While it might not be prudent to infer that there is a paradigm shift in the way Bollywood has been making movies of late, there has certainly been a gradual shift and the new generation of filmmakers have taken to presenting history or fiction on celluloid, free of a few inherent bias that the entertainment industry has had.
National security is a sensitive topic to touch. It requires an in-depth research before finally carving out the final product. Even a slight error can result in twisting the plot, making it look like an amateur attempt. Movies like Baby and Wednesday could stand out only because the intricate details were kept in mind and credit to the filmmaker for having done justice to a fictional subject. Such subjects make filmmaking vulnerable to veering towards unthinkable heroism.
Call it the new wave or the desire to finally do justice to the glories of Indian achievements, there is a race to come up with movies based on true incidents – incidents which should have had a movie on them by now but filmmakers were busy distorting the history of Rani Padmavati.
Let’s not digress!
John Abraham has announced his next project and it’s a big one, considering the subject he has chosen. Parmanu: The story of Pokhran will be directed by Abhishek Sharma.
The name is self-explanatory, it’s based on the successful nuclear tests conducted in Pokhran, Rajasthan in 1998. The poster of the movie looks promising. But so did the trailers of Madras Café – John’s previous attempt at making a movie based on real life events.
Madras Café was a valiant attempt but for reasons best known to John Abraham and Shoojit Sircar – the director of the movie – it began with a disclaimer – it’s a work of fiction. To trace history through a film and then not be willing to accept it as a representation of truth does not augur well for the film. I, as a movie-lover, won’t feel the connect when my subconscious cries that it is an attempt at presenting true events on 70mm but the makers are taking the easier route of calling it a work of fiction.
Thus I sincerely hope that Parmanu: The story of Pokhran is not meted out the same treatment. It’s a golden chapter in the history of the Indian defence and John Abraham and his team would do well to keep it real and proudly acknowledge the achievements of those unsung heroes. He can be rest assured that theatres won’t be burned down and no protests will be carried out even if he fails to do complete justice to the work. If that had been the case, Haider, which quite clearly tried to jeopardize the image of the Indian armed forces in Kashmir, won’t have been allowed to release in the first place.
Madras Café was about Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and a strategical blunder that India committed by getting its forces involved in the Sri Lankan civil war. It does not take much to call a spade a spade. There was a government in power and most decisions were taken at the top level but the movie made the events appear to be more of a failure at the administrative and operational level rather than a political blunder. Madras Cafe tried its best to show how the Rajiv Gandhi government tried to create alternatives for the Tamils in Sri Lanka, while the move may have been noble, the execution was pathetic at best which Madras Café deliberately missed thereby making it more of a propaganda material to be released in 2014, right before the General Elections.
Since Parmanu won’t be based on a negative subject, the headache here would be slightly different – to balance out the credit.
Also, such complex issues do not necessitate use of glamour, it would be sagacious to refrain from adding anything faintly romantic or having a foreign correspondent. I continue to wonder what Nargis Fakhri was doing in Madras Café.
To make a movie climax of which is in public domain requires having a plot that is simple to comprehend without allowing the audience to occupy more than the edge of their seats. Nuclear science is not a day-to-day business for everyone and it’s probably the toughest project John Abraham has taken so far in his career. How he keeps the flow of the essay without compromising on the entertainment quotient is what will define this movie. If done right, this might catapult him into a different league. The launched had failed miserably last time!