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Shubhra Gupta

Looking back, the year 2003 could be termed as the year that resurrected Bollywood. The big learning: Don't move away from the formula.

A still from the film, Kal Ho Naa Ho.

Shah Rukh Khan rocks. The superstar, who is inching towards the 40-mark, and who has started to look a little worn, is still capable of a huge opening: Kal Ho Naa Ho (KHNH), the movie in which he has a death scene perfectly designed to show off his dimpled smile, is raking it in, in India and abroad.

The film's director, Nikhil Advani, who learned his craft from Aditya Chopra and Karan Johar, both masters of the refurbished family film, buffs up the formula, adds some innovative touches, and coasts. He makes sure not to be radically different (with Karan writing and producing, that would have been difficult): a couple of families, one loving, another divided, only to end up with hugs and kisses, and two young men and a woman. All layered over with the kind of mix so typical of Indian movies... romance, emotion, laughter, emotion, tears, emotion... just like Karan's superhit Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, KHNH also makes you laugh and cry.

Neither the story nor the characters are new. What's fresh is the treatment. There are Hollywood-style split-screens, where you are in on what all the characters are doing without them knowing what the others are up to, the dialogue has crackle (there are quite a few instances where the sparks fly between Shah Rukh, Saif Ali Khan and their love interest, Preity Zinta). Advani pulls his punches sensibly where he could have easily gone over the top, the way his mentor, Aditya, loves to do.

`The formula is dead. Long live the formula.' The box-office kings this year have been those movies which tweaked the formula, added gloss to the familiar, and took care not to make too many departures. The one thing Indian audiences hate is a film that is `too different'. We like the comfort of sameness, with just the right does of finesse: too much sophistication makes us uncomfortable.

Take Koi.. Mil Gaya, the Rs 40 crore film which catapulted Hrithik Roshan back into the frontrunners. Papa Rakesh Roshan's sci-fi adventure incorporated just the right differences — the alien was given a Krishna blue hue, and was made endearingly naughty to make the association with the beloved god even stronger, the child-like adult Hrithik, who made being mentally challenged palatable with his sunny disposition (his mother's pain is shown, but in the end, he miraculously becomes `normal'). A happily-ever-after scenario is painted with Hrithik going off into the sunset with his girlfriend. He gets to do a super-calisthenics dance number (that's a standard Hrithik feature, which his fans go bananas over, even in his worst movies). And he gets to keep his girl.

If the film had ended grimly, with Hrithik imprisoned in his 12-year-old mind, it might have collected critical acclaim, not the 30 per cent overflow from the Indian and overseas market. Koi.. Mil Gaya was the first superhit of 2003, and the only film that might just dislodge it from the number one position, could be Kal Ho Naa Ho, already standing at Rs 8 crore after only one week's run.

Baghban, still running to good houses in its 13th week, and produced at Rs 14 crore, will make more than average profits for director-producer Ravi Chopra. The son of old warhorse B.R. Chopra — whose last major success was the long-running TV serial Mahabharat — has revived his respected production house with an old-fashioned movie whose `difference' lies, again, not in the plot (how old parents are rejected by the selfish children, and how those children are shown the error of their ways), but in the way the parents are presented. Amitabh Bachchan is in familiar patriarch mode, Hema Malini makes a glamorous splash as his wife: it is their relationship, still full of passionate tenderness even after 40 years of marriage and grandchildren, that audiences are warming to.

The other biggie this year has been the Rs 25-crore Chalte Chalte, starring Shah Rukh and Rani Mukherjee. They play characters whose post-marital life runs into problems before sorting itself out. Nothing startlingly new about the script (for this writer, it was director Aziz Mirza's least affecting story), but the film soared on Shah Rukh's mass appeal, Rani's jazzy make-over, and the eye-catching locations on Greek islands.

Mid-range to smaller successes have all boasted of a USP, a little something to perk up the formula. Jism had the sultry Bipasha Basu treading a blatantly sexual path for material gain like no other Indian heroine has. Andaaz had both beauteous female leads Lara Dutta and Priyanka Chopra shedding clothes and inhibitions. Bhoot boasted of director Ram Gopal Varma's edgy stylishness and some truly chilling moments. Teeny bop romance Ishq Vishk introduced a potential pin-up in Shahid Kapoor, son of Pankaj Kapoor, who could never make the classic lover-boy leading man grade despite being a fine performer. And Qayamat, another Hollywood rip off, like Jism, gave the Indian audience an out-and-out action film with colourful baddies — a moll who divides her favours between two men has to be a first, with Ajay Devgan pulping the ungodly with great vigour.

The big-budget films that were expected to do well and didn't, had this essential ingredient missing: they hammered the beleaguered formula in place minus that extra element, or the pizzazz. Take Sooraj Barjatya's Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon, the biggest clunker of the year.

The man who reinvented the `family film' with Bollywood's biggest hit Hum Aapke Hain Koun (net profits Rs 75 crore) made the mistake of forsaking his own formula of loving families, servants and pet Pomeranians. And veered towards a teenage tale where he was all at sea: nothing his actors, Hrithik Roshan, Kareina Kapoor and Abhishek Bachchan did, could save the film from being a disaster.

Big learning from 2003, the year that resurrected Bollywood, after the dismal previous year: We love our formula. Just remove the creaky bits and give it to us all restored and shiny.

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