Laaga Chunari Mein Daag
Aaaditya Chopra and Subhash K. Jha are wondering about the box office failure of this film. Jha Ji has already concluded. Indian audiences are not interested in watching films with a strong woman protagonist. They don’t want to watch films with rona dhona. They want only to laugh. Multiplex audiences are being blamed. The same guys were hailing the multiplex revolution until a few days ago. It will bring discerning, high income, intellectually inclined, and artistically evolved audiences back to the cinema hall. Some filmmakers went to the extent of declaring that they make films for the multiplex audiences alone.
Whatever be the classification of our film audiences, they are cinematically literate. You cannot bull shit them forever. They may buy your star power, hype, and hoopla once, or may be twice. You cannot be third time lucky. So, it is useless calling them churlish or childish. You should better look within, and discover the causes of failure. And those who keep harping on the ‘unpredictability of the box office’ theme should know that audience behavior is most predictable. They just want to watch a good film. In fact, they have lowered their expectations so much that even a few inspired moments in a film are good enough to give them a sense of fulfillment.
Is ‘Laga Chunari Mein Daag’ a good film? It is not. You don’t take anything back from it, neither the message nor the masala. One of my friends found the photography of the Banaras ghats and gullies very inspiring. A Film’s frame should look bright and beautiful. Even a burning ghat should have a carnival like feel and look. Jai ho Osho maharaj ki. Mrityu ko utsav bana dena chahiye. Garib ko ameer jaisa jeena chahiye.
This
is what the new breed of filmmakers does. They keep trying to bring
Hollywood visuals to Bollywood. Pradeep Sarkar turns Banaras into a
city of perpetual gaiety and gamboling of the Bollywood variety,
unrelatable, soulless, with no sense of time or place. You cannot sense
the city’s character. He tries to reproduce gaudy colour plates of
Banaras life as depicted in those cheap coffee table books on the city
and that is what some idiots among new generation filmmakers take to be
the aesthetics of cinema. And that is the difference, between a good
and a bad filmmaker. A good filmmaker can turn roadside filth into a
stunning visual statement.
Sarkar creates characters that are as fake as some of the temples of Banaras built by Marwari moneybags. They fail to win the sympathy of the audience. Let us analyse the character of Badki, played by Rani Mukherji. She wears designer dresses, and prances around singing songs on Banaras ghats, and gullies, instead of helping her mother stitch blouses, and petticoats or taking tuitions to make ends meet. Why will anyone cry if a girl like her is forced, by ultra-simplistic and ridiculous circumstances, into a call girl racket? Had she been a simple middle class girl, she would have won the sympathy of the audience as an underdog. Now, Badki’s is the central character of the film and it turns out to be bogus. You cannot take the film anywhere after this failure, however hard you may try. Let Aaditya Chopra visit Chak De yet again. Had the Chak De girls like Chautala and Kaur been glamorized like Rani, the film would have vanished without a trace.
A wrongly defined character stunts the actor, and leaves him/her with weak motivations. And LCMD could have been a great film only if it had sterling performances. There is nothing much in the story. It is literally a one-line story. A middle class uneducated girl takes to prostitution to save her family from destitution and doom and is finally rescued by a knight in a shining armor. That is it. You can only add to this by assaying the journey of the girl and exploring the dramatic moments of her life and character in depth. Nothing happens. The central character becomes the negative point in the tale. It is so dull and boring. And who says crying kills the appetite of filmgoers? If it is handled well, it makes people cry with the character. It does not happen here though. People stay aloof, uninvolved, and unmoved. And the film flounders.
Let us have a look at the screenplay of the film. It is a designer screenplay, more like a simple arithmetic equation. Two plus two is equal to four, four multiplied by five is twenty, twenty divided by ten is two, and two multiplied by zero is zero. An arithmetical screenplay is always a zero sum enterprise. It looks good on paper and remains as dry and colorless as the paper itself after it is made into a film. The screenplay of LCMD has all the twists and turns a tale can have but it goes dud. Why? It is a predictable tale, known to everyone, from beginning to end.
As I said earlier, nothing but great performances could have made it work. The screenplay does not create enough room to build up high drama. In fact it hurries through whatever dramatic moments there are. Nothing stays with the audience; they come out empty handed, and feel cheated. We don’t have a single scene in which the central character sits in a solitary place and cries over her plight. She does not even cry when her knight in the shining armor arrives to rescue her. Where are the cathartic moments? The screenplay has almost no real rona dhona scenes. And the actors muck up a few that are there with their obvious fakery.
Aur Jha Ji kehtein hain ki log auraton ka rona dhona nahin dekhna chahte. Arre na hassante ho, na daraate ho, na intellectually stimulate karte ho, aur na hi rulaate ho, to film kyon banaate ho? Banaras ki Ganga kinaare ki haveli, ghat, aur galiyaan, Mumbai shehar ka flat, office, hotel ki lobby, aur shopping mall dikhane ke liye?
There is a general perception that comedies are money-spinners. Everyone is trying to climb on to the comedy bandwagon without really understanding why do they work. It is not just the gags and the jokes folks, it is the performances that cast the magic spell on viewers; as if our actors get a chance to showcase their talent only in comedies these days, doing remarkable character sketches. They have learnt to do it so well, with élan and rare chutzpah, thanks to some inspired writing and competent direction.
That is all for now. I hope makers of LCMD learn from their mistakes.
RKS
