The Hindu Business Line : Don's stylish avatar

Going by the mixed response Don has been receiving within theatres (the audience includes as many people who haven't seen the film as those who have), it is very clear that remakes are, ultimately, movies.

Last week, bludgeoned by the rising crescendo of hype about the clash of the Khans (Shah Rukh's Don and Salman's Jaan-e-mann) a small titbit nearly slipped past us. Anant Mahadevan declared that he was all set to remake one of the most popular entertainers of the 1970s, Victoria No 203, which featured Ashok Kumar and Pran as an unlikely pair of jewel thieves, and Navin Nischol and Saira Banu as the young romantic leads who sing and dance, and romance.

Does the current rash of remakes signal a paucity of imagination?

The fact about remakes is that viewers know exactly where it is coming from, and that inevitably leaves the film open to comparisons, which are nearly, just as inevitably, less than flattering.

Farhan Akhtar's Don - The Chase Begins, which released on the prized Diwali weekend, is a beautifully styled, extremely swish movie. It will appeal to sophisticated movie-goers in the metros who admire the Mission Impossible movies, or even the darker, broodier Jasone Bourne films (Bourne Identity, Bourne Supremacy). It is a film for the classes.

Even though Chandra Barot's 1978 Don was way ahead of its times, it was very clearly a film for the masses. It had Amitabh Bachchan in a double role, a favourite trick of his producers because it gave them a chance to plant some variety in the superstar's screen time. So he got to play a bad guy, but only for a brief while because his fans were only happy if he was good, and as he ascended the ladder of superstardom, negative roles became a thing of the past. But in 1978, he hadn't yet turned iconic, so Don gave him some freedom to play evil, because he knew and we knew, that he would go right back to being a nice guy again, chew paan, drink bhang, and sing the song.

Shah Rukh plays Don with the kind of cool menace, where he actually likes killing people. He's not faking it. Shah Rukh's Don and the Big B's Don are separated not just by the decades, but also their attitude: the former is sending him up ever so slightly, whereas the latter inhabits him and connects with us while doing so.

The slight distance is a deliberate contrivance of the big thriller, as opposed to the emotions a more intimate movie can create, and it is accentuated by the way the director designs his movie and stars. Every last thing in every single frame in the new Don is there because the scenarists have planned it that way, whereas the older film was a pretty much `as-is, where-is' kind of thing. If there was a potted plant in a corner, it may have been there even before the art director reached the set, and maybe he just decided to let it stay.

SRK, on the other hand, is designed right down to the tips of his elegant shoes. The colours are dark and subdued. Farhan Akhtar's Don can be ranged alongside any international thriller, and will come off fine, just in terms of style.

The content, though, is another thing. The bare bones of the plot are borrowed from the older movie, the names of the characters have been retained, and some of the iconic dialogues are the same — Don ko pakadana mushkil hi nahin, namumkin hai (to catch Don is not only difficult, it is impossible). But substance is sacrificed to style, and ultimately Akhtar Jr's (Javed Akhtar, Farhan's father, scripted and wrote the dialogues for the original) Don — The Chase Begins becomes something people will remember for its curiosity value, not as a complete movie.

Going by the mixed response Don has been receiving within theatres (the audience includes as many people who haven't seen the film as those who have), it is very clear that remakes are, ultimately, movies. And movies, ultimately, live or die on their own strengths. Like the contradictory reactions to the director's own two movies before this, Dil Chahta Hai, and Lakshya: the same metro youthful audiences loved the first one because it said something to them about the way they lived their lives; in the second, he was trying to do something he didn't know from the inside. And it showed.

But being original, or what passes for originality in Bollywood, doesn't necessarily make for a good movie. Anything startlingly out of the box is usually shown the door (it takes established production houses a long time to incorporate difference, and that too is done only up to a point). The other big release of the previous week was the Salman-Khan starrer, Jaan-e-Mann. It is a Sajid Nadiadwala production, very glossy, very expensive (production costs are being pegged at Rs 35 crore), directed by debutant Shirish Kunder (better known as Farah Khan's husband) was at its core, the oldest story in the book: two men in love with the same woman, and one, not necessarily the better man, wins.

Naturally, with Farah as choreographer, the song-and-dances are spectacular. Red, orange, yellow — the screen is suffused with these colours. But neither Salman nor Akshay Kumar, who fought over one woman in Nadiadwala's Mujshe Shaadi Karoge, can save the movie from coming off as just another tired love triangle, in which the stars are made to go to college in ridiculous clothes and wigs, and look sadly old — the kind of thing which went out with the 1990s.

Up in a couple of weeks is JP Dutta's Umrao Jaan, a remake of the Muzzafar Ali classic from the 1970s. Even the artwork in the poster looks remarkably like the older one; the promos also leave you thinking of the past. But Aishwarya in the role Rekha is still so strongly associated with? That's a tall one.