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.