That 70s rip-offs

This year,the 70s seem to have feverishly climbed the popularity charts in Bollywood. Only last week Akshay Kumar and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan were transported to the mid-70s in Action Replayy,and made to sit astride Lambrettas,and fill out 40-inch bell-bottoms. Ajay Devgns gangster,fashioned on 70s mob boss Dawood Ibrahim in Once Upon A Time in Mumbaai,romanced a girl sporting giant bouffants and tiny clutch-bags. Farhan Akhtar is busy filming Don 2 in Germany,with Shah Rukh Khan reprising his reprise of one of the most beloved badmaash characters of the 70s: the Banaraswala paan may turn into a Berlin kartoffel,but are we fooled about where the film is coming from? No way.

Its not like the 70s have just been discovered. All through the past 10 years,the 70s has been paid homage to by a generation of filmmakers who were just being born then. For them,and their uber-urban contemporaries who were finished in Swiss schools,later to fashionably drop out of American universities,the 70s was a time when Hindi cinema was in an intense flowering phase,where the foundation of what is considered classic these days,was being laid. If you have no original thoughts in your head,what better than to dip into a time and a period that put out an unending series of hits based on nothing but strong scripts and performances?

It was a decade when both mainstream cinema and its snooty counterpart,parallel cinema,hit its stride. In 1969,a gangly hopeful from Calcutta had given the voiceover for Mrinal Sens Bhuvan Shome,and had been credited as just Amitabh: within a couple of years,that baritone got a face to match in a handful of films made by directors who would make those years memorable Hrishikesh Mukherjee,Manmohan Desai,Ramesh Sippy,Prakash Mehra and Yash Chopra. There were others who managed to make equally enjoyable movies without Bachchan: the dexterity that Vijay Anand,for example,showed still remains unmatched.

These were filmmakers whose cinematic roots were organic. Their plots came from an unbroken tradition of storytellers,unsullied by voices that did not belong. Hollywood was still a distant cousin,very powerful but demonstrably alien,whose values did not match with the sensibilities of the audiences they were making movies for. Bombay B films may have turned its gaze towards local variants of Tarzan and Jane,but A-list directors and stars stayed sensibly within the desi daayra.

Dev Anand went to London for Des Pardes,and to Nepal for Hare Rama Hare Krishna but those foreign influences were declared pernicious: heroines had to be rescued from lusty goras,and sisters from blonde-haired charas-smoking hippies. Yash Chopras brand of mush is now mostly remembered by its Swiss slopes and Dutch tulips,but his early films in the 70s were recognisably Indian,tailored to suit the needs of Indians leaving behind the conservatism of the 60s,eager to sample new stories and styles that spoke to them.

Bombay cinemas turning into post-liberalisation Bollywood came with massive changes. The presence of a huge diaspora hungry for faux nostalgia for the homeland brought the movies back to the forgotten-in-the-80s Bharatiya sanskriti and sabhyataa: Shah Rukh sang Doli sajaa ke rakhna to London-returnee Kajol,and Yashs baton passed on to next generation Aditya in the mid-90s. Post DDLJ,Bollywood has turned into a baraat of brands,with leading men and ladies who have to read Hindi in English in dubbing studios,directed by people from similar backgrounds. I cant forget a Ranbir Kapoor line that goes: main go around kar ke aa raha hoon. This pearl belongs to a Yash Raj film,which is currently exhibiting the worst sort of confusion in the kinds of films it is putting out.

Todays Bollywood is in search of roots. Looking to the past is a way of looking to the future,but not when it is used as an easy way out. And certainly not when it becomes the only way out.

shubhra.guptaexpressindia.com