The Hindu Business Line : The `item movie' scene

Behold the Item Movie. With Dhoom 2 — the Yashraj production, which received a bumper opening last weekend — the kind of mega-budget film which zooms from one item to the other has come of age.

Consider this. A long train snakes through the Namibian desert. On it is a priceless crown, an old woman who looks as if she is wearing a mask, and a clutch of clueless guards. Director Sanjay Gadhvi, who also directed the first mega-successful Dhoom, quickly gets down to the job. Super-thief Hrithik Roshan descends from the skies, whacks the crown (that's why the mask looked fake, get it?), and vanishes, literally into the blue.

Cut to the next robbery. Of a jewelled sword in a Rajasthan fort. And then the next. And the next. Dhoom 2 fills in the in-between spaces with wordy duels between the main protagonists (Aishwarya, Abhishek, Uday, Bipasha and, of course, Hrithik), and lavishly mounted songs. Even the completely spectacular scenery becomes an item: ok guys, done with that dizzyingly high cliff from where Hrithik and Aish fly off in a very Mission Impossible manner? Move on.

No time to reflect. No time to pause. Just the business to hand. Very much in synch with our MTV times, where the average length of a video (one-and-a-half minutes) is enough to tell a full story — birth, death, redemption. Sure, stopping to smell the roses is a desirable thing, but not now. Later. Two-and-a-half hours — the running time of an average potboiler — later.

It's not as if we haven't had fast-paced `actioners' before. Bollywood has always done thrillers, but they've always had relationships built into them (not for us the Hollywood way of doing things, where we've just about started to know the character and he gets bumped off, without even getting to sing a single song). Emotion has always been the underpinning of our movies: if they don't make you laugh and cry, `woh bhi koi film hai'?

In the last six years, as our movies have got slicker and slicker (Farhan Akhtar's Don and now Dhoom 2 are as stylish and as superbly shot as any Hollywood thriller), we've moved from telling pure stories to creating moments. Karan Johar is a past-master of the moment: his films are item movies of another kind, where the director propels you to a sequence labelled — now you cry, and you've barely stopped sniffling when there's another which says — laugh!

Movies such as Dhoom, its sequel Dhoom 2, and Don, The Chase Begins are the worthy follow-ups of the first attempt in the genre, Main Hoon Na. Farah Khan, choreographer-turned-director, knew exactly what she wanted in her debut film — one superstar, and lots of items, which included the supporting cast. Shah Rukh Khan, lead star and producer, gave his favourite choreographer her head, and the result was a smash hit.

The plot was an excuse to showcase SRK in an actioner, a role he hadn't done before. There were episodes built into the film, which used glycerine (not quite as much as a KJ film, but still a respectable amount, considering that there was an estranged mother, a long-lost son, and a jealous step-brother, all in the mix), but the focus was always on the next sequence, the next song, the next moment.

Shaad Ali's Bunty aur Babli was Bollywood's first full-fledged, no-holds barred `Item Movie'. Everything in that movie was an item: the introduction of the hero and heroine, the small-town crooks and charlatans, the wizened cop, the sexy mujrewali (it stands to reason that one of Aishwarya's biggest hits comes from B aur B, where she does Famous Item Number Kajarare, a national discotheque action for over a year). The other stars, Abhishek, Rani and Amitabh did their job admirably (the Big B's beedi-smoking, indulgent policewala was a hoot), but again, Shaad Ali knew that if he had to keep and preserve the attention of the 15-25 year-olds, the movie had to zip through from Item a to Item zee.

Khan and Ali got it right. Laying it on thick, in a mix of romance, comedy, action, the whole shebang, and piggybacking on stars, was the way to go for these directors.

Gadhvi got it right, too, the first time round. Dhoom created dhoom at the box office, and left the ground ripe for a sequel. The cool factor was very simple: get those bikes out, put some dudes on them, and have a couple of babes to sizzle up the screen. The formula has been replicated in the sequel; only the movie has got much, much bigger, matching the ambition of its producers.

John Abraham, the bike-chor of the last Dhoom has been replaced by Hrithik Roshan's classy thief, who has loftier plans and a much classier den bristling with cutting-edge gadgetry.

John shared as much screen space with Abhishek and Uday; in the new one, not only John has been dispensed with, Esha Deol too has disappeared, leaving the scene for the more popular Bipasha, and India's biggest female brand, Aishwarya (it is to be noted that the top-rung of Dhoom 2's stars are all brand ambassadors of products ranging from a cola to a shampoo).

Like Farhan's Don, this Dhoom also stops you in your tracks with all that spectacle, and those special effects (barring those self-indulgent excesses that both directors hit you with, when the movie stops moving, and starts dragging). But nothing touches you. These are not movies designed to hold you for anything other than the way they look. And sound.

Style is fine, but where is the soul? Or has that turned into an item, too?