The Showman v/s the Tellman

If Hollywood were ever to make a horror movie called 'The Preacher Man', with Dusty Springfield crooning away as the open credits roll, guess who'd be the most likely to star as the titular character? Tough call, actually. For it'd be a toss-up between showman reincarnate ten times over Sanjay Leela Bhansali and tellman (copyrighted, I coined the term) who loves history so much that he retells it in movie form, Ashutosh Gowariker.

I was an impressionable teen (I think) when I first saw Bhansali's directorial debut, Khamoshi - The Musical, and as impressionable teens go, I was quick to see the beauty behind the constantly-breaking-into-song cast and the forehead-or-chest-thrashing hearing-impaired duo of Nana Patekar and Seema Biswas. I hadn't yet understood the beauty of subtlety then; but, as a lover of cinema and moving images and stories beyond my own, it was after watchingGulzar's 'Koshish' that I had no choice but to learn to tell a masterful storyteller from a pale (or colour-loving, if you will) imitator.

Don't get me wrong - 'Khamoshi' is probably the least evil in Bhansali's body of work, but it too has its cringe-worthy moments - the over-the-top acting/hamming, the depiction of bleakness in his choice of colours (gloomy shades of blue, grey and black dominate) and such like. Melodrama has been the bread and butter and perhaps even jam of Bollywood (paratha, makhan aur achaar, if you will) for so long that I don't think I'll see *that* change in my lifetime. But being guilty of cramming that much schmaltz into every single film you make? There's only so much the human mind can take.

I believe in the milk of human kindness, but to see the melodramatic equivalent of double D decolletage in every frame of the movie kind of makes me want to watch a 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' to cleanse my mind. Which was what one saw in Bhansali's latest venture, 'Guzaarish', a crude but gorgeous-looking imitation of 'Whose Life is it Anyway?', starring Richard Dreyfuss as a quadriplegic who fights for the right to take his own miserable life. The difference being, Dreyfuss fights for his rights, but Roshan does the salsa with his nose when a fly lands on it. The movie, or at least the trailer, which is all that I dared to live through, made me want to run a million chalks on the black board and tape its glorious sound effects and send it to Bhansali with all my love.

Cinema is about a lot many things, and I hope to take a film appreciation course someday to better understand its many nuances, but if riots of colours were to make up for what a movie lacks in story or performance, the world would have chosen a Van Gogh painting to marvel at, don't you think?

And now on to Ashutosh Gowariker - similar career graph; started off promising, is now fighting hard against the age-old too-much-of-a-good-thing syndrome. Marrying a historical fact to an impossible fictitious idea may have worked wonders at the box office the first time and gotten you global accolades galore, but trying to force-fit fiction into history with alarming regularity (with one hugely unimpressive exception times twelve) is bound to fall flat sooner or later.

Back when it released and kicked off the whole "India's entry to the Oscars" trend, 'Lagaan' was a winner in every sense of the word. A humble 'Swades' followed, (Shahrukh's only performance other than 'Baadshah' that he can be proud of, IMO) and then, it was the turn of pachyderm-fighting Hrithik Roshan as Emperor Akbar who tries to win the heart of Jodhaa, that history textbooks claim was (f)actually his daughter-in-law. Hoo boy. Following that atrocity was Mr. Yogi in female form, starring, unfortunately, manufactured miss Priyanka Chopra, who deserved the best actress award for this movie - for having the gumption to take it on. I wonder why Bhansali hasn't cast her yet. Staying true to his habit of alternating between impossible pipe dreams (pun unintended) and hysterical historicals, Gowariker's 'Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey' about the Chittagong Uprising is well on its way to disappearing without a trace.

Here's a brainwave - why don't Bhansali and Gowariker make a movie together? Bhansali's over-the-top visual excess can do with a bit of understated simplicity that is Gowariker's trademark, and Gowariker's penchant for rewriting history can maybe rub off on Bhansali's insistence that originality is overrated in storytelling, considering none of his so-called grand ventures are original. And in return, Gowariker can benefit from Bhansali's cinematic vision and see the world in hues other than brown and beige.

It can end in two ways - show-and-tell will get a new definition. Or that horror movie I was talking about in the beginning can originate from Indian shores. Our next entry to the Oscars, perhaps.

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Find out who fared better at the box office this year - the small-time storyteller or the big-budget filmmaker in our section on the Year at the Box Office.