Rock On

We cannot have it better than this out of a recycled theme. It is a major improvement over films like Jhankar Beats, and is nearly as good as countless non-descript Hollywood films of this genre.

Though the film is apparently about music and musicians, cinematic elements like competent direction and a well-written screenplay make it work. The female cast of the film does an excellent job in crucial scenes. The male actors have problems. Farhan (who plays Aaditya) is camera conscious and unnecessarily tense and is the weakest link in the film. And the best performance comes from the girl who plays Debbie, Arjun Ramphal’s wife. The other noteworthy actors are Prachi Desai who plays Aaditya’s wife, Purab Kohli, who plays the Killer Drummer, and Luke Kenny whose nuanced portrayal as Rob, a much-exploited soft-spoken music programmer, goes unnoticed since his character is least developed and underlined.

The high point of the film is the way the live concert scenes have been designed, choreographed, and shot. The emphasis is on recreating the impact of huge rock concerts abroad with thousands of frenzied fans going crazy over every move of their star. All known atmospherics that typify such events have been used to make it look grand, energetic, and musically charged. In this respect, Rock On succeeds hugely, vis-à-vis the previous Bollywood films of the genre. The addition of canned applause to the soundtrack of the songs creates the desired ‘live’ feel and impact and has been done very well. I don’t think many people will be humming the songs of this film, but the concert scenes will impact all. To that extent, the music of the film has played its assigned role to perfection.

The story of Rock On has nothing new to offer. It emulates the known elements of the films of this genre. There are no surprises and no new explorations. It is the story of four passionate musicians who had formed a struggling band named Musik in their wild youthful days. They parted ways over some ego issues. Their lives have not been the same after that though almost ten years have passed. By a quirk of fate and contrived circumstances, they get together. The dormant music bug is stimulated, and they return to their first love, revive their band, and after a few hiccups finally succeed in giving their last concert and sing their songs one more time.

The narration has a non-linear structure, the kind where you keep cutting back and forth between the past and the present to tell a story. This familiar ploy has been handled with great editorial finesse. Generally, our filmmakers fail in such complex enterprises undertaken in their over-enthusiasm to copy the style and approach of the master filmmakers of the west. The director, the editor, and the writer of Rock On have done an excellent job here. They have a good grasp of the language of cinema.

The major flaw of the film is its stereotypical characterizations. Because of it, while the film succeeds in recreating a rock concert’s atmospherics, it fails to capture the high-voltage passion that goes into the process of any creative work. The characters have no depth except those of Debbie and the drummer. Rob’s role is too minuscule and understated to be appreciated fully. The performances don’t really work in the non-concert scenes. The actors just look good in all those fun-filled collages, smiling, cracking jokes, jumping into ponds, necking with their girl-friends, and going on drives in an open jeep and of course performing on stage. They fail to impress beyond that.

Is it a landmark film? No. It is just a well-made film of its genre and the helmer Abhishek Kapoor deserves to be complimented for it. Actually, it is yet another fake with very few inspired scenes, songs, and dialogues in it. It is as fake as the kind of music wannabe Anglo-oriental Rock bands continue to create in the eastern hemisphere to perform in front of local fans who obviously try to fake the frenzy of the western rock concerts. Both fail miserably, the musicians and their fans, since they are not rooted in their soil.

I find it strange that they revel in being clones. Is it because they have developed a kind of disdain for their native art and culture thanks to their anglicized social milieu? Probably yes. They still have to grasp the fact that by imitation a donkey cannot become a horse. Unfortunately, in this case, the horse is trying to become a donkey without realizing that it can only turn into a ‘khachhar’ in the process.