Salman Khan’s ‘Bajrangi Bhaijaan’ reaffirms that real hero of the movie is ‘Story’

I couldn’t help laughing, but then I sobered up rapidly. The comment is telling. About the superstar, who has long abandoned all pretense of playing to a plot. And about how the film industry functions, especially the reigning Khan troika, which pretty much dictates what the Bollywood big boys’ club does. Shah Rukh’s directors do try giving him some kind of a story, even if he mostly ends up playing himself. Aamir takes a stab at playing characters, and manages, once in a while, to do so. But Salman and his team have no such worries. The plot has been deemed irrelevant, whether it is borrowed from a south Indian blockbuster, or not. His fans show up, as long as he shows up, jangling that turquoise bracelet, swinging his hip and waist, buff biceps to the fore. Why bother with other pesky things?

Cut to his latest which actually has a story. How do those self-same fans, and those who watch Salman movies to watch his fans watch Salman, deal with this?
Another caller on the same day expressed disbelief and disappointment after watching the film. “Kya ho gaya hai Salman ko? Pit ke aata hai, peet ke nahin (What’s happened to Salman? He didn’t even pulp the bad guys; he got bashed instead)”. This is the kind of fan for whom Khan’s dialogues should run like this oft-quoted one: “Dil mein aata hoon, dimaag mein nahin (the heart understands Salman, not the mind)”. That is what Bhaijaan has proudly preached, while being human, glossing over such inconvenient facts as deaths of animals and humans, and inimical court cases.

In Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Salman plays a “good” person, so good in fact, that he is incapable of lying or dissembling. And we all know how that pans out. Bad boys are all very well, up to a point. But we take only the good people home.

It matters not that the film’s premise is a huge stretch: our hero, a simple, even slow (he’s flunked many classes many times) fellow sets out to re-unite a little lost girl with her family which lives across the border. I will reveal a spoiler, because by the time you read this, the whole world and its aunt would have already seen the film: our Hanuman-worshipping Bajrangi, aka Pawan (yes, the reference to the Pawan-putra monkey god is so in your face that it is unmissable) barrels across the strewn-with- barbed-wire heavily-patrolled fence that divides India and Pakistan, armed with nothing but his unassailable goodness, and everything turns out fine and hunky-dory.

The film has done, over the weekend, what it was expected to do: leap into the Rs 100-crore band. From all indications, it is all set to be a huge blockbuster, and break existing records. So what just happened here?

Did the inclusion of a plot actually help the star? Did it reassure viewers, not necessarily die-hard fans, that it is entirely possible to surround the star with a story, that it is not something to be feared? Did his fans, those who keep their ‘Bhaijaan’ in their heart, feel cheated because he (and his director) felt the need for a story?

And most importantly, did it give out a general message, whose recipient could, shockingly, be Salman Khan and Co themselves, that if you give your audience more, your film will be treated like a film, not an empty vessel?

Stories allow for characters. For detailing. Nuance. Situations with heft. But more than anything else, they fulfil the real function of a movie, which is to tell a story. Spin a yarn. Show us a time. The story could be any kind: something that comes from la-la-land, or from the reality, or a mix of both, but what it does is to give us a world we haven’t seen before; where stereotypes can be freshly reimagined, and something added to our selves.

A good story, that comes from somewhere, that has provenance, leads almost always to good storytelling. And that makes for a good film, which nestles into both dil and dimaag.