At a recent reality show, Rohit Shetty ribbed a young contestant about why he watched Shahrukh Khan only on TV. Did he not watch movies in the theatre? The young boy replied that in his village, there was no movie theatre. Shetty smiled good-naturedly and exulted, ‘If Chennai Express becomes a hit, I will build a movie theatre in your village!”
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He said it without vanity, in a matter-of-fact way with the confidence of a child who thinks he can do anything. And he really can, can’t he? Create a South-Indian village or what he thinks a South-Indian village looks like, near maybe Mahabaleshwar. Float plastic lotuses in a make-believe pond and hope no one will notice and if someone does, they won’t care. Conjure up a film that is a rainbow, a candy shop, a road trip, and the fantasy of a child who with his Lego pieces creates a world that is real only because he believes it is. And well, see where that conviction has brought him. From Arshad Warsi and Tusshar Kapoor (no offence meant to either) to Shahrukh Khan who even mimics Shetty’s critics by accusing Deepika Padukone of cheap, massy, single screen humour and then plays right along, like he had been uncaged to just be silly and fun at 40 something.
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So Shettyisms abound. Vehicles clang mid-air and explode and as in the action sequences of many films that Rohit’s father starred in (yes, that iconic Shetty who would send send shivers down our spine in the 70s), everything gets scattered if not destroyed when people fight. Piles of plastic pots, food kiosks, push carts. This is a film where a drunk hero escaping from a village wakes up to find himself on a ship headed for Sri Lanka! A film where tea pickers walk down the road swinging to a song that has not even started. And the songs. Each one, a carnival of baubles, froth, costumes and colour-coded joie-de-vivre. What’s not to like?
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And it is not the first time we have seen a film-maker who creates his unapologetic version of an alternative universe, is it? Remember the Greek and Roman and Chutney kingdom of Dharam Veer? The blood sucking British in Mard who actually ran well.. blood sucking factories? And the travelling twin flames in Amar Akbar Anthony that animated Nirupa Roy’s blind gaze? Comparisons are odious and Shetty is no Manmohan Desai but the point is this. We have ALWAYS had film-makers who have liked to entertain, logic be damned so the vitriol against Shetty is a bit supercilious especially because in this film, the sensibilities refrain from making certain kind of jokes and a short person gets hugged instead of being mocked. And Shahrukh’s personal stand about gender issues gets translated not just in the way his leading lady gets top billing in the credits but in a little impassioned speech about choices women are still not allowed to make, 66 years after independence. That in a film being dismissed as a masala entertainer, we can actually find credible lines said by a mainstream hero about how badly women are treated, is something to be applauded rather than sneered at. But then critics are called critics for a reason, right?
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Is the film insensitive to South-India? I watched it in a house-full theatre in Bangalore and everyone seemed to be having a good time. The film is more of a take on South-Indian hits rather than culture. It spoofs village dons and their goons, the heroines possessed by ghosts or bad dreams as the case may be and Khan himself is a butt of many jokes in the film along with the roles he has been a part of. And so while Deepika speaks a smattering of Hindi and impeccable Marathi, English and Tamil in the film, Khan sheepishly admits in one scene that at his age, one language is all he can manage. Anyway, both Shetty and Khan know that their worlds will collide when they come together and they sure make sure that the collision is worth the price of a ticket. The tone right from the first scene is unlike anything Shahrukh has been a part of. It is the ‘sur’ of hyperbole, of wailing background music and thick cliches. Dead parents. A chain of sweet shops called ‘Y Y’ (not ours to ask why) and an adorable grandfather (Lekh Tandon, the man who directed a young and restless Shahrukh Khan in the DD serial Dil Dariya all those years ago and also starred with him in Swades) who good-humouredly refuses to die and when he does, just short of a century, the moment is more funny than tragic.
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Compare the whole issue of the immersion of his ashes here with Preity Zinta’s long, sentimental trek in Veer Zaara and you can see the seams that divide a Shetty and a Chopra film and as time progresses, a Karan Johar film, a Mani Ratnam film and so on. This is a film you are meant not to analyse but to sit back and laugh with and at and as a long-winding train chugs out of Mumbai and spoofs DDLJ, you realise Rahul could be a 40-year old Simran about to go off to live her life after a lifetime of gentle suppression. There is the hilarious songathon he and Meenamma (Deepika Padukone in surprisingly great comic form and showing us she can now pull off anything ) indulge at right at the start, the psychedelic village with a cotton sifter reminiscent of Sholay’s Ram Garh and towering goons and the Rahul/Raj idealism to tie up a rather impossible love story.
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Khan critiqued rather snobbishly by some reviewers for his energy is a delight. This is a film he sets out to enjoy and he throws himself literally and otherwise at every gag, every opportunity to bring the house down. There are films that run on their legs and there are stars who run away with films, good, bad or indifferent. Khan is like a train too that never stops chugging, never gets spent or jaded or disinterested. Let us please not grudge him his stardom. He has earned it. He still gets beaten up with the same abandon as he did in Darr and Baazigar, he is still funny and miraculously, when he says, “Dammit, I love her,” to a girl, it still rings true.
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I am not a Shetty fan or even a die-hard Shahrukh fan girl like the teenager who was sitting next to me today in the theatre and who giggled and rubbed her palms in nervous excitement when the credits began to roll, knowing in advance she was going to have non-step fun, but I laughed throughout without feeling even once that my brain had shrunk just because I was not looking down at a film but enjoying it. Get on the train baby and laugh at the critics. The laugh should be at them once in a while.
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Reema Moudgil has been writing for magazines and newspapers on art, cinema, issues, architecture and more since 1994, is an RJ, hosts