Ta Ra Rum Pum

It is a near perfect fake and a huge testimony to Sidharth Anand’s abilities as a good film faker. Let us hope that someday he quits the school of film faking and turns to filmmaking. He may succeed if he has just a little will to cross that thin line - the DVD line. He may have to donate his DVD library to wannabe film fakers and start thinking and imagining and taxing his brains a little more.

But it can be a difficult decision. Unless he feels ashamed of what he has been doing, he will continue to walk the least demanding path and waste his time, talent, and life on producing fakes of dubious masterpieces or performing ‘cut and paste’ jobs. What is it that would motivate him to transcend his mediocrity? Cinema audiences won’t. They have got conditioned to acknowledge and applaud imitation art as the real thing.

The demented and brain-dead multiplex and mall generation suffers from this malady in particular. Anand will have to motivate himself if he wants to come out of the rut. Will he do it?

He may not. Buoyed by the box-office success of his second film under the Yashraj banner, he may not even recognise these fatal flaws. Moreover, film faking is an inherited and probably incurable debility plaguing us since the advent of cinema in this part of the world.

What are the pluses of TRRP? It is the first Indian film to achieve an almost seamless integration of computer graphics with actual film footage. The special effects and the stunts are world class. It is comparable with known Hollywood films of this genre, more or less. It also has that special heart-warming Indian touch with its blatant emotionalism and song and dance routine. And it has Saif Ali Khan, one of the most natural and free-flowing actors of modern times, perfectly cast and characterised. Of course, due credit must also go to Siddharth for reinventing a camera-conscious Javed Jaffery as a beautiful actor in Salaam Namastey and yet again in TRRP. It has a screenplay that moves without major hitches and hiccups, with a definite beginning, middle, and end. It has a sound premise in the story of an underdog who overcomes all odds for the love of his family.
 

Why do you call it a fake then? Because it is a fake. The stamp of fakery is all there to be seen, in the film’s  structure, art direction, shot divisions, scenes, scenarios, performances, and dialogues. It has an obviously predictable and formulaic structure, supplemented by stolen ideas. It has a whole lot of plagiarized stuff you have been seeing in countless genre-oriented Hollywood films with great regularity.
 

‘Genre’ is the favourite term of film marketing whiz kids. It simplifies their task of evaluating the moneymaking potential of a film idea. It is also easy on the filmmaker since he works within the safe and secure confines of the genre determined by the studio bosses. More often than not, filmmakers act like lazy bums and tell the same story with slight variations and twists here and there and deliver a fake of a film. The greatest of directors have been doing it of late. ‘Departed’ is an apt example.

Indian filmmakers like Siddharth Anand and Adi Chopra, and a whole lot of others, fake these original fakes. As a result, their best effort turns out to be a worthless cinematic offering.

Why can’t there be a marriage of art and commerce? There must be. Filmmaking is not like creating a painting or writing a book. It costs a lot of money. The film must recover its cost. So, there is nothing wrong if you use smart marketing strategies and tactics to make your project viable. But why do you have to purloin scenes and sequences from ‘Life Is Beautiful’ and sundry other films without paying a royalty and turn your film into a devalued second-hand product?

What is the hurry? What you need is a few days or months and the penchant to take the trouble of doing some inspired writing. You spend so much time and money in getting your visual effects and stunts right. Can’t you develop a story and screenplay that has not a single trace of a Hollywood film of that genre and is refreshingly original, truly inspired, and has unique Indian touches?

What do you miss? You miss the opportunity to be counted among all-time greats, to see your film getting released simultaneously in 5000 theatres worldwide, to have big studios lining up to sign you up for film projects with their millions and billions, to expand the market for Indian films, to win international name, fame and recognition, and to be feted and felicitated by the practitioners of arts, craft, and the business of cinema across the globe.
 

 

This kind of fakery is a bad bargain all the way. Look at the box office collections of Dhoom 2 and Krish and compare them with those of Spiderman. You have been deservingly making peanuts. What stops you from picking up an internationally proven genre and making a film that is a few steps ahead of the best that genre has had to offer till date?

You have seen the best. You should be doing better than that. Why don’t you do it? You have everything now -- money, market, stars, and global reach. And you have the cost advantage. Then why do you resort to daylight thievery?  Why do you show such a lack of confidence in yourself?

RKS

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