How the aam aadmi biopic is wooing Bollywood
There is a sudden surge of real people in Bollywood. We have had biopics in Hindi mainstream for a while but this latest crop of films is different. The focus so far was on celebrating life stories of the famous. This new lot of films in the genre creates drama out of stories of ordinary people who faced extraordinary circumstances and rose above the same. For Bollywood, aam aadmi is the new hero of the biopic.
Filmmakers have realised there is money to be made in real stories that inspire, and these stories need not necessarily be of a celebrity such as a Mary Kom or a Milkha Singh. The hunt therefore is on among scriptwriters and directors to discover the next great story of bravura that may have made headlines once and somewhat diminished from popular memory since then.
This week’s new release Neerja, based on the true story of a brave airhostess who laid down her life trying to protect passengers from hijackers aboard her flight, is one such film. Following Neerja, Bollywood has a date with Aligarh the week after. The film is about a professor who courageously faced all travails coming his way due to his homosexual orientation.
Truth, they say, is stranger than fiction. It can also be more dramatic and laced with heightened emotions. Reality as a formula is overall rising in Bollywood, with even fictional scripts creating thrust on characters and situations that are authentic. Stories of real people had to become flavour of the season.
Look closely, biopics of any kind are essentially doing what any commercial film meant to inspire does. Very simply, they use the story of a protagonist to create a sense of heroism and/or create social awareness over a pertinent issue. If Bollywood as a mainstream industry has been serving exactly that potion forever, the idea it would seem was getting jaded amid the generic masala film’s larger-than-life approach.
Real stories about real people bring in an element of respectability to that approach, even if they alter certain truths of the tale they set out to narrate.
So, if you tell the story of an airhostess who actually existed and sacrificed her life for the greater good aboard the plane she served as a purser, the idea earns more popular credibility than it would if you created a piece of heroic fiction that narrated the story of a make-belief heroine who might have laid down her life under imagined circumstances.
The greatness of a protagonist such as Neerja Bhanot in Neerja or Professor Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras in Aligarh, after all, is special beyond the measures of success or any yardstick of popularity. It is defined by the way they stood up to testing conditions with sheer character. The idea is a readymade potion of drama — melodrama, even. It calls for heightened play of emotions and creates space for violence or patriotism as the particular story may demand, in the midst of the hero worship it sets out to peddle.
In the case of a story like the upcoming Sarbjit, the formula also brings in extensive scope to play with relationships. The film is about an Indian farmer Sarabjit Singh who was arrested on charges of spying by Pakistan after he strayed across the border. Sarabjit ultimately died in a Pakistani prison after brutal torture.
Director Omung Kumar, who revealed his slant at elaborate schmaltz in Mary Kom looks at Sarabjit’s story from the viewpoint of the character’s sister Dalbir Kaur, played by Aishwarya Rai-Bachchan. The presence of the actress brings in the element of glamour into his otherwise sombre film, naturally. Therein lies a danger. The urge to make a film as Sarbjit compatible to the glamour quotient of its stars for maximum impact creates chances of manipulation of the truth it sets out to narrate. This is a menace biopics reveal universally. In a bid to glorify the subject, screenplays often alter facts. While the idea becomes part of the imagebuilding process if the film’s is a celebrity, trouble starts if truth is stage-managed in incidents of wider pertinence that may involve regular people.
A recent example is Airlift. The film, otherwise a pulsating entertainer that deserved ovation, drew enough flak for its skewered view of what actually happened. Akshay Kumar’s new film cast him as the fictional hero of a real operation that happened quite differently than what the film showed.
Airlift is about a brave operation in Kuwait during Iraq’s attack of 1990, to rescue over a lakh Indians stranded in that country. Akshay played Ranjit Katyal, a man shown to be pivotal to the mission. The film claimed the character was fictitious but based on a couple of real people. Soon after the film’s release, many Indians who survived that ordeal in 1990 came out to say the actual operation was hardly anything like what the film showed.
Perhaps Bollywood is only reacting to the fact that the aam aadmi is flavour of the season all over the country lately. Narrating stories of common people who did remarkably in life is after all only in sync with that important socio-political reality of the country. Neerja, Professor Siras and Sarabjit will therefore coexist with Dhoni, Azhar and Sanjay Dutt on Hindi filmdom’s biopic canvas for now.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)