Reel rules aren8217;t real

The weekly trade papers are always full of terror, the prospect of doom and total annihilation for the industry around the corner unless ...

The weekly trade papers are always full of terror, the prospect of doom and total annihilation for the industry around the corner unless there is intervention from a god-like source.Death, an increase in taxes, the threat of an increase in taxes, too much piracy on cable TV, too high a cost of advertising time and hence too little exposure on cable TV, actors not deserving their price, actors8217; fee hikes, musicians not deserving their price, musicians8217; fee hikes, and of course the government 8212; all are the cause from time to time.

Just about anything but for the fact quot;NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHINGquot;. William Goldman8217;s Golden Rule No 1 is still valid. Goldman needed only two such rules to make sense of the industry, but the industrywallahs themselves cannot find it a very satisfactory axiom to hold on to as the backbone of their business, where everyone is thirsting for more pointers for success, so every few weeks, months, years, the trade recognises, analyses and then formalises a business trend. And, as soon asit is a Golden Rule, it then collapses under its own lightness of being.

These days, there are a couple of Golden Rules that have gained considerable currency despite the fact that the two biggest hits of the last year have contradicted them entirely. In fact, 1997 was one of the most interesting years because the trade has hit an all-time high of being spectacularly wrong on most occasions.

So what are the rules? Well, one seems to be: ACTION DOESN8217;T WORK ANYMORE. Except for the fact that Border was the biggest hit of the year, and it centered around a stunning, huge action sequence, near impossible to execute, which the director described as 48 nights of madness in the desert. I don8217;t think there has been an action movie made with this kind of scale, execution, or most importantly, conviction, in the past few years. Which is precisely why it worked.

And if we needed to put the last nail in that coffin, I don8217;t think we could have wished for a more bludgeoning instrument than Satya.

This isedge-of-the-seat action at its finest, with a Tarantino touch it is probably no coincidence that both Quentin and Satya8216;s director Ram Gopal Varma can list running a video store as their previous occupation. People in the trade are saying that for the first time since the first Bachchan zenith post-Zanjeer, they are seeing audiences identifying so viscerally with a film and its protagonists, who are more than ever seen before, exponents of violence as a trade. So there goes that credo.

On to thesis number 2: FOR A FILM TO WORK, YOU NEED A STRONG STORY. Now this seems to be a fairly solid hypothesis, one that has lasted decades, not years, without being challenged. But to the chagrin of these formulators, came along a film like Dil To Pagal Hai. Not since Hum Apke Hain Kaun! was near unanimously dismissed by the trade in pre-release screenings the trade uttering in horror, quot;It8217;s a wedding videoquot; has a film proved the pundits so wrong.

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And to my mind DTPH is a path-breakingfilm 8212; for the simple reason that it is a film with the simplest or most minimal of stories, and it has held together as a movie.

The premise of the film is cleared, or done away with, in the first 30 seconds, so we can sit back and be entertained for the next three hours.

Highly unusual for a Hindi film, where writers are blamed and vilified for their lack of imagination, enterprise and general humanity, for their inability to give us a good story. Well, in DTPH, there is almost no story, and guess what? We don8217;t miss it, we are too busy enjoying ourselves.

Film-making is a chimerical enterprise, where weaknesses are strengths and Achilles8217; heels turn out to be Ronaldo8217;s golden boots, where the Quixotic pursuit of Govinda as a dhabewala in pursuit of a wealthy Raveena in Dulhe Raja somehow makes more sense than Shah Rukh8217;s obsession for a terrorist Manisha in Dil Se.

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Hence today, when the trade speaks of Hum Apke Hain Kaun! they say, in awe: quot;It8217;s a wedding video.quot;