Of Masala and Magadheera (2009)

[Note: This piece was republished in South Scope magazine.]

I love masala films.

This weekend I saw not one but two modern specimens of the form: Vivek Oberoi’s Prince and the Telugu SUPER HIT Magadheera. The divide between the two is indicative of so much that is happening in Bollywood right now and with all the Bollywood chattering classes expressing surprise that Prince has done well when piles of films with better critical reviews have crashed up against audience indifference, I thought I should add my take on it.

Not so long ago, Bollywood put out films that were not too different from the southern film industries. Granted they were always a little tamer with a little better production values and, of course, different cultural reference points. Something like Khakee (2004) is not really so far removed from Chatrapthi (2005), even if Akshay Kumar has never wrestled a shark. But in the last few years, the number of big budget Bollywood masala films has dropped along with the quality of the masala that is getting made. Signaling that the trend is here to stay, the Filmfare Awards quietly dropped the traditional “Best Villain” and “Best Comedian” awards in 2007—awards that used to give the industry a chance to appreciate the hard work of actors like Pran, Amjad Khan, and Johnny Lever who stole scenes from out under the feet of the hunky heroes headlining the films.

Bollywood filmmakers are aiming more and more towards the greener (as in cash money) pastures of the “world” audience and, in doing so, are changing the composition of the films they are selling. And, yet, for all the talk about “competing with Hollywood,” the Hindi film industry has had a rough couple of years. Since Akshay Kumar had his year of low-brow hits in 2007 and solidified his place as a Hero who could bring in the masses, no new faces have emerged to take over the mantle from the Three Khans, who are all in their mid-40s and objectively speaking don’t have that many years of “heroing” left. While Ranbir Kapoor, Shahid Kapoor, and, to a lesser degree, Neil Nitin Mukesh and Imran Khan, have all had hits none have begun to inspire the devotion shown to Shahrukh, Aamir, and Salman. And this isn’t a coincidence – the kinds of films that create the larger-than-life personas of Shahrukh, Aamir, and Salman are just not being made today. The industry has gone and changed the kind of audience it is aiming at—Westernized, educated, and most likely raised on Hollywood—and has been suffering at the box office at home because of it.

All of this is a roundabout way of bringing me to my point, namely, there is a reason that one of the top films of the last two years was a Southern remake, Ghajini. Bollywood scriptwriters have forgotten how to write a proper Bollywood narrative. I feel like every week we see yet another round of films that don’t connect with the audience. Take Karthik Calling Karthik, which had an promising premise, a good cast, and great music and then proceeded to waste all of it in an attempt to make a film that was as “realistic” as Hollywood but still Bollywood enough to please the average viewer. Song picturizations, which ideally should flow naturally from the narrative, have become song montages thrown in at random intervals. Witty dialogues and memorable lines have—with the exception of, perhaps, Imtiaz Ali—vanished into Hinglish simple enough that even gori me can watch a recent film without subtitles (which I did for Karthik Calling Karthik) and understand everything that’s going on just fine. In one of my favorite scenes from post-modern masala film Tashan (a total flop, although not because it was a bad film), arch-villain Bhaiyaji gives a bastardized version of Amitabh Bachchan’s epic temple speech from Deewar entirely in Hinglish, horrifying his audience. (This is just one of the many scenes from Tashan that leads me to believe that Vijay Krishna Acharya, who also wrote Dhoom 2, is currently the only man in Bollywood who knows how to write an honest masala story.)

And it’s not just the style. The songs and dialogues are also gone, as are the epic struggles and epic romances of times past that would emotionally connect the audience to the film and the actors in it. Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na was cute but it doesn’t have the emotional heft of DDLJ. More and more often, when I leave the theater, I don’t care about the film I just saw. Actually, sometimes I stop caring while still watching the film. Prince may not have had any dil but it did deliver on the masala style, which was enough to give it a 70% to 80% opening crowd at the single screen theaters.

There is a wonderful quote from the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes in which Calvin says that, “a good compromise leaves everyone mad.” To me this sums up so much about the state of Bollywood right now. New filmmakers want to be making Hollywood-style films but audiences at home still want the traditional masala experience, leading to the cognitive disonnance that leads the Bollywood chattering classes to express surprise that something like Prince turns out to be a hit. Of course, it was a hit! When was the last Bollywood film to add action, adventure, sexy ladies, evil villains, and a bumping soundtrack? I can answer that for you because I saw that one, too, the tepid, hugely boring Blue back in October. It’s now April. Why are we all surprised at Prince’s success? It may not be a “good” film but it is certainly much more entertaining than anything else out there right now.

So, where does Magadheera fit into all of this? The SUPER HIT film starring Ram Charan Teja and Kajal Aggarwal is a masterwork of masala from the opening motorcycle jump sequence to the star-crossed love to the creeptastic villain and unironic heroicness and even more unironic dance moves by Raj Charan Teja. Magadheera delivers on everything that the Bollywood crowd is too embarrassed to show onscreen and it’s incredible. The simple yearning between Harsha and Indu, Hero and Heroine, is palpable and the villain is evil enough for us to enjoy hating while not overwhelming enough that I end up rooting for him. Ram Charan Teja’s performance as the Hero was breathtaking. He has the kind of charisma that gets an audience rooting for him even though we know he is going to win. That takes talent. And while Ranbir Kapoor and maybe Shahid could pull off something similar in Bollywood, they won’t get the chance because no matter how much I might wish it, the Pandora’s Box of “realism” has been opened and, like a virus, this desire to appear “realistic” is spreading around Film City. I may sound like a crank but I’m not against progress—like I said, I loved post-modern Tashan to pieces—and there is certainly a place on film screens worldwide for films like Ishqiya and Dev.D which use a subtle and more contemporary form of Bollywood narrative. What I am against is this half-baked idea that films can only be taken seriously if they are “realistic” and that “realism” is something only found using a Hollywood style of filmmaking. This idea is something that filmmakers are going to have to shake if they want audiences to start returning to the theaters en masse. While I still go to my local Bollywood theater and still see all the new releases no matter how terrible the reviews, when I do get excited for Bollywood films now it’s usually for things like Golmaal Returns or Ajab Prem Ki Ghazab Kahani or Singh is Kinng—comedy aimed at the masses (and me)—because I know I’ll be in for a rollicking good time.

But when I want a cathartic viewing experience, the kind of film that I’ll watch twice in one day, I turn South.

To Magadheera.

(Originally posted April 11, 2010)