The Road from Smallville

Being Cyrus mopped up a cool Rs 2 crore in its first weekend. So is the multiplex film movement finally getting somewhere?

MULTIPLEXES HAVE CHANGED the way we watch films. But have they changed the films we watch? If the darkly Hitchcockian Being Cyrus is a pointer, there is reason to believe they have. But hang on. The battle is far from won. For barring a Black here or a Rang De Basanti there, Bollywood blockbusters, on which the industry rides, still reek of narrative mustiness. Popcorn cinema still holds sway.

But, yes, small-budget, offbeat films to-day enjoy much greater visibility than ever before thanks to the new multiplex culture. Being Cyrus is already in the record books. No English-language Indian film has ever grossed as much as Homi Adajania8217;s maiden feature in its opening weekend. The film mopped up a cool Rs 2 crore from 80- odd prints between March 24 and 26. The starry presence of Saif Ali Khan may have helped Cyrus, but there is more to this defiantly non-conforming film than its cast.

8220;Being Cyrus is cur-rently number two on our charts, second only to Malamaal Weekly,8221; says Aditya Sikri, CEO of Spice World, a Noida mall that houses the eight-screen Spice PVR. 8220;Films like Be-ing Cyrus wouldn8217;t even have been released a few years ago.8221; It8217;s been a long haul.

The signposts8212;36 Chowringhee Lane, Bandit Queen, English Au-gust, Hyderabad Blues, et al8212;were good ad-vertisement for a different cinema , but sin-gle- screen theatres had little room back then for films that came in from the cold. Even when the multiplex boom kicked in, market wariness persisted. The quirky cinematic essays weren8217;t all necessarily great. Says the two-film-old Sujoy Ghosh: 8220;Year 2003 saw the release of nearly 40 mul-tiplex films. Only one his own Jhankaar Beats survived.8221;

That spelt danger: as more and more amateurish films were passed off as non-formula cinema, frustrated audiences went back to their weekly dose of mind-numbing Bollywood entertainment. Of course, not every new-millennium Hinglish film was as unappetising as those urban angst comedies Freaky Chakra or Mumbai Matinee. The genre threw up a slew of interesting products8212;Everybody Says I8217;m Fine, Morning Raaga,Raghu Romeo, Amu,Chai Paani Etc and My Brother Nikhil8212;and yet the movement stagnated.

The tide turned last year. Page 3 in the first half of the year and Iqbal in the second catapulted movies from the fringes into the big league. Interestingly, neither used Eng-lish, though both films drew inspiration from the unconventional spirit of the new urban Indian cinema.

The rules of the game have changed, for the better. Says Madhur Bhandarkar, maker of Page 3: 8220;Multiplex players have entered the distribution business. We can now deal di-rectly with the exhibitors.8221;

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Sunil Doshi, producer of the recently released Mixed Doubles, saw the Page 3 model perfectly worthy of emulation. 8220;I sought a Page 3 kind of slot. I released 35 to 40 prints. It wasn8217;t a main-stream release, but it was big enough to reach out to its target audience.8221; Bollywood powers that be are also seeing some per-centage in backing offbeat ventures. Says Assamese veteran Jahnu Barua, direc-tor of the critically ac-claimed Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Maara: 8220;Yashraj Films came forward to distribute my film. Clear proof that the market believes a good film will find takers.8221;

The situation is poised to improve even further. The number of multiplexes is set to double to 150 in the next two years, with the capacity increasing from the current 90,000 seats to nearly 170,000 seats. The real multi-plex revolution will happen when the masses are drawn into its ambit. Of course, much will hinge on quality. Says Ghosh: 8220;When a film like Rang De Bas-anti pulls in the crowds, it enthuses people to come back to the halls for a different kind of entertainment. That helps us all.8221; India8217;s off-mainstream urban cinema could do with all the help that it can get.