The Hindu Business Line : Resham-mian serenades

About a month ago, a Himesh Reshammiya special on a TV news channel got jammed. He was on live, the phone lines had been opened, and the calls wouldn’t stop coming. It got to a point where the reception was told to stop taking all calls.

The TV spot was positioned ahead of Reshammiya’s debut film Aap Ka Surroor, and was a sign of how the movie would fare at the box office. It’s broken all the opening records in 2007, and is still doing good business. Sol d for over Rs 1.5 crore in the Delhi-UP circuit, it’s already made nearly double that; everyone associated with the movie, the producers, the distributors and the exhibitors, are ecstatic.

What makes a movie featuring a singer who has a fetish for caps, and jackets and facial hair, such a magnet? Admittedly, Reshammiya has legions of fans, who adore his flagrantly high-pitched nasal voice. There are those who believe that actor Emraan Hashmi, whose playback voice Reshammiya has been, got so popular because of the latter (there was a time when Aashiq Banaya Aapne was blaring from as many autorickshaws as there are on the road in North India). In an attempt to cash in on this craze for him, Reshammiya had, of late, been appearing in music videos.

But a full-length, two-and-a-half hour feature is not the same thing as a two-and-a-half minute song. There have been other playback singers who’ve been bitten by the acting bug, got producers to put them into movies, and have been roundly rejected. Sonu Nigam is a recent case in point who came on and went off, and now sticks to playback singing.

The right pitch

Industry watchers point out a crucial difference between Reshammiya and other wannabe hopefuls; he has been working towards a film right from the time it was evident to him, and his backers, that he could carry the connect with his listeners on to a screen, that people wanted to both listen to him and see him.

Unlike Nigam, who tried a conventional singing-dancing fictional route, Reshammiya plays himself, a rising singer, who goes by the name of HR. So the audience doesn’t have to work at identifying with another character. They’ve come to see the singer, and that’s what they get: Reshammiya in his trademark caps, and long, modish jackets, singing his songs. The bonus comes in the shape of the ultra-curvaceous Mallika Sherawat, and debutant heroine Hansika Motwani — who is youthful and fresh, and virgin locations in Germany, in that order.

Aap Ka Surroor has come just at the right time for Bollywood, whose report card at the six-month mark this year shows more big-budget flops than this time in 2006. Reshammiya’s movie is making the trade smile, as is Anil Sharma&# 8217;s Apne, which presents for the first time all three Deols together — papaji Dharmendra with sonny boys Sunny and Bobby. It may not be as big a success as Aap Ka Surroor because it was an expensive movie at Rs 20-plus crore, but its steady performance proves there are enough takers still for Garam Dharam, who is still, despite the wrinkles and the distinctly ageing profile, a star.

The hits…

So what else worked? Mani Ratnam’s Guru was the first hit of the year. The thinly-disguised biopic of Dhirubhai Ambani’s life, starring Abhishek and Aishwarya, started slow, and then gathered momentum after the Abhi-Ash engagement. The real-life fascination for the couple amongst audiences translated, in one of those quirky twists that can make or break a movie, into box-office bonanza. Vipul Shah’s reverse spin on the classic NRI-coming-home-for-a-bride in Namastey London (in this case it was Katrina Kaif coming bridegroom-hunting, and the dulha in question was Akshay Kumar) was another success: Katrina’s British-accented, white-skin-obsessed character was just right, as was Akshay’s flipping the macho Indian male role over for his part.

The other successes: Anurag Basu’s Life in a Metro, which combines men and women, love and lust, trust and betrayal and plays them out in the background of a rain-soaked Mumbai. A superb ensemble cast (Irrfan and Konkona, Shar man and Kangana, Kay Kay and Shilpa) and soul-stirring melodies still playing on top of the charts on FM stations, made the film a must-watch for multiplex audiences.

Apoorva Lakhia’s gangsta movie, Shootout at Lokhandwala, loosely based on encounter deaths of a Mumbai gang 16 years ago, will also be counted as a plus; it did very well in the Bombay circuit, and well enough in the North. Tara Rum Pum, Yashraj’s April gift to schoolchildren about to head off for their holidays, steadied itself after a rocky start. Left to themselves, Saif and Rani couldn’t have pulled them in; it was the two kids and the cute dog which helped the movie attract droves of children, and their parents, and their grandparents! It was an average hit.

What’s really hit the bull’s-eye is Sagar Bellary’s Bheja Fry’, a minimalistic comedy based on a French movie and about an off-key, obsessive singer, and a rich music company owner. In bits and pieces, the fi lm flags, but on the whole it has such a lovely premise and, again, very good acting by Vinay Pathak, Rajat Kapoor, and Sarika, that it hasn’t managed to find its way out of theatres till now, more than two months after its release.

…and the misses

On top of the big, big flops has to be Nikhil Advani’s Salaam-e-Ishq. At three hours forty minutes, it turned out to be just too long. There was also not much that was staggeringly novel about its tracks and its characters. No thing could save this movie from being a Rs 40-crore turkey, not even its rousing music, and the presence of John Abraham, Salman Khan, Akshaye Khanna, Priyanka Chopra, Ayesha Takia and Vidya Balan, and a funny turn by Govinda.

But the real shocker has turned out to be Yashraj’s summer biggie Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, with its much-hyped dream cast of Amitabh, Abhishek, Preity, Bobby and Lara, and London and Paris. Its all style, no substance approach has acted as a sure-fire audience repellent, making it the first flop from the Yashraj banner in more than a decade.

Now for the next six months.