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Shubhra Gupta

With big budget films losing out heavily last year, smaller budget films were the ones that were clear winners. The success formula: make movies and sell them at prices that guarantee a return.

In an e-mail conversation a couple of weeks ago, the programming head of a prominent multiplex chain posed this question: what is the future of the `small' film?

He was asking this in the context of the recent trend of the `small' budget English-Hindi (Hinglish) movie (Rs one to two crore), branching out in several variants — Hinglish, with regional accents, if you will. If it is primarily English made in Hyderabad, it will have some Telegu, and Hyderabadi Hindi, like Nagesh Kukunoor's `Hyderabad Blues'; if the same stuff is made in Mumbai, it will be laced with slick South Bombay accents and Mumbaiya Hindi, like Ram Madhvani's `Let's Talk'; if it comes from Bangalore, it will have some Kannada and Tamil words thrown in, like V.K. Prakash's `Freaky Chakra', which released last Friday.

It is about an author who dreams up characters, and toys with them for his amusement: an eccentric 40-year-old widow who dresses up corpses for a living, and her relationship with the two men in her life, a 19-year-old paying guest, and a middle-aged man who makes anonymous amorous calls to her.Though there are big problems in the way `Freaky Chakra' is executed (embarrassingly amateurish direction, incoherent plot), it is an experiment in form and structure. Coming up later this month, other youthful love-fests like `Bas Yun Hi', and `Jhankar Beats', which promise zany storylines, credible characters and motivations, and cadences which are currently in vogue, language and music-wise.

What we are getting is a clutch of movies, made by young directors who are determinedly focussing on middle-class urban issues, in their own language, a confident, assertive mix of English, Hindi, and whatever third and fourth languages they have grown up using: the `small' film is undergoing another definitive transformation in its journey towards greater acceptance in the market. That the process is rocky goes without saying: more often than not, these movies have gained critical appreciation more than clear profits.

In a manner of speaking the `small film' has always been around, simply because there have always been a few intrepid souls who have gone against the flow, and chosen to work with non-stars or lesser stars, in order to make movies they believe in. Back in the 1970s, the parallel cinema movement gained real momentum with Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal, Kumar Shahani, Avtar Kaul, all coming up with path-breaking work, which sought to bring back the `real' in an increasingly fantasy-ruled commercial cinema framework.

Benegal's initial string of excellent movies (`Ankur', `Nishant', `Bhumika', `Manthan', `Mandi') created stars out of his actors, and made money for his producers (most of the money came from NFDC), bringing about a refuelling of energies of cinema-on-the-fringes. Some of this zeal got rubbed on to the proponents of the middle-of-the-road cinema in Bollywood-Basu Chatterji, Basu Bhattacharya, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Amol Palekar made movies which did not radically depart from the familiar song-and-dance dramas, but used naturalistic styles to cut back drastically on glycerine and saccharine, with stories which had real characters grappling with real issues.

The 1980s saw the death of sensible cinema: with the advent of the video cassette recorder, and commercial television, viewers sat back, and started the trend of home viewing. Film producers went into an overkill of sex-and-violence laden content, and this trend continued right up to the 1990s. It took the second generation convent-school educated scions of old-time film families like the Barjatyas, Chopras, and Johars to return sprawling joint families and soft-focus romances to the big screen, audiences to theatres, and crores to their coffers.

A still from the film, Freaky Chakra.

But the tyranny of this genre with its grandmums, granddads, mums, dads, aunts, uncles, servants, pomeranians, pigeons, mansions, chandeliers, and nubile-but-obedient lovers turned Bollywood in the 1990s into an unending assembly line of pallid `family romances'. Mega budgets, which bought sequences in Switzerland and sets in South Africa, were of no use: the audiences turned their back firmly, decisively and finally, on repetitious fare.

It was perfect timing for the return of the `small film'. The difference this time was the use of English as the primary mode of communication: when Dev Benegal, a nephew of the famous Shyam, came up with `English August', he was unapologetically declaring that he was making a film for a select English-speaking, similar-sensibility audience. Then came the Kaizad Gustads, Sunhil Sippys, and Nagesh Kukunoors, and a profusion of whacky subjects, crazy characters, and MTV-style breathless editing.

Dev followed on with the much less attractive `Split Wide Open', and his lead actor Rahul Bose, who came up with his own directorial venture `Everybody Says I'm Fine'.

Now the `small' movie has transported itself outside the country: witness last year's `American Desi', and `Leela', with their young NRI directors parlaying their own stories of coming-of-age-in-America, a country whose expansive culture is at once inclusive of, and at odds with, Indian traditions and values. These second generation Indian-American voices are now being heard in multiplexes in both countries: the movies do not have the budgets to play in the bigger theatres, nor should they, because their audiences are those which gravitate towards the upmarket multiplex, where a ticket can cost upward of Rs 150.The lesson moviemakers are learning from these movies is one that could take the industry out of the woods: the movies are made, and sold at prices which practically guarantee a return. A phrase that corporates have long used is now gaining currency among people in the film industry: neither small nor big budget, but the `right' budget.

The most significant move towards financial restructuring has made a tentative start in Bollywood: a Madhur Bhandarkar makes `Chandni Bar', on the life of a Mumbai beer bar girl, on a shoestring budget; the movie makes money. Bhandarkar's new film `Satta' starring Raveena Tandon as a woman finding her feet in the murky byways of politics released last week, and a new film with Amitabh Bachchan is on the cards. Doing a `right' budget, cutting-edge story, with megastar Amitabh: now that could signal the beginning of something that the film industry has long dreamt about.

Response can be sent to life@thehindu.co.in

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