of film: jobless guys, bikinied babes, a sprinkling of lesser comics, and a complete absence of plot or planning. Some of these movies hit the jackpot, urging others to try me-toos.

Two of Bollywood’s best comics have the job of keeping Paying Guests going. Shreyas Talpade is a versatile actor who can do anything he tries his hand at. He does a good job, but he’s done the drag-gag act in two recent films. It’s all very déjÀ vu. Jaaved Jafferi is not served as well, because he’s made to romance an awkward girl, and do the boogie woogie: in his TV show of the same name, he does it with zest; in his film, he borrows awkwardness from the girl he’s been paired with.

In earlier, easier days, this film would have found a ready audience. In fact, this is what it was supposed to do, but now, having found that there’s more to life than bad movies, viewers are electing to stay away. It wasn’t as if there were no films during April, May and June. Hapless critics like this one had to suffer through the kind of garbage that wouldn’t have found screening space if the multiplexes hadn’t been dry. Nameless, faceless horrors made by wannabe producers and so-called actors bereft of either art or practice, had steadily streamed out, successfully keeping film lovers out of theatres.

Waiting for the strike to end, a multiplex rep had spoken of the deluge after the drought, warning that there would be more movies than viewers. Sorry, but that doesn’t look like a possibility right now. Today, the first of the big ones is out — New York, from the Yashraj stable, but not a standard studio romcom. On the lines of director Kabir Khan’s previous Kabul Express, the new offering is meant to be a gritty tale of three friends coming to grips with a paranoid world order after 9/11.

Will it hit the jackpot? It’s all in the hands of the shrewder, cannier viewer.