Bollywood loves remakes: from adaptations and frame-by-frame copies of Hollywood and world cinema to reboots of Hindi classics and regional films, it’s been there, done that. Led by a nose for profit, it regularly churns out fascimiles of successful movies in the hope of replicating their box-office success.
Kosher enough for an industry whose raison d’etre has largely been about money. The problem, however, arises when movies that aren’t pulp cinema are chosen to be recast in a mainstream mould: they end up mauling both the nuances and the aesthetics of the original, not to speak of creating logical holes through which the entire film could sink if our audiences were a little more critical.
The prettification game
Yup, the trigger for this column is Dhadak , the Vogue version of Nagraj Manjule’s remarkable Marathi film Sairat. Now why Karan Johar chose to remake a hyper-realistic film on caste, as many wondered, is not really the question; love stories are Bollywood’s favourite genre, and Sairat was a humongous earner to boot. The issue is, when the content of a film clearly supersedes the money it’s made, shouldn’t film-makers be a little more sensitive to what made it tick in the first place? No, says Bollywood, which has a fixed blueprint—ostentatious upscaling—and never mind if it subverts the very soul of the original.
Remake after ersatz remake of the small film stands testimony to this compulsive and unthinking tarting-up: slums, chawls and villages get replaced with picturesque locales and mansions, Dior and DKNY displace the local dresswalla, and au naturel faces get coats of high-end pancake. In Dhadak , not only is the humble Solapur village of Sairat replaced by touristy Udaipur but both protagonists are given camera-friendly waterfront residences (the ‘poor’ leading man’s is justified as a restaurant his family runs). However, because the movie is more or less a scene-by-scene copy, the girl, who’s supposed to belong to a royal family, studies at the same downmarket school that the boy does and frolics in a local pond, not a heated swimming pool at her palace-turned-hotel. Plausibility takes a flying leap over the moon but then plausibility has never been a concern in mainstream Bollywood.
Bizarre tweaks
This penchant for look over logic ends up putting credibility question marks over remakes derived from the best originals. In YRF’s Laaga Chunari Mein Daag, adapted from the award-winning Marathi film Doghi , the protagonist is a woman who does sex work to support her family back home. LCMD ’s makers not only chose to shift the rural background of Doghi ’s family to a haveli in Benaras but also softened the reason behind the girl becoming a sex worker: where Doghi ’s protagonist is allowed to be sold into the trade by her hardened-by-poverty mother, LCMD pussyfoots around the issue, making it about a misunderstanding over a phone call that leads to Vibhavari Sahai agreeing to sleep with a man who promises her a job.
All this is perhaps even semi-condonable for a commercial production; what isn’t is the utterly bizarre transformation of Vibhavari into a full-fledged call girl in the span of two short scenes. First, her sympathetic new friend, who’d earlier steadfastly refused to introduce her to his lecherous boss, personally drives her to the latter’s hotel room (Vibha even stoically hopes that the man will be pleased with her bedroom performance!). And then comes an even more jaw-dropping moment: after the boss reneges on his promise of a job, Vibha straightaway becomes a call girl, egged on by the friend’s friend who inexplicably sees this as Vibha’s revenge for the rape and on the entire male race. Also worth noting is the fact that the woman appears in the movie only to achieve this end.
Glamour over logic
This obsession with glamorising lessens the impact of many a story and situation (at least for those of us who don’t indefinitely suspend disbelief). In Drishyam , I found it difficult to accept that the chic-looking young mother with an affected accent was supposed to be a semi-educated rural woman; who, when confronted with a Peeping Tom blackmailing her innocent daughter with an undressing video, sobbingly implores him not to upload it instead of hauling him to the cops. (The original Malayalam film, set in a remote Kerala village, was marginally more believable.) In Baghbaan , clearly based on the evergreen play Natasamrat and the Marathi film Tu tithe mee , the heartbreaking pathos of an old couple badly treated and forcibly separated by their children is totally lost—the youthful and very attractive Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini don’t inspire any such sentiment and the very spacious house they live in does nothing to establish their financial helplessness either. I could go on but you get the drift.
Nakal ke liye bhi akal zaroori hai (One needs intelligence even to copy) goes the popular Hindi maxim. Alas, in Bollywood, with its box-office priority, akal is mostly given short shrift.
