Friday, October 26, 2012

SilSila of Bollywood




I think Bollywood’s bane is melodrama. This tear-jerking overture of the film makers has the potential of killing a plot which could otherwise be a classic. This was the actual grouse of R K Narayan who lamented the garishness of Devanand. The celluloid version of The Guide was an apology to his literary work thanks to the Bollywood’s characteristic kitsch.  However, the academic value of Naryan’s contention was beaten down to a silly money matter- Devanand didn’t bother to pay the acclaimed writer though.

The biggest showman Raj Kapoor, as stimulator of fake emotions, was also the biggest generator of potboilers. Lengthy sermons on social values delivered in the likes of Awara and Sri 420, and the skin exposure camouflaged under women sentiment in the films like Satyam Shivam Sundaram, and Ram Teri Ganga Maili made him a tricky preacher. However, the trick was covered under the boisterous melodrama, and the real heartburn is that even those block-busters of Raj Kapoor could have been all time classics but for these hollow cinematic histrionics.

Gurudatt was just a flicker immune to the malice. His irreverence shone in Sahib, Bivi aur Gulam and subtlety of emotions sparkled in Kagaj ke Phool could have been the leading light shoring up the banal Bollywood to a path-breaking freshness. But, his regime was so short-stinted that the genre that could have flourished under his inspiration died before taking birth.

These rambling thoughts came to me, while watching Sil Sila on Sony Max on Vijaya Dashami night. Although, I had watched it long ago, the film came back to me with a new meaning with its grandeur and short comings. The sad demise of the king of romance Yash Chopra, who created this stirringly unconventional theme of the time, notwithstanding, the gratuitous melodrama and contrived politically correctness that has sucked the very poetry of the creation goaded me to be critical.

Rekha was the real diva with just living into the character, while her styling tastefully engineered by the aesthete director in colorful chiffons just to be lifted by the luscious background settings of Switzerland added to her grace and beauty. While her eyes spoke all along, they were aplomb in expressing the internal conflict of a woman who had to be a true lover apart from being a truthful wife of another. While crossing the thin line between the love and adultery, those eyes said everything.

Amitabh Bhachchan, who graduated from a nervous actor of Anand to an unlikely performer of Sholay gave testimony to how he had come of age while sharing the screen space with Rekha in Sil Sila, though his interludes with Shashi Kapoor in the earlier part of the film were still amateurish.

While the villain of the film was the melodrama, its real victim was Jaya Bachchan, a virtuoso who was unfairly fitted into a mutely-moaning house wife struggling to win back her husband from an illegitimate love affair. The writer imparted sheer injustice to her by making her mouthing the words like pathi parameswar, dharam, jeevan, and pyar. Her characterization has not just punished Jaya as an actor, but also killed the very plot which could have made for an epic movie otherwise.  The contrived face-offs of the husband and wife in the wake of the former straying into a wrong path and the conclusion of the plot similar to a moral story with a message that the good (read true Indian family value bound to the institution of marriage) would always win over evil (read love outside of marriage) were woven to appease a wide gallery of overtly sentimental audience admiring moral values and most importantly to avoid the blame of assaulting Indian tradition.

The sequences created to establish characters and their mutual relationship are characteristically artificial to be typical Bollywood and the way they lead to subsequent drama and the climax was really laughable. 
Yet Sil Sila is regarded as one of the greatest movies that Indian filmdom produced. When we have to choose among the available lot, there is no option but to settle for the best of the worst.