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Shubhra Gupta

The box office results of Hawas, Murder and Tum, all based on the Hollywood film Unfaithful, go on to prove that skin alone will not do the trick.

Mallika Sherawat and Mahesh Bhatt pose with the poster of the film, Murer, at a promotional press conference in Hyderabad.

Mallika Sherawat is the new pin-up girl of the nation. Or soon will be, if she carries on the way she has begun — willing to shed clothes and inhibitions on her way to stardom. Other starry-eyed aspirants have done the same. Where Mallika is so refreshingly different from the ladies who preceded her is her complete candour: "I have a great body," she has said over and over again in print and TV interviews, "and I have no problems in showing it." None of the familiar waffle that leading ladies in the past have taken recourse to... "if-the-role-deserves-it-I-will-wear-a-bikini" kind of stuff. She's got it, she'll strut it.

Her new film, Murder, which was released a fortnight ago, took a great opening, before the collections dipped somewhat. It opened a window on something that the hard-headed industry has taken note of: in a scenario where only superstars like Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan manage a bumper initial, and then not always, a one-film heroine managed not only to pack the theatres, but to get her film an impressive advance booking (much better than Khakee, the Amitabh Bachchan-Ajay Devgan-Akshay Kumar cop thriller, said a disbelieving New Delhi theatre manager).

Murder, a Mukesh Bhatt production, directed by Anurag Basu, was one of the spate of movies based upon the Hollywood hit Unfaithful. In Arunaraje's Tum, Manisha Koirala's character of a much-married wife has a one-night stand with a much younger man. The film had several bedroom moments, but they and the movie were so badly done that viewers were put-off.

Just a week before Murder came Hawas, a more faithful copy. Again, there was plenty of skin on show, with leading lady Meghna Naidu (who shot to fame with a steamy music video) making sure that she was clad as little as legally possible.

Going by the conventional wisdom that sex sells, Hawas should have been a hit. But it has been rejected in most A-class centres and may have to be content with lean pickings in B- and C-class centres. Basically, despite being set in Dubai, the movie had low production values, and looked as if very little money had been spent in putting it together.

Director Karan Razdan forgot one important rule that lures people into the theatres these days: a film has to look glossy. The other, even more important rule he ignored is that your so-called actors have to be able to act. Skin alone will not do the trick.

Everything in Murder is glossed-up, right from Mallika's curves to the classy interiors of the house she and her workaholic husband and hyperactive five-year-old son live in, to the office she works in. The film is set in downtown Bangkok, and a lot of the exterior shots have that faintly exotic foreign feel, designed to make you empathise with the loneliness of a neglected wife who jumps into bed with an old flame.

And that's important. Insiders attribute Hawas' failure to a couple of factors. Just the name Hawas (Lust) is enough to keep the women, a sizeable portion of the audience, at bay. Plus, Meghna's errant wife does not arouse the sympathy that Mallika's character does: the former leaps into the arms of a perfect stranger to slake her desires; the latter succumbs to the ministrations of a former boy friend who could have been her spouse.

But there is an even more important learning from the little-over-average performance of Murder, and it is something that newbie moviemakers lose sight of now and then, in the excitement of flogging the sex-skin show: that the only way to get a big hit is to make sure that family audiences arrive in theatres in large numbers. Sure, low-budget erotica will make money, but it will never gain widespread acceptance.

Where all-out serious sex may work as a deterrent, raunchy comedies may bring in the numbers. Initial reports for Masti, a film about three guys running away from their boring wives in search of more exciting morsels, suggest that the movie will make money. And that must be manna to long-time partners, director and producer duo Indra Kumar and Ashok Thakeria, whose recent ventures have bitten the dust.

Kumar and Thakeria notched up a series of massive hits in the 1990s with their trademark style: loud characters, overblown situations, and over-the-top jokes.

In Masti, starring poster boy Vivek Oberoi, Aftab Shivdasani and Ritesh Deshmukh as the straying husbands, three new girls, and senior star Ajay Devgan, subtlety is dumped and obviousness is embraced with a zeal. The jokes are off-colour and suggestive; the dialogue is full of double meanings that an all-male audience has no difficulty in decoding.

There is place for all kinds of comedy in the movies, low IQ with-their-humour-in-the-nether-regions, to the sophisticated, urbane kind. A certain maturing of the audience is required before more understated humour can be written into our movies: there is a section that will groove to the classy humour of Dil Chahta Hai, and a much larger segment that will be totally cold to it.

Till such time, we'll have to make do with the likes of Masti: at least, in parts, it makes you laugh.

Picture by A. Roy Chowdhury

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