Guiding light

Hansal Mehta, Rajkummar, Patralekha and Mahesh Bhatt at the promotion of CityLights

Everyone has a wish list of the celebrities they would want to meet in their lifetime and I am no different. Of the top 100 on my list, I have put a tick mark against a few who I had a chance to meet, but the one name where the tick mark was missing was Mahesh Bhatt’s. Even though we had met in the passing on a few occasions, it was not quite what one would qualify as a meeting. As it turned out, last week, such a meeting finally happened. It was for Hansal Mehta’s forthcoming film CityLights that (Bhatt is presenting) provided me the occasion to meet him, and I certainly didn’t come away disappointed.
As always, there was no dearth of quotable quotes. He opened the conversation with, “Watch the 25 -minute footage first and then we will talk, for how can I explain the taste of sugar to one who has not tasted it?”
Well, who could refuse instructions of the persuasive and profound Bhatt? I certainly didn’t. Thankfully, what I saw of the film seemed deserving of his generous praise of the film which is about a couple from Rajasthan that makes its way to Mumbai in search of livelihood as thousands do, and how things unravel in the face of circumstances that survival in the city involves.
Bhatt is playing mentor to talent and the kind of cinema he believes in. That’s good news. According to Bhatt, it is admirable that after producing commercial films and a few duds, Mehta has found his voice and is finally making the kind of cinema that he believes in. He describes CityLights as a film that turns conventions on its head— “The fact that we see a woman from Rajasthan, where they maintain purdah, join a dance bar in order to earn money, as her husband fails to provide for the family, is the opposite of the image we have of the man as a breadwinner.”
The film is an official adaptation of Metro Manila, though Bhatt maintains that CityLights, given the huge cultural gap between villages and metropolitan cities in India, seems to travel through several more time zones than the original.
Bhatt’s voice and support for the film carries weight especially in a season when indie film-makers are finding it hard to rope in takers. Not too long ago Rajat Kapoor’s Aankhon Dekhi barely found a handful of theaters and viewers because of its unusual story and the lack of a saleable star. Shahid, for which Mehta even won the National Award, did not create ripples at the box-office despite being backed by UTV Motion Pictures, clearly indicating that films identified as art-house need helping hands. Despite the odds, Bhatt, during the making of the film, told Mehta to be audacious and fearless. It’s wonderful that Bhatt, after a long spell is throwing his lot behind art films, the kind that earned him the mantle of a maverick-maker and so on. Non-starry films could do with that kind of support. The Lunchbox, Stanley Ka Dabba, Ship of Theseus and Peepli [Live] that were propped up by industry top brass fared rather well.
And no, just for the record, Bhatt has not started a small division within his company to back starless films. For that would be too clichéd. But then again, when it comes to the mercurial Bhatt, you can never say never.