The Hindu Business Line : Will `Fanaa' click?

Bollywood is hoping for a Yashraj rescue... because a movie from this prestigious production house is always an event, and a hit is what the industry badly needs.

On the face of it, Fanaa looks like a winner, despite the slow-starting music, low-key visibility, and its heroine's comeback, post mommyhood.

On the face of it, Fanaa looks like a winner, despite the slow-starting music, low-key visibility, and its heroine's comeback, post mommyhood.

At the half-year mark, the mood in Bollywood is sombre. The three hits — Rang De Basanti, Malaamaal Weekly, and Aksar — are simply not enough to counter a string of under-performers. Top of that list are Rajkumar Santoshi's Family, followed by Raj Kanwar's Hum Ko Deewana Kar Gaye, Satish Kaushik's Shaadi Se Pehle, Ram Gopal Varma's Darna Zaroori Hai, Anubhav Sinha's Tathastu, and some others. All these films were backed by big producers, budgets and stars, but failed.

It has been a bad six months, says Sanjay Mehta, who distributed Family in Delhi-Uttar Pradesh, the country's biggest territory. Traditionally the first couple of months are slow, he points out. The momentum starts building in April-May, with the vacations and general leisure time; but this year, the slow burn seems to be continuing. Except for UTV's Taxi No 9211 and Abbas-Mustan's 36 Chinatown, which have been termed `decent earners', nothing has worked.

All eyes are now on Fanaa, Yashraj's latest film starring Aamir Khan and Kajol, out today. "Let's see how it fares," says Mehta, who points out that the movie's subject is chancy and that the music hasn't done that well, "their last film Neal `n' Nikki aroused great expectations but didn't too well, so I think this time they are underplaying the publicity."

Nothing on the face of it told us that the flops, outlined above, would slump. Santoshi had a moderately successful and critically acclaimed Khakee behind him, and Family had the same stars, Amitabh Bachchan and Akshay Kumar.Raj Kanwar, maker of popular potboilers, promised an old fashioned love-triangle led by Akshay. Satish Kaushik boasted a string of comedians and Mallika Sherawat's nubile charms. Ramu's public relations people told us that he was firmly at the helm of this horror sequel, so it would be much better than the first. And Anubhav Sinha tried wooing audiences with Sanjay Dutt's everyman appeal, coasting on the success of Dus, with the same star.

Santoshi's choice of a debut star, his producer Keshu Ramsay's son, proved disastrous. Ramsay Jr gobbled up screen space in most of the second half, and he just wasn't star material. Kanwar's love story turned out to be the millionth rehash of all the Chopra-Johar romances of the 1990s. Kaushik's brand of loud storytelling belongs to an even earlier decade, the 1980s (these days the only director who seems to parlay loud comics into money is Priyadarshan, whose Malaamaal Weekly is still running well in smaller centres).

That Indian audiences do not take well to irony or self-referential send-ups is well known. Ramu's horror movie, a string of six segments directed by different directors, including one by himself, suffered from unevenness. Ramu's own segment, featuring Amitabh as a petrified professor, and Riteish as a puzzled student, was the most indifferent: the former has been so good at scaring our socks off (Raat and Bhoot) that this was almost unbelievably disappointing. And as for Anubhav Sinha's Tathastu, a rip-off of a Hollywood movie, which features Sanjay Dutt as a desperate father who holds a hospital to ransom because he wants treatment for his dying son, didn't have any takers. The film was simply not interesting enough.

Looking up to `Fanaa'

It's not surprising that the trade is looking forward to a Yashraj rescue, because a movie from Mumbai's most prestigious production house is always an event, and because a hit, any hit, is a sure-shot way to get out of the doldrums. Though there hasn't been too much of a splash about the film directed by Kunal Kohli (he's the man behind the last Yashraj hit, Hum Tum, and the nearly forgotten Mujhse Dosti Karoge), this much we do know: Aamir plays a tourist-guide-cum terrorist, and Kajol, a blind girl he falls in love with, and that parts of the Capital, where some of the movie was shot, have never looked so good.

Tarun Tripathi, Head of Marketing, Yashraj Films, agrees that the production house has been relatively quiet about their latest property, which has been sparking interest because of the star pair (Aamir and Kajol have worked together before, in Indra Kumar's Ishq, but never as romantic leads opposite each other). Brand managers would kill for that kind of coupling, and if they wanted, Yashraj could have been flooded with marketing tie-ups. "But we didn't want to go in for an overkill with Fanaa," he says, "we want to keep the film pure, like we did with Veer Zaara."

On the face of it, Fanaa looks like a winner, despite the slow-starting music, low-key visibility, and its heroine's comeback, post mommyhood. Aamir is hot right now because of Rang De Basanti's success in engaging a wide arc of the audience demographic — the under-teens to the middle-aged — and because of his own immensely likeable role in the movie. Kajol took a break when she was on top, but her fans and popularity are still in place, because of where she left off... as a motor-mouth Chandni Chowk lass whom Shah Rukh Khan loves and weds in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham.

Then there is Krrish, sequel to super-hit Koi... Mil Gaya, in which Hrithik Roshan is presented as India's first full-fledged superhero. Rakesh Roshan, father and mentor, is making sure that nothing will come between his son and success. The stunts are credited to the team who have done the super-kinetic Shaolin soccer movies, and then there is Hrithik himself, who has a huge following amongst children because of his character's interplay with a bunch of kids in Koi... Mil Gaya. Preity Zinta has been replaced by Priyanka Chopra, who will undoubtedly be an able understudy as the superhero goes about saving the world.

Krrish should be out in end-June/early-July. And then in August is another much-awaited film, Karan Johar's return to romance with Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna. This one too is a mega-starrer, crammed with Johar's favourites — Amitabh, Shah Rukh, Preity, Abhishek, and Rani.

As they say in showbiz, wait and watch.