Last week, I happened to watch Tanu Weds Manu Returns a good two years after its release. Yes, it’s a fun film with a mind-blowing double lead performance but it also has something I’ve never seen in any film before — a character who suddenly vanishes into thin air. And no, I’m not talking of special effects.
Komal is kidnapped from her wedding by Pappi, her admirer who believes she’s in love with him. After he and his accomplices stun her and carry her off, she’s laid on a charpoy in a crowded basti while the characters attend to various other rigmaroles. And that’s the last we see of her (though she’s resurrected in the end credits in a lame attempt to tie up loose ends).
The curtailing of Komal’s story without so much as a decent script burial is the shoddy limit but it’s part of the standard practice of snipping off scenes — or characters, songs or subplots — in order to make the film crisper. The hacked portions don’t normally leave a trail — not a bloody one like Tanu Weds Manu Returns in any case — but once in a while, viewers do get the distinct feeling that something is missing.
Puzzling subtractions
Take Pink, where Amitabh Bachchan plays the defence lawyer of a young sexual assault victim. His character is a powerful and interesting one — but it’s also confusing. Why does he stare malevolently at and stalk the girl and her flatmates early on before suddenly turning concerned and offering his services as a lawyer? Does the otherwise pointless character of his bedridden wife — all of three or four scenes — hint at some previous tragedy? Putting two and two together, I had assumed that many scenes or an entire subplot — perhaps one where the lawyer and his wife lost their daughter to a similar experience — had been cut out of the final film. Well, no clue on the subplot but Amitabh Bachchan did mention on a TV show later how several scenes depicting the bipolarity of his character — “alternately laidback and over-excited” — had been snipped off. Perhaps that explains his schizophrenic behaviour with the girls.
Not all hacked scenes cause craters in the story or disfigure the logic of a film — there are some that barely hint at their once-existence and are caught only by the most perceptive. In the song ‘ Tu bin bataaye’ from Rang de Basanti, for instance , where the just-engaged Madhavan and Soha Ali Khan are with their delighted group of friends, a few split-second close-ups of Siddharth’s not-so-joyous face tell their own story. A couple of years after the film’s release, I had asked the film’s writer Rensil D’Silva about this during a screenwriting class, and he confirmed that there was indeed a one-sided love story subplot involving Siddharth and Soha that had to be cut out. (Interestingly, the two play Bhagat Singh and Durga Vohra in the film within the film but that’s another story.)
Leads to character
Some deleted scenes hold clues to not plot but character. In Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge ’s junked scenes, there’s one which has Amrish Puri’s verbal back story, touching on why he changed from a cheerful, happy-go-lucky man to an angry, bitter one. Although the dialogue is just a couple of lines, I thought it gave an insight into the character’s compulsions and a likely explanation for the iron control that he exercised over his daughter’s life — less out of patriarchal totalitarisnism and more because of the trust issues that he had with people. Had this aspect of his nature been elaborated on, perhaps the comical ‘ Ja Simran ja ’ moment in the climax would have sounded a wee bit more plausible.
Like DDLJ , Raman Raghav 2.0 also has a scrapped scene that sheds light on its protagonist’s motivations, but it doesn’t really do anything for the film. In the seven-minute-long monologue, the police officer, who’s on the verge of killing himself, spews hatred for his father and reveals a horrific secret from their joint past. Riveting as the scene is on its own, the lengthy exposition about where the character was coming from was, I felt, out of place in the dark, amoral universe of the film where both cop and murderer were unapologetically psychopathic. But then to each his own; several people thought the scene was like the missing piece that completes a jigsaw puzzle.
Delving into the ocean of scenes scrapped from the editing table (sometimes the screenplay) is an enlightening pastime. You find out that Pretty Woman ’s hooker was originally a drug addict dumped by her Prince Charming at the end. You realise why the soldiers in Saving Private Ryan, deputed to find a missing comrade in Nazi-occupied France, are undertaking such a vital operation on foot. You see how James Cameron almost trivialised the sinking of the Titanic with a dollop of black humour — by shooting a scene where a woman asks for “more ice” in her drink just as the giant iceberg, which is about to hit the ship, passes by in the window behind her. You even discover why Inglourious Basterds is spelt the way it is.
Treasure troves
Scenes that never made it to the final film have now found a happening new life on the Net and in ‘Director’s Cut’ DVDs. Indeed, in Hollywood, film-makers policed by the studios have even released entirely new edits of a film – closer to their original vision – in theatres. In Bollywood that’s unlikely to happen for a variety of reasons but perhaps film-makers could begin by putting out a compilation of significant deleted scenes that have some bearing on the overall film. It would make great viewing for sure.
The columnist is a freelance writer and editor
