Do we care for musicals?
SAY NO SAY NO
Saawariya is just the latest in a line of experimental films that may be proof that despite our love for songs and dances, we don’t really care for musicals.
NOV 25, 2007 - IF THERE IS SUCH A THING as an Indian genome, and if it is going to go under a microscope, here’s what they’ll find out about us: that we love bright colours; that we can’t do without oily, spicy food; that however much reason and reality may tell us otherwise, we’ll always find things to like about Sachin Tendulkar and Shah Rukh Khan; and that we’d rather have a lettuce-salad lunch or wear white or defect to Dhoni-worship than give up the music videos in our cinema.
Whenever a film containing songs and dances is made in the rest of the world – say, Moulin Rouge or Chicago – it’s hailed as the return of the musical, but here, it’s never really gone away and it never really will. Our DNA is hardwired with the capacity to completely accept as natural an actor speaking one instant, bursting into song the next – and the history of our cinema is littered with examples of films that have succeeded simply because we saw one rocking number in the promos and paid an obscene amount of multiplex-money to watch it on the big screen. (Yes, Dus, I’m talking about you.)
And yet, the most high-profile musical of the season has crashed out with a discordant note. No one – not the critics, not the audiences – seems entirely happy with Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s latest stab at melding film and opera and theatre and performance art, and Saawariya is just the latest in a line of much-anticipated musicals that has been received with little enthusiasm: starting with last Diwali’s Jaan-e-Mann and moving on to Umrao Jaan and Salaam-e-Ishq and Jhoom Barabar Jhoom.
What’s common to these films – apart from the drubbing at the hands of critics and their destiny at the box office – is that each one is, in its own way, a musical, not just in the sense that it features songs and dances, but in that it tries to use these songs and dances to do something more, something interesting, something different. You could say that these films, in a sense, haven’t been directed so much as orchestrated – for their songs and dances often take the place of expository dialogue.
The music, in these films, isn’t just a part of the narrative. It is the narrative – as in Salaam-e-Ishq, which uses two golden oldies to define the contours of an extra-marital relationship. (Aao huzoor tumko, that come-on from Kismat, comes on when the much-married Anil Kapoor is attracted to his dance instructor, while Babuji dheere chalna from Aar Paar plays soon after, as a caution against this attraction.) You could contrast this with something like the current smash Om Shanti Om, which features a superb soundtrack, but could just as easily have existed without these numbers – except, perhaps Dhoom tana, which is a spoof of Hindi film music videos down the ages. (It is, in other words, a song-and-dance tribute to song-and-dance cinema.)
The difference between a song-and-dance movie and a musical can be laid out on a hair’s breadth, but perhaps a music video from Saawariya can help explain this microscopic (or perhaps not) distinction. When Rani Mukerji and a group of extras burst into choreography in the Chhail chhabeela number, it does look like a song sequence from any other film featuring many anonymous dancers keeping step behind one lead actor – except that the extras in this case have been defined in terms of the stage-space they inhabit.
They don’t just appear for the sake of the song and disappear soon after, the way they would in just another song-and-dance movie. We may not know each one of them by name and by face – and in this aspect, they are as anonymous as the dancer-extras in any one of our films – but we know what they do and where they’re from, and even after the song’s end, when they no longer occupy centrestage, we know that they are lurking around in the corners of the screen. They are an integral part of an organically imagined musical universe.
And they are in service of a film that uses music in conceptual ways – like Umrao Jaan, where JP Dutta structured his song sequences as contrapuntal mirror-images to the happenings in Umrao’s life. When this courtesan performs for the first time before an audience, the number that plays out is Salaam – and these words are how she greets her patrons, how she introduces herself to her clientele. In Jaan-e-Mann, when Salman Khan recounts the events that led to his divorce, the room darkens, as if getting ready for a show. And as his flashback unfolds, it is a show that follows – with roving spotlights, billowing red curtains and moving sets.
And in Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, that other meta-musical, a courtroom sequence with a lawyer arguing for the plaintiff morphs very suddenly into the glitzy, high-octane Kiss of love number. There’s no pretence about this song situation building from where the previous scene left off and tapering into where the next scene begins, nor is there an attempt to ground this sequence in a recognisable reality. It’s the Bollywood format taken to its most logical end: surrealism.
