To puncture the space between each monthly launch, IA brings to you its weekly edition, IA Weekly, which will be updated every Saturday to bring forth latest review. This week  PAA – The Destruction of an Icon.

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Metteur-en-Scene – R Balki

Photographed by P C Sreeram

Performed by Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Vidya Balan

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Before Shahrukh Khan assumed a persona that is unattainable in its size and incomprehensible in its scale, he was the symbol of middle class hope. Up till a certain point in his career, people did not have to look up at his image on the screen and try to demystify its sheer magnanimity; but instead, could look straight at him as someone who had risen from amidst them. Till that point, he evoked within audiences a sense of relation. Now he evokes intimidation. Then, he was a commonly shared example which aspirants to the screen would attempt to emulate; but now, his mention is a hushed whisper because emulation is not a thought that is impossible – it is also demoralizing. Up till that point, a filmmaker could fit him into a film. Now, they fit the film into him.

When Mani Rathnam, known for his meticulous casting of actors and choices of faces to represent his actors, selected Shahrukh Khan to play Amar for Dil Se, people were skeptical. Wasn’t Khan’s image as this huge everyman’s superstar directly at loggerheads with the irrelevant nobody he was going to play in the film? And yet, it was precisely the image of a superstar, as Shweta Nambiar puts it, that Rathnam wanted to have dwarfed by the magnanimity of the issue that is terrorism in the film. It was precisely the use of Khan’s middle class origins that Rathnam utilized to play into the primary vulnerability of his film’s (and the nation’s) predominant middle-class audience – no matter how big you get, there are certain issues bigger than you. It was the utilization of the icon to not revel in its iconic stature; but to break it.

It’s a wonder that in a nation where, in the ensuing 11 years, innumerable talentless nobodies have assumed the stature of a celebrity, no one made an attempt to deconstruct the trend and appreciate this nation’s tendency to create mountains out of molehills, or simply, to comprehend and then subvert a legend until Paa came along 11 years later.

The problem with most other films, or television programmes that use someone as huge as Amitabh Bachchan is that they embrace his superstardom. They celebrate his stature as an icon to the extent that they find themselves in eternal allegiance to them, mostly resulting thus, in making him a larger than life persona who the film is subservient to and in some cases, thankful to, for his mere participation. Examples galore, Kaun Banega Crorepati, Black, Sarkaar, Sarkaar 2, Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, Bigg Boss – films in which he is treated as a figure so large, that the entire film’s mostly a tribute to  him. In the last ten years or so, the only film that managed to soak him into the atmosphere was Dev, his best performance since Deewar.

With Paa, director-writer R Balki’s attempted such a monumental feat of iconoclasm – he has taken the conventional suave Reid & Taylor borne image of Amitabh Bachchan and completely destructed it to create a character so far removed from where we started with, that it exceeds the achievement of the rather run-of-the-mill film it is placed inside. And it is a brave achievement, because unlike The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where Fincher, by the end of the film, had to restore Brad Pitt’s iconic stature to its most fundamental – by actually taking the actor back(by making him look young) to the early 00’s when the hysteria was at its peak – Balki not only sticks to his guns of destructing the legend of Bachchan, but he also does not display special pride in it  – until the very tepid last half-an-hour of the film, where he finally falls into the Bollywood-ian trap of celebrating one’s own achievements. He resorts to shooting Bachchan in extreme close-ups, for the more wrinkles his character develops, the more Balki wants us to appreciate the authenticity of the make-up. What he does not realize is, however, that the more authentic the make-up looks, the more we become aware of its presence, and consequently, the presence of Amitabh Bachchan underneath it. However, until that point, Balki creates a character that is so good not because it is well-written, actually being one more in the tradition of children from Mumbai who are unrealistically clever and quick-witted for their own good, and elicit humour from their emulation of adult-like behavior ( a child, in a quick-fire repartee, puts down his father; another makes a closing monologue in the finale that is the turning point of the film); or because it is so well-played by Bachchan (good, as usual); but because it uses the audience’s awareness of the Bachchan legend outside the film, and uses that as a point of reference for his character. As a result, most of our astonishment with Auro(Bachchan) is not a result of how it is, but how it is compared to the real-life visual image of Amitabh Bachchan. We respect, not the character itself, but the transformation that it is a result of.

Martin Scorsese understood that in Raging Bull. He was aware that De Niro’s histrionic achievement in the film was nowhere as good as compared to his turn in Taxi Driver, even bordering on being uni-dimensional, but that it could be presented as great if his bulky avatar was placed directly adjacent to his normal one. Therefore, at the very beginning of the film, Scorsese cuts from a CU of La Motta in 1950s to a similarly aligned camera CU of him in the 70s. By placing these shots in quick succession, he made you aware of the scale of De Niro’s achievement.

