Guru

Dhirubhai salvages Gurubhai

Forget Syd Field and his workshop. You don’t need lessons in film writing from anyone. You have a readily available resource - the news headlines. Simply pick up a subject, and start collecting anecdotes around it from sundry news reports, put all these together and your script is ready. You don’t have to work hard at integrating the stuff into a holistic story because the audience has very limited power of concentration. Don’t they watch a film during the breaks between their main activity of munching popcorns, slurping coffee and coke, holding hands, fondling breasts, caressing thighs, chewing lips, and talking into their cells? A few startling scenes, some funny gags, and two or three peppy songs are what they need to pass their judgement about a film.

Guru is an apt example of an anecdotal film. It is based on the life of Dhirubhai Ambani. It picks up snippets from various stories about him and puts them together with a good measure of songs and dances, and typical Gulzar lyrics, incomprehensible beyond their mukhdas and tukdas. Rahman does a neat job of almost drowning the words in his high-octane orchestral arrangement, and making them undecipherable. This saves the celebrated lyricist from a critical assessment of his monumental idiocies. Ignorance is bliss and the demented are geniuses.
 

It is a rags to riches story of a dreamer and a doer, a sound premise for an inspiring film, with great artistic and commercial possibilities. Alas, Mani Ratnam fails to exploit them to the hilt. Although he has all the resources to create a masterpiece, he mounts a commonplace extravaganza instead.
 

There can be only one valid excuse for this failure -- the absence of an Integrated Cinematic Vision (ICV) and the inability to break through a pigmy mind-set that cannot think beyond the borrowed externals of filmmaking - various elements of production design like make-up, costumes, sets, lighting, shot compositions, and colour tones. However, these atmospherics cannot and don’t work in the absence of an ICV.

Abhishek Bachhan seems to be the right choice for the role of Gurukant Desai. He has certain rusticity about him and a warm natural smile. It is undoubtedly a role of a lifetime for him. Does he deliver? He does as far as his looks are concerned. He also delivers his small monosyllabic dialogues all right. He falters when it gets demanding. Thankfully, the shallow script does not have too many of those moments and situations. Though it saves everyone some trouble, the jarring inconsistencies are painfully obvious.

There is this speech at the fag end of the film. Gurubhai faces the enquiry commission like the ‘Aviator’. He is supposed to floor all his opponents and come out as a winner. This is just a bit more demanding than the rest of the stuff. Abhishek Babu botches up the scene. In fact, whenever he has to speak more than a line of a dialogue, the ‘aatma’ of Big B takes command of his being and transforms him into Vijay Singh Chauhan. He has been doing this in films after films, unchecked and probably unaware of the fatal flaw.
 

 

Aishwarya Rai plays the role of Sujata, an ebullient and vibrant village belle, who loves dancing in the rain, prancing in the streams, going for a drive in a bullock cart, and playing with ducks and goats. Too familiar and predictable. The film is set in a Gujarat village. However, there is nothing Gujarati about this girl except her backless ‘choli’. Even the songs that she sings have Madrasi sounds.  While Guru is treated as a character in the film, who, as he gets old, grows a paunch, Sujata is the heroine of a typical celluloid opera. It is a fake character that makes no special demands on the actress. She gets married to Guru and that is when Aish starts ‘acting’ as Abhishek’s wife.

This is the problem with her. She is always acting, which is different from living a role. And how can there be an on-screen chemistry between two actors who are obviously faking their characters? I won’t blame them though. The film’s writer and director and its ‘anecdotal’ style are the root cause of the problem here. In such films, defining and developing the relationships between characters is a minor objective of the filmmaker. He compiles anecdotes in the name of reality, and then goes about stuffing the film with bits and pieces of smart aleck dialogues, a few funny scenes and interactions, impressive-looking shots to wow the audiences, and ‘music video’ interludes. More often than not, such films are not even timed correctly and are edited mindlessly to reduce their length, leaving gaping holes in their narrative structure. Guru is replete with such easily avoidable glitches, blunders, and sins.
 

A true filmmaker will die a hundred deaths before committing these unpardonable sins. He won’t repeat them at least. Mani Ratnam and his team keep repeating these follies. This seems to be his signature style. His actors, technicians, and other team members are also convinced that they are doing everything right. They all live in a paradise, a paradise of hardheaded and hardboiled nincompoops.

 

 
 What is it that saves this film from turning into a box office dud? It is Dhirubhai, the great visionary who brought about a paradigm shift in the way Indian business and industry was run -- a handful of business families would use their political and bureaucratic clout to corner licenses and permits and perpetuate the ‘license permit raj’. And of course, he is the father of today’s capital market. Khullamkhulla mourned his demise  under its column 'Truly Great'. Here is a link - TRULY GREAT

Since the film’s story is based on his life, it gets invested and imbued with meaning and substance by default. It is Dhirubhai’s soul that salvages Gurubhai and thanks to him, Abhishek and Aishwarya will have a great wedding party riding on the tide of Guru’s box-office success. They should walk barefoot to Patalganga to express their gratitude, and offer the late Dhirubhai Ambani their humble homage and seek his blessings chanting ‘Om Dhirubhai Namah’.

RKS

Archive of Film Reviews & Other Issues