Every weekend, my parents would take me to the town’s drive-in theatre. I’d watch the latest Bollywood movie perched on the bonnet of our green fiat. Between appetising wafts of pao bhaji and Gujarati pizzas from the picnic spreads opposite every car, amid cackles of static emitted by ancient metallic speakers near each window, I would gape at the humungous five-storey screen.
People didn’t move on it. They moved in it.
Reading cinema
After every film, I’d try my darnedest to convince my folks to drive out from behind this enigmatic contraption. I had a theory. I believed that the ‘studio building’ firmly holding this screen was where all the heroes, heroines and villains hid between shows. They performed behind the transparent curtain, occupied erected sceneries for three hours, before running amok in their secret green rooms.
My worries revolved around the behavioural science (fiction): Where do they go when their storytellers are asleep at night? Are they still alive when not performing? Did Raj Malhotra, freed from the shackles of entertaining us, take off for another Europe tour when our vehicles queued up to exit at midnight? Was this Simran’s cue to sleep off all the stress while Aditya Chopra readied to ‘control’ her live next evening? When creators are stuck on a certain page, do these fantastical faces simply mull around at locations? Is it during these independent phases that their minds become their own?
Much later, on a bleak July morning, I stepped out of a swanky theatre. Without the nostalgic sound of a hundred engine motors revving up towards the end credits, despite the synthetic functionality of new-age cinema-going experiences, I was that 10-year-old boy at the drive-in again. I had read a Christopher Nolan film. Inception , for what it signified, became a deeply significant milestone in my career. It would change the way I thought about my own mind — and the audacity, and endless possibilities, of cinema. A mega-scale, inexplicably coherent story about dreams had sparked in me the euphoria to dream again. This time, I wanted to sneak into that building. And I wanted to explore its space without finding an answer.
Reliving experiences
I started to write. An idea, the most “resilient parasite”, soon began to assume the form of a script that would, over two intensely private years, teach me everything I needed to know — not just about the craft, but about the way creators think. The way they de-think. I sat at home and worked mercilessly, relentlessly, on a tale called Block . It started off as that childhood musing: where do characters from a novel go during something as trivial as a writer’s block? What is this parallel intermediate universe they occupy?
I wrote about an Indian author who, to get over the untimely death of his young wife, begins to write a melancholic biography about their life together. It hadn’t dawned upon me that I was a writer, too, creating a semi-autobiographical story reflecting my own recent experiences: the death of a serious relationship. This script became my only way to relive it.
When the author took breaks to grieve between writing, his characters — effectively younger versions of himself and his wife — traverse an incomplete, no-rules fantasy world called Block. In the downtime between being ‘summoned’ back into the book, they could do as they pleased, across places that had already been written. They could fall from a balcony and wake up at the station they first met at, or the cramped restroom they first kissed in. Yet, they were finite, because their existence was too. Their puppeteer, after all, was a broken man.
These machinations were a dreamy manifestation of my own memories of a phase I wished more of. Subconsciously, I too wished that these memories assumed a life of their own, for its faces to miraculously contrive and alter the ending of their story. And in turn, my story. Block became about just that. The past scrambling for a future — a heart battling to come to terms with its tragic destiny — offset by its characters fighting time to reverse fate.
Familiar narratives
Some years later, Vikramjit Singh’s Roy hit the screens. In it, a maverick, womanising director (Arjun Rampal) struggles through the last film of his franchise. As he writes on location abroad, and falls for an NRI filmmaker (Jacqueline Fernandez), the escapades of his fictitious protagonist (Ranbir Kapoor), a suave thief, vaguely reflect his moods through the suspense of one final art heist. Immediately, I found myself absorbed by the familiar narrative. I silently braced myself, as the mythical anti-hero occasionally stared into infinity from a stationary boat — like a video game on hold — to suggest inactivity by his real-life creator, a raging anti-hero of his own accord. Yet, this was nowhere as complicated as Block , scratching perhaps only the first dream-level of the film-within-film template.
Roy didn’t go the whole hog. It revelled in its exotic perception of the world it displayed, instead of manufacturing a new one. Rampal’s character didn’t warrant empathy, his quasi-British scotch-and-cigarettes writing bouts made it look like his was in fact the storybook life. He didn’t even seem an honest-enough artist (he is making the Guns trilogy) to begin with. I identified, during various points, where Singh may have reeled himself in from affording his vision the inherent depth it deserved. I imagined the precise moments where, faced with two paths, he chose the shorter one — the route he (or the powers that be) assumed would tickle the audience’s intellect instead of challenging it.
Though the intent had seemed novel, in hindsight I feel immensely let down. I feel sorry for every Block , and for every courageous innovator who was probably discouraged by Roy ’s failure. Once you delve into the unknown, you inherit the responsibility of full conviction, and explore it wholeheartedly, not go half-steam on what is the first and last chance to dream your own way. For when it tanks critically and commercially, you’ve closed the door to an entire potential genre for successors. Of talented pretenders. Of ambitions that may now assume a more “acceptable” form of accessibility. Visually exploring the human mind isn’t a mainstream option anymore, thanks to Roy ’s conceptually compromised nature.
Space and time
The disappointment of witnessing something new, and brave, within the commercial space fail spectacularly is worse than watching the same old non-stories earn millions in a deceptively populous nation. Roy , and to some extent, Baar Baar Dekho (which used an unheralded time-travel narrative to mount yet another conventional romcom; that is, safety within risks), are not merely flops, but misused opportunities whose immediate damage will never be apparent on our cinematic landscape. But each time we rue the lack of “Nolan-ish” plots or “Shyamalan-esque” twists, I think about these few careless men and women who walked away after rolling up an entire culture of inventiveness as if it were dusty for-exchange yoga mats. They opted for more space-time instead of reaching the moon.
At no point did Roy feel like it was being made to fulfil a lifetime of untapped curiosity. Somewhere along the way, the 10-year-old kid at a multiplex made peace with the whir of the noisy projector, instead of pondering about the drive-in pillar that gripped the s screen. Because this film forsook basic grammar for personality, without quite being personal enough, thereby making sure there would never be another of its kind again. There may be no more adventurers who try to discover the intimacy of writing a story by telling many within it. Simply writers who want to sell the easiest adventure. While several potential characters wait indefinitely on an anchored boat, in Hindi cinema’s lengthiest ‘Block’.
The writer is a freelance film critic, writer and habitual solo traveller