But De Niro was never as huge an icon as Bachchan is. Therefore, Balki did not have to place the reference point (Bachchan’s real life persona) within the film, but instead; allowed it, in his pre-release blitz to exist outside the film, with Bachchan himself promoting the character, and automatically, placing himself adjacent to it.

This destruction of an icon is similar to Roland Emmerich’s contempt for all American landmarks – the infamous White House shot in Independence Day, for instance.

Unluckily for Balki, however, most of the rest of his film also exists in a consistent state of comparison. The reference points for the comparison to take place are either the world outside the theatre, or cinema itself.

It is a new tendency in Bollywood screenwriting to incorporate events from the real-world within their ridiculous plots to induce a notion of being based in ‘real-life’ (itself disputable). But their attempt at it comes across more as a desperate scraping for narrative possibilities in their inability to break free from clichés. In that, they attempt, not to innovate and create a new idiom, but substitute those clichés with events from the life outside the screen. What they do not realize is that ‘realism’ exists not as a term which has a literal, definitive existence that can be incorporated within the film; but as a notion whose essence has to injected into it. Their idea of realism is to copy and paste real-life characters/events into the narrative of their films, for instance, Ajay Devgan witnesses the murder of a starlet in Hulla Bol, or Kalki Koechlin gets ridiculed for her participation in a MMS scandal in Dev D., John Abraham suffers because of 9/11 in New York, and Abhishek Bachchan’s character(Amol) only mimics Rahul Gandhi from real life in Paa. However, the fact that these reference points exist in reality still do not make their films realistic. Yes, it might assure them of not being ridiculed for the lack of logic, but realism, as aforementioned, should yield from an aesthetic approach and not a narrative one. It is a result, not of impersonation, but of creation. One could shoot an event as immediately urgent as the Mumbai terrorist attacks, but still manage to attach unnecessary sentimentality to it and make it look cinematic. Similarly, even though Abhishek Bachchan mimics Rahul Gandhi, his character exists not as a human being, but as a confirmation of a populist belief – the simplistic view about the injection of youth in politics would change the nation’s scenario – a belief endemic in films like Satta, Rang De Basanti, Yuva and Nayak. Consequently, his character and the events that happen to it yield from this belief – and are thus, entirely predictable. One wishes that Balki would have used the time he wasted on Bachchan’s defeat of his corrupt political opponents on developing the sense of incompletion that his and Vidya’s(Balan’s character) relationship so suffers from.

Mostly, thus, Balki’s film cannot break away from stereotypes. The children are too conceited and too confident, each being yet another resemblance of Sexy from Cheeni Kum, who because of her individual existence, came across as a humorous aberration. The principal is the kind-hearted soul. The political opponent is the manipulative, corrupt bastard.

It is only when Balki allows a minor world within the film to exist outside his narrative concerns, and those of his attempts at realism, that his film attains some sort of exclusivity. It exists inside Auro’s home – where his mother Vidya (Balan, perfect, the best performance in the film), and her mother, live with Auro. It is precisely because he chooses to let his characters simply live and breathe in that house, instead of burdening them with the responsibility of progressing his narrative at two scenes a minute that there exists a chance for them to develop, both a set of relationships, and characters, whose traits go beyond a wafer-thin existence.

But such form of naturalism does not stay for too long simply because, as you realize later, Balki is in too much of a hurry, like his peculiar editing style (the entire first half seems like a montage through dissolves) to reunite the estranged lovers – Amol and Vidya. In that, he does not care if the narrative of his film begins bearing a very emphatic resemblance to his preceding Hindi feature, Cheeni Kum, almost to the point where a cathartic event (deaths, in both cases), bring together the two lovers. And it is when that begins happening that you realize that the character of Auro does not have an existence more than that of a convenient narrative device to catalyse the process of reunion.

Yes, his disease and his subsequent appearance is a representation of an ‘incomplete’ relationship that yielded it. And through this reunion, he only seeks to legitimize his identity. But does that mean that the relationship’s completion becomes the very point of his being? He has progenia, sir, for a very specific purpose, as you discover at the end. Specific, and very very callous. When will ever go beyond the idea of love existing, in its prime state, only between a man and a woman?

SPOILERS

Even as Amol and Vidya embrace at the end, Balki cannot decide whether to feel happy for his characters’ reunion after 14 years, or to feel sad because his lead just died. Nor can we. Is that sense of confusion a good thing?

SPOILERS PAST

Tags: Abhishek Bachchan, Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood, IA Weekly, Indian Cinema, PAA, Reviews, Vidya Balan

Posted By Debojit Ghatak | Friday, December 4th, 2009 | Filed under Reviews