The Hindu Business Line : Play of power suits

In 1986, a Wall Street arbitrageur gained notoriety for paying a $100 million penalty to settle insider-trading charges. Ivan Boesky's speech at the University of California commencement speech that year (`you can be greedy and still feel good about yourself') became even more famous.

The following year, Hollywood came out with Wall Street, in which Michael Douglas playing ruthless corporate raider Gordon Gekko, immortalised the phrase `Greed is good'. Gekko takes under his wing a young ambitious stockbroker, enticing him with another often quoted line `I'm gonna make your rich'. The key words — greed, rich, money — all gained currency in the era's popular culture, and spun off many me-toos in movies and television.

Finally Bollywood has caught up with the world of high-powered corporations, with Madhur Bhandarkar's Corporate, which released last Friday. Men in power suits. Women too. Boardroom battles. Endless intrigue. And sums running into thousands of crores. The film gives us a ringside view of the dodgy goings-on in institutions where individuals get together for the purpose of profit and the lengths they can go to, to keep the graph rising.

In the process, Bhandarkar creates one of Bollywood's most interesting female roles. Nishigandha Dasgupta, played by Bipasha Basu, is a bright spark in the Sehgal Group. The only thing she stops at is actually getting into bed with a rival, but has no qualms in playing pimp (she puts a lady of easy virtue in her place), paying bribes (she is shown taking bundles of notes out of her handbag to pay off an informant a couple of times), and lying through her teeth — to gain access to the secret plans of their closest competitor, the Marwah group. When the rival, who has just lost his job, confronts Nishi, she comes back with a slap-in-the-face rejoinder: It's not the loss of your job that is bothering you, it is the fact that the whole thing was engineered by a woman.

Her only vulnerable spot is her CEO's (Rajat Kapoor) feckless brother-in-law (Kay Kay Menon), who returns to Mumbai after an exile in London, to take his place alongside her in the boardroom. To plot and execute a dirty, no-holds barred contest to launch a mint-based soft drink, the plans for which have been stolen from the Marwah group.

Like he did in his National Award winner Page 3, Bhandarkar crowds the canvas. All the dramatis personae in the film are people he seems to have plucked from recent headlines: stock market slimeballs, venal politicians, godmen who double as powerbrokers, soft drinks contaminated with pesticides, CEOs with no morals, business practices with no ethics, and dehumanised humans.

Sometimes, as he rushes from one situation to the other, the director appears to be skimming the surfaces, like he did in Page 3, which was about greed of another kind, to attain instant fame. That was a world that was celebrity-driven, where wannabes jostled with real celebs, where entrants were willing to do anything to appear on the page in the newspaper devoted to the doings of the party people. The relentlessness with which Bhandarkar carted us off to one party after another became, after a while, repetitive. And, like the people in the movie, superficial.

But Corporate is a far better film. It has more heft. The rough edges have been smoothed, even though the grime that the movie shows is as filthy, and the characters are more rounded and have more credible motivations. "It is targeted very clearly at the kind of people who go to urban multiplexes, the 15 to 45-year-olds, and at the class which prefers watching classier movies in good theatres in smaller towns," says Sanjay Mehta, Corporate's distributor in the North (Delhi, UP, Punjab), "and the first weekend is exactly what I expected: nearly 80-85 per cent collections in well-maintained single screens by Sunday, building up from Friday, the multiplexes in A class centres booked solid on Sunday, and a fairly decent attendance in the smaller towns."

Hearing Mehta (also the distributor of Page 3, which he describes as a more universal movie because it cut across many audience layers, as well as its characters that everyone could identify with), talk about the movie's performance is like listening to a well-laid battle plan, no less intricate than the one in the film.

Corporate, which uses much more English and has a limited range because of its subject and styling, is running in Kanpur and Lucknow, towns where the corporate culture and the multiplex habit is much stronger than it used to be. As well as in much smaller places like Hapur and Bahraich where only a tiny, educated percentage will turn up. Mehta makes a special mention of Bareilly's Prabha theatre which is playing the film: "they were discontinuing Fanaa, and next week there is only one Hindi film, so I've got an open week." Last Sunday, Prabha's collections were at 80-85 per cent.

There was a time, when Madhur Bhandrakar would not have got the backing to make a move like Corporate (the film has been produced by Percept Pictures' Sahara One at an estimated cost of Rs 4 crore). And, an established distributor like Sanjay Mehta wouldn't have touched the movie with a bargepole. The soaring popularity of multiplexes have put those times behind permanently, as well as the growing awareness among the general junta about markets and shares and prices and the Sensex.

The scent of money is heady. Nishigandha follows her nose till her conscience comes in the way. We won't reveal what happens to her. That would be giving the plot away. What we will say is that Corporate is a welcome addition to `different cinema', the kind of cinema Bollywood keeps claiming it wants to make, and seldom does. There is a story here. And people. And lives.

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