Short Cuts

Unfortunately, as it is a thriller, I cannot get into the details of the film that give it this remarkable quality. But Manoj Night Shyamalan has broken genre definition with this film, which I think contributes to a large extent to the kind of success that this film has enjoyed. It is the shock of the new that always has the maximum potential to hypnotize an audience, move them in ways that they never imagined was possible, and that creates a bond between the film and the individual.

It happens in many ways, but primarily I think it is the emotion that has to feel new. Mehboob Khan spellboundan audience with Mother India 8212; he managed to convince a nation that a mother was justified in killing her own son. In the 90s, the newness came with films that featured obsessive protagonists like Baazigar and Darr, redefining what a hero could or could not do, and whether we could still call him a hero. Judging by the whistles that celebrated every time Shah Rukh survived Sunny Deol8217;s onslaught in the climax of Darr, he remained the hero.

But these films could not satisfy the audience the way that a couple of films did a year or two later. Hum Aapke Hain Kaun and Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge may seem unlikely candidates for newness, but audiences in the middle of the decade were seeing a love story that was treated in a way that appealed to their sensibility for the first time, the way a Bobby did twenty years earlier. Almost entirely sans the action and loudness that had become essential in every filmmaker8217;s guidebook at that time. The films worked because themakers had the vision to make the old new. Ideally a film should also look new 8212; I remember being blown off my seat at Sterling every one of the six times I saw Star Wars in 1977. It was unimaginable that a film like this was possible, and after watching it, it was impossible to my mind that it could ever have not existed. It became part of the mental landscape.

And then a few years earlier, I was not so much blown off, but jumping and ducking from my seat, to avoid the 3D projectiles that Chota Chetan was hurling at me. The experience was amazing every time I went to see it, and the audience reaction only added to it 8212; in a sequence at a bar, when a tray full of bottles levitates and bobs around uncertainly, there would be shouts of 8220;Bagh Tikdey, Battli Pakad!8221;

But 22 years later, when I sat down in the same cinema to watch Lucas8217; first episode, I felt disappointed, because there is nothing qualitatively new about The Phantom Menace. Despite all marketing to the contrary, it remainsvery much a dekha khatra. Even though the effects are bigger, better and spilling out of the screens, emotionally it doesn8217;t seem to excite the audience the way Star Wars did. Here the new was feeling distinctly old. And it is very evident that the real phantoms of the imagination have ben unleashed by Shymalan.