6

Jul

BOLLYWOOD IN IPL MODE

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Amitabh Srivastava

Seeing Neena Gupta as a grandmother in ‘Lust Stories’ is not such a shock now that we know her.

But her advice to her granddaughter about to get married in the film to ‘test’ her fiancée physically before getting married is not so common yet in Indian couples going for arranged marriages.

With this Indian cinema seems to have reached a stage where producers and directors are willing to invest in the character roles as much as the heroes and heroines, sometimes even more.

This is a drastic change from the time that there was a set formula for a Bollywood film - a larger than life hero, a sarvgun sampan   heroine, a villain and sometimes a comedian, the last role was later taken over by the hero himself and for some time by the villain while Kader Khan and Shakti Kapoor ruled the roost.

Not that there were no films with large families. The Tarachand Barjatyas and the Manmohan Desais always wanted to present a whole family who could come in handy for ceremonial and colourful functions like marriages and barats etc.

But the difference between today and those times is that even though there were multiple characters in Hum Aapke Hain Kaun or Hum dil de Chuke Sanam the story revolved around the hero and heroine who had to be there in every frame. Others were there only because they were either for them or against them. Each of them had to be related to or connected to the hero or the heroine to be relevant.

But things have started changing in the new scripts with the heroes and heroines being brought down their pedestals.

In ‘Shubh Mangal Zyada Savdhaan’ for instance, the focus for the most of the time of the film from scene one was on Gajraj Rao the eccentric scientist who is fond of growing black cauliflowers, and his wife Neena Gupta ever ready to take off her Saree when he is in tension. And mind you Gajraj Rao is no way connected to the hero Ayushmaan Khurrana. Rao happens to the father of Khurranna's gay partner Jitender.

This elderly pair Neena Gupta and Gajraj Rao seem to have carried on their endearing and shocking affair from ‘Badhai Ho’ where Ayushmaan got a solid support from their presence in the film and reportedly he had some say in their being cast again in his latest venture.

They are not the only ones who are getting the thumbs up by audiences in a welcome democratisation of Bollywood cinema where roles are being written for them by script writers.

This has been going on for some years now. Even a super hit film worth a watch again and again like 'Tanu Weds Manu Again' with a powerful heroine like Kangana Ranaut had a lot of characters who had been given some very important slots.

Besides old veterans of theatre and TV like Seema Pahwa and Pankaj Tripathi (the later is becoming a huge pull even in advertising and OTT productions) there are characters like the irresistible Jimmy Shergill and a Mohammad Zeeshan Ayub as Chintu, the lawyer who would not give up either the house that he lives in or the heroine till the last scene of the film. Even while appreciating the super ending of the film viewers feel that the film would have been incomplete without either of the side characters.

This new trend has started with cinema going back to the small towns where there are joint families and multiple characters.

These are not the villages where a Dilip Kumar would win the applause of the village damsels by winning a Kabaddi match or where a Manoj Kumar would extol the virtues of village life versus urban life holding a plough in his hand.

These small towns are as full of scoundrels as the big cities. But no one put the spot light on them like now.

The new writers and directors don't have to take viewers to Switzerland or France to hold their interests. They could easily do the same in Kanpur or Bareilly. These small towns are as mod as the bigger metropolitan cities though they try to hide their realty under a cloak of secrecy.

Could anyone have imagined a girl in ‘Bareilly Ki Barfi’ asking a prospective groom coming to interview her, if he is a virgin even as the boy cringes in embarrassment.

Had it not been for the Tanu weds Manu series where would we find a delightful character like Deepak Dobhriyal.

He has been one of the finds of this new cinema. With neither the looks or the glamour of a hero of even an Ayushmaan Khuranna,  Dobhriyal has been vowing viewers with his performances in films after film. A student of theatre under Arvind Gaur for seven years Dobhriyal has been seen in Omkara, Delhi 6, Maqbool and the Hindi Medium of 2007 and the last film to be screened before Corona broke out ‘Angrezi Medium’ where he plays another powerful role with Irrfan Khan in the lead.

Yet another character who is becoming an indispensable part of the new cinema is a very ordinary looking Aparshakti Khurana who is being given roles as big as and some times even more important than the hero.

In films like Luka Chipi or the more recent Pati Patni or Woh he provides a very important foil to the hero and one can't imagine the film without him.

I somehow feel the resurgence of this new trend is like the IPL of Indian cinema.

Till the IPL came into its own, some very gutsy cricketers were playing adventurous cricket in their towns and villages but never got noticed by the national selectors.

Similarly, these new roles being written for character actors are not only giving a new lease of life to veterans like Neena Gupta and Gajraj Rao or Seema Pahwa but also sucking in talent from theatre from small towns which was only waiting to be noticed.

It's a double whammy for viewers as well as the actors and would hopefully prompt more parents to allow their children to plan their dreams to enter theatres/cinema from childhood itself rather than wasting their energy, time and money becoming mediocre engineers and doctors and applying for jobs of peons or gardeners in government offices.

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