The Hindu Business Line : Silent... but not powerful

American Beauty, with a similar theme, had much more power because of how the movie set up its dilemmas: the wife is no unattractive slouch, and the daughter's friend is sexy all right, but not so that the man can't see straight.

NO SILENT REVOLUTION? Amitabh Bachchan and Jiah Khan in Nishabd.

What is it about April-December romances that sets filmmakers salivating? The discrepancy in the ages of the protagonists and that thing called love automatically precludes convention: it becomes a relationship fraught with unpredictability and uncertainty. A film on the subject, if done well, can surprise and delight, and can turn into something lasting.

It can also give a filmmaker, oriented that way, a licence to show illicit lust (what other kind is there, anyway). Ram Gopal Varma's Nishabd, featuring Amitabh Bachchan and Jiah Khan, gives us a 60-year-old attracted to an 18-year-old, quite simply because the latter fills his eye with her lithe body at every opportunity. She is tall, has curves, and shapely long legs. Bachchan, who plays a world-famous photographer, frames her in his camera to begin with. And then in his heart.

The problem with Nishabd is that the film chickens out after the half-way mark. A supremely sensual teen, confident of her abilities, turns into a snivelling bore. Her body is her signature, her mind is not. Till the time Bachchan is shown entranced by the view, we are with him. The moment he steps back from a physical culmination, the movie turns into something it hadn't set out to be: a slugfest between a frumpish wife, a horrified daughter (whose friend Jiah is), and the man himself, who finds himself at the edge of a cliff, both literally and metaphorically.

I love you, do you love me? Eternal words, eternally engaging, and while the relationship is in its first flush, totally delightful. Jiah, in many ways, is a child, and Bachchan finds himself being youthful and giggly and silly again; the fear of aging and dying being placed in abeyance in the company of the young is an age-old nostrum. It works, sometimes: at others, it turns the people involved into heartbroken wrecks.

Are Indian audiences ready for an all-out, all-consuming passion play between two people significantly separated by age? Going by where the director cuts off, you somehow don't think so.

You wish that Varma had been as brave as his movie demanded, though he does go places no other Bollywood film has gone before. When was the last time you saw a 60-year-old chuckling because a little girl is playing footsie with him under the table? Or breaking into uncontrollable laughter at the memory of the interlude? Or drawn towards a young woman young enough to be his daughter with as little reticence. When he tells his daughter off because all he wants is to be with Jiah, you are taken aback at his sudden vehemence. That is certainly another Bollywood first. But you are equally let down when he crumbles and gives in for the very reason that he had gone towards her in the first place; that she is so young, and he is so old. The clunkiest scene of the movie is when a boyfriend is conjured up to take Jiah out of Bachchan's life, and the movie.

The similar-themed American Beauty had much more power because of how the movie set up its dilemmas: the wife is no unattractive slouch, and the daughter's friend is sexy all right, but not so that the man can't see straight (as opposed to poor old Bachchan whose ladies are clad in clothes and propriety). Hero Kevin Spacey's life is much emptier; there is none of the residual warmth and tenderness of the Bachchan-Revathi 27-year-old marriage, and his daughter is a brash alienated American teenager, not the loving girl that Bachchan has. Spacey's arc is more understandable, more tragic, and therefore much more powerful.

One of Yash Chopra's nicest films was the under-rated Lamhe, which had Sridevi play the double role of a mother and daughter: the former rebuffs Anil Kapoor's advances because she loves another; the latter, also 18, falls madly in love with our hero. Kapoor, who is only in his late-40s, is deeply conflicted when he discovers that his old love's little girl has feelings for him. He fights it, but in the end, gives in. The film ends with the two coming together in typical Yash Chopra style — running into each other's arms in slow-motion, violins wailing.

At the time of its release (1991), the movie garnered more critical appreciation than box office. The story was deemed incestuous, and though patently there was no links by blood between Kapoor and the 18-year-old Sridevi, audiences professed themselves to be too shocked. It got relegated, unfairly, to niche viewing (this was much before multiplexes), and didn't get the kind of response it would have if it had come today. In that sense, Lamhe was way ahead of its times.

The 2003 Joggers' Park was a firmly multiplex movie, produced by Subhash Ghai and directed by Anant Balani, which dealt with the old man-young girl theme in a cool, very contemporary manner. Perizaad Zorbian plays 20-something Jenny, a worldly-wise, sexually mature, on-the-go professional who attracts a retired judge (Victor Bannerjee). They meet at a park, where she jogs with proficiency, and he with the faltering steps of a beginner: their relationship blossoms through a consultancy (he think she is being gypped by her lawyer, and she is grateful for his advice). But it becomes more than just friendly banter between two newly acquainted people, and that's when troubles start brewing. Again it turns on the vexed question of the young woman's age-appropriate companions and the commitment and ties the man has towards his family. What would have happened if he actually left his family and went off to be with her?

We'll have to wait for a braver filmmaker, and perhaps an audience ready to accept more, to come up with that film.