It’s not as if the director Shaad Ali dreamed up such a situation for the very first time in the history of Indian cinema. His Kiss of love essentially does what Aaj phir jeene ki tamanna hai did in one of our most popular musicals, Guide (yes, musical, not just song-and-dance film): it takes a moment of revelation and highlights it by hanging a musical number on it, by letting us bask in and fully absorb the import of the situation. The song in Jhoom appears just after Bobby Deol confesses to Preity Zinta that he’s attracted to her, but considering the nature of their professional relationship, they’d better stay away from… well, the kiss of love. And the song in Guide is, of course, a reaffirmation that Waheeda Rehman has broken free from her stuffy marriage.
But where Guide differs from Jhoom is in having a strong story, with strong characters. There’s nothing surrealistic in Guide – other than, of course, the fact that this woman who so far sounded like Waheeda Rehman has suddenly taken to singing in Lata Mangeshkar’s voice with the full backing of SD Burman’s orchestra – and that may perhaps be why even those who don’t care for musicals could find something to invest in. Jhoom, on the other hand, is such a hip, snarky lark that it doesn’t even pretend to tell a story, so if you’re not going to focus on how London-snob Preity Zinta’s reversal of stance on marrying a “brownie‿ is reflected in her musical reverie of interior-India in the Dhaage tod laao song sequence – where her love interest Abhishek Bachchan isn’t just a “brownie,‿ he’s also a coolie – there’s not much else in the film to hold on to.
Could that be why Jhoom Barabar Jhoom didn’t work, because the constant barrage of item numbers – the present-day incarnations of the ostrich-feather cabaret items of the past – has whittled away our capacity to see songs serving any other function? Have we evolved (or devolved, depending on how you see it) to a point where we only care about song-and-dance films, and not musicals? Do we – today – want songs and dances to be just a pleasant diversion, where we enjoy the clothes and the choreography and the good-looking performers and nothing else? Is that why so many films of the fifties and the sixties readily classify themselves as musicals, while most of what we get these days are simply song-and-dance films?
The point isn’t that Jhoom – or for that matter Saawariya or Jaan-e-Mann or Salaam-e-Ishq – is some sort of unheralded masterpiece, unfairly neglected by a paying public that has made hits of far lesser films. Each one of these has its own set of problems – but when so many other films-with-flaws get away with success, why not these? And if someone got down to it and made a really good musical tomorrow – oh, for argument’s sake, let’s just say someone made another Guide or Navrang (with its high-concept premise of a poet who reimagines his prosaic wife as a passionate muse, thus allowing his life to mutate into one long, uninterrupted musical) – would we go and watch it?
And what does this say about modern audience tastes (not in a churlishly judgmental how-could-they-not-like-these-films way, but more along the lines of whether we still have the patience and the interest to sit through all-musical conceptions, where the lyrics are as important as the lines of dialogue, the sung inseparable from the spoken)? At least in the case of Saawariya, you can see why it hasn’t caught on. For one thing, it’s a gloomy vision of romance, and perhaps not many wanted to celebrate a Diwali weekend with a film that (literally) has no sunshine. But Jhoom and Salaam-e-Ishq had big stars. They had catchy music and flashy production numbers, and these alone have been reasons for other films to make it. So what happened here? Why the hostility in the reception, where people didn’t merely point out that these films weren’t worth watching, but took almost perverse pleasure in tearing them down?
Of course, all these arguments crash down before Devdas, a musical that truly succeeded. To see why this isn’t just another song-and-dance movie, you only have to recall the point where the stage is set for Paro’s mother’s thundering humiliation, and afterwards, the actual thundering humiliation happens. But in between this bookending, the director (Bhansali again) takes a breather and shows us Paro and Devdas simply, quietly being in love. It’s romance as well as respite, and this effect could just as easily have been achieved by a scene of dialogue – but Bhansali gave us the More piya song sequence instead.
Perhaps it was just seeing how ethereal Aishwarya Rai seemed that made us drop our defenses. Or maybe it’s quite simply the fact that Devdas starred Shah Rukh Khan, who, at this golden stage of his career, can clearly make any subject work – even a film on women’s hockey. Maybe that’s why he’s the true superstar of our age – not just because of the mega-blockbuster-in-the-making that is Om Shanti Om (which has handily trounced Saawariya), but because, in his hands, even a musical becomes a box-office smash.
Copyright ©2007 The New Sunday Express. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.