'rang birangi'

‘rang birangi’ early in the morning on gudi padwa.. hrishikesh mukherjee directing a cast of the usual suspects- amol palekar, deepti naval, utpal dutt, deven varma, farookh sheikh- basically almost all the representatives of the alternative middle class cinema set of the 70s and the 80s- with glam queen parveen babi thrown in playing the bored housewife.

i don’t know how many films i have seen by him.. ‘golmaal’, ‘khoobsurat’ –but my favourite has to be ‘chupke chupke’ with dharmendra playing a professor playing a driver, a amitabh bachchan playing dharmenra’s wife sharmila tagore’s husband.. whatever..

his films as well as those of basu chaterjee (khatta meetha) or sai paranjpe’s ‘chasmhe buddoor’- all of these films are light romantic comedies of error set in a background where polyester salwar kameez wearing heroines travel in buses, genial uncles play the part of match makers, where the bell bottomed hero cannot find the right words to express his love while his best friend eggs him on and everything goes wrong somewhere in the middle of the plot and falls into place towards the end. happily ever after.

nowadays its rare to see people and places that come right out of our everyday experience of living in the city- where things like affordability of a new house, or the trivialities of how does one travel to work, or the promotion that one is working towards are all spoken about and made represented. i still remember the film in which deepti naval meets farookh sheikh and tries to sell him ‘chamko washing powder’ – i think the film was ‘chashme buddoor’- or amol palekar pretending to have a twin for the sake of a new job (gol maal)

this genre and even its derivatives has all but disappeared from the screen. instead we have high emotional drama soaked in soft focus glamour, gritty urban stories about the underworld or the sex horror film. even the alternative film industry that is trying to break new ground in film making (or at least story telling) ‘my brother nikhil’, ‘black’, ‘page 3’, ‘white noise’- all veer away from the ‘ordinary’ preferring to root stories in fanciful dream like landscapes- i guess in the hope that the gloss will be able to make the project commercially viable.

the last time i remember being stunned by the tangibility or the ‘reality‘ of a representation on screen of a space that i know was the romance between abhishek bahchan and antara mali in the lovingly detailed best bus scene in ram gopal varma’s ‘naach’- where the conversation between strangers is interspersed with sounds and images that anyone who has lived in the city will know.

i hope i don’t sound like i am arguing for a ‘realism’ in film- i just think that it would be nice to see ‘us’ sometimes on screen.