This movie is about Bollywood telling India what Deng Xiaoping so successfully told China: "to get rich is glorious." Bollywood shapes India's attitudes. Bollywood delivering this message - to an India that has been wallowing for decades in the Gandhian mythology of self-denial, and in the consequent hypocrisy, mediocrity and poverty - just the concept makes this film a winner.
At heart, this is a thinly disguised Bollywood style documentary on Dhirubhai Ambani. There's a great item number with Mallika Sherawat, set in Istanbul. Aishwarya Rai plays Kokilaben (I'm sure Kokilaben is flattered) and is introduced to the film in a peppy dancing-in-the-rain sequence. Dhirubhai makes a big speech in the courtroom denouement, kind-of-sort-of comparing himself to Gandhi. It's fun to watch.
But the film never goes from being visually interesting to being viscerally compelling. There is no knot, no conflict, no tension that drags to plot forward until it is resolved. Nor is their any character development. Dhirubhai seems to have been born being Dhirubhai. For instance, there is no conflict between Dhirubhai's high aspirations and the sordidness of the bribes he needs to give out to meet those aspirations. The only attempt to create inner tension was with Nanaji, a Ramnath Goenka like character, who starts off as a father figure to Dhirubhai and then proceeds to wage a crusade against him. That storyline didn't really work.
That might be why Guru was not a box office blockbuster. It's not going to have a Sholay or Lagaan-like impact on India's psyche. A pity. Because the "to get rich is glorious" message really is reshaping India.
2 comments:
Hated the end. Yeah - its fine to get rich. But to have a stadium of people cheering the fairly dubious means to achieve the end was terrible.
And this is not coming from the need to make the hero virtuous. If he was forced to resort to bribes - to doing things he never believed he would need to - in order to make it; in order to survive - I think it is ok. I can even sympathise. But then end it realistically - the hero lives with the good and the bad. He has to reconcile it within. That never really happens.
Also - hated the mallika item number. and liked the goenka battle - that could have been the great tension of the film - a la thomas becket.
Yeah. The two potentially interesting plotlines that never quite took off were the Goenka battle. The parallels I like better than Becket are Shivaji Ganesan in Thanga Paddakam or Tom Hanks and Paul Newman in Road to Perdition...father-son moral conflicts. The trouble with the Goenka plot is that it never resolved cleanly. It was set up as a no-prisoners-taken fight to the end. So, did Nanaji lose? Did he die a bitter broken man because Gurubhai's betrayal? And if so, did Gurubhai really end the story as such a big hero? Something doesn't work.
The plotline I like better is the potential inner conflict within Gurubhai (like in Nayakan). Benegal made a film called The Making of the Mahatma, starring Rajat Kapur as Gandhi, which is interesting because Gandhi was a man being shaped simultaneously by the world around him and by his own will. He was a real person. Not yet an icon. There still is a story to be told about The Making of Gurubhai. This wasn't it.
I suspect the filmmakers actually started with the same political idea that I like, and layered a film on to that political idea. And despite my sympathy for the political idea, that rarely is a great way to make a film. In film or in fiction, the character comes first. The politics comes in, only if necessary, to support the character.
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