Art is the most frustrating of human endeavours, for it isn’t about who’s fastest or which building is the tallest or who invented the device that saves the most energy. Superlatives in art have little meaning beyond what works for an individual, which really boils down to that most elusive of barometers: taste. Roger Federer versus Rafael Nadal has meaning — even if you “like” one over the other, there are indisputable statistics that let us measure who’s god of grass, who’s king of clay.
Charles Dickens versus Fyodor Dostoevsky, on the other hand, is meaningless. For every literary scholar who applauds the social sweep of the former, there’s one who’ll say it pales beside the latter’s psychological keenness.
That’s why our ears perk up when Pablo Picasso’s 1955 painting, ‘Les Femmes d’Alger’, is sold for $179.4 million, or when Vikram Seth is paid a $1.7 million advance for his sequel to A Suitable Boy . And that’s why we devour box-office updates. It’s a way to get around the abstractness of art. What you thought of Jurassic
World may vary from what your colleague or spouse felt about it. But there can be no dispute that the film opened in 3,220 North American locations the Thursday before last, and earned $18.5 million. It expanded to 4,273 venues on Friday, and won the weekend box office with U.S. $208,806,270, beating the opening of the previous record holder, The Avengers , by U.S. $1,367,562.
These numbers have little to do with our enjoyment of a movie. Indeed, the fact that we went out in droves to watch a movie only means that we were taken in by the hype and marketing and decided that this was the movie we were going to watch that weekend. There’s no guarantee we are going to actually like the movie. And yet, sometimes, there are small films like Piku and Tanu Weds Manu Returns that are well-liked and grow by word-of-mouth — and in these cases too, it’s gratifying to see how much money these films end up making. I didn’t care, personally, for Tanu Weds Manu Returns , but how amazing that a film with no star value to speak of has grossed Rs. 19.25 crore nett in its third week. (As comparison, consider Bombay Velvet , which grossed Rs. 22 crore in its first week.) Not only are we seeing David beat Goliath, we now know the velocity of the slingshot.
Will future generations remember Tanu Weds Manu Returns the way we recall earlier blockbusters like Mughal-e-Azam and Sholay ? While you argue about that, let’s just consider that we, as a nation, have embraced the movie to such an extent that it’s become possible to talk about it alongside those earlier ones, as an All Time Blockbuster. The proof? It’s total business now stands at nearly Rs. 135 crore nett. No one can argue with that.
baradwaj.r@thehindu.co.in
