The multiplex wave

More than a decade ago, an NRI engineer pulled off a rather remarkable feat. He wrote, produced, directed and starred in a super-low-budget film with a bunch of young new faces.  That wasn’t the remarkable part. The remarkable part was that the movie actually made it to the theaters and turned into quite the sleeper hit. Nagesh Kukunoor and his irreverent, slice-of-life debut film, Hyderabad Blues, may have been the butterfly that set off what some people are now calling the ‘New Wave’ of Indian cinema.

Since Hyderabad Blues, we’ve had a steady stream of new filmmakers breaking away from the Bollywood routine, exploring fresh themes, styles and sensibilities.  Vishal Bhardwaj, Farhan Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee, Anurag Kashyap and Sriram Raghavan are some of the most prominent directors that have met with critical and commercial success in their not-so-conventional ventures. Yet, this isn’t quite a New Wave in the spirit of the original French movement of the 50’s and 60’s. That one was characterized by a rejection of traditional filmmaking norms and a radical shift in cinematic form and expression. What we’ve been witnessing in Indian cinema is a far gentler, incremental pushing of the envelope, characterized more by a new found freedom of expression than an outright rejection of tradition.

The gradual shift in Indian cinema over the past decade has coincided with the introduction and growth of multiplexes across all our major cities. The multiplexes, with their expensive tickets and more homogeneous audiences, skewed movie economics in favor of the urban, English-speaking middle classes. Freed of the burden of catering to an entire nation of diverse tastes, our filmmakers are now able pick subjects of limited appeal and make commercially viable movies. Commercial viability has brought in the production houses (UTV Motion Pictures, YashRaj Films, even Ekta Kapoor’s Balaji Films, for example) and allowed a new generation of writers and directors to dust off their fantasy scripts and put them on celluloid.

Some of our best filmmakers have been responsible for propelling this new wave forward. They have been actively producing films that appeal to them, generating eco-systems that nurture and promote fresh talent and ideas. Ram Gopal Varma was perhaps the first filmmaker to do this effectively. Vishal Bhardwaj, Anurag Kashyap (who incidentally started his career as a writer for Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya), Farhan Akhtar and Aamir Khan, have all produced films with first time directors in recent years. Their mentorship extends to writers, musicians, actors and the entire crew, with the result that we’re seeing fresh talent emerge with amazing regularity. Vikramaditya Motwane and Zoya Akhtar made their excellent directorial debuts with Udaan and Luck By Chance, respectively, after years of waiting in the wings. Sneha Khanwalkar and Amit Trivedi delivered the most memorable soundtracks in recent years with Oye Lucky! Luck Oye! and Dev.D, respectively.

A lot of the new wave films are heavily influenced by Hollywood, European and World cinema. So one might see shades of Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino in Kaminey, or a fan-boy tribute to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown in Manorama Six Feet Under. But there is also the inescapable influence of Bollywood, and interestingly, 70’s Bollywood at that. Many of the current crop of filmmakers grew up in the 70’s, and regardless of the cinema they discovered and admired later in life, nostalgia for the cinema of their childhood is evident in their work. So we have a Kaminey playing off the much loved good brother, bad brother storyline of Deewaar, and a Johnny Gaddaar with riffs of Parwana and Bandini, and dedicated to the films of Vijay ‘Goldie’ Anand.

Whatever the influences and chain of events, the results have definitely been interesting. We’ve had more variety in our theaters than ever before. From edgy noir thrillers to screwball satire, every imaginable niche has been explored. So far this year, we’ve had Ishqiya, Karthik Calling Karthik, LSD, Road, Movie, Tere Bin Laden, Udaan, Aisha, Peepli [Live], Antardwand and The Film Emotional Atyachar. As expected, it’s a mixed bag. Some of the attempts have been very good, some others have been self-conscious, over-indulgent and downright tiresome. But the best ones have been delightful – Ishqiya, LSD, Tere Bin Laden, Udaan, Peepli [Live] – each distinct, assured and impressive in its own way.

We have come a long way in the last decade. And yet we have remained the same. A decade ago, a little film with unknown faces from Chhattisgarh would likely have sunk without a trace. But a decade ago, a big film with a superstar playing a badass cop would likely still have smashed box office records. The good news is that we now get to enjoy both Peepli [Live] and Dabangg, and the entire spectrum of films in between. And that’s an exciting place to be.

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wrote this for channel6, hyderabad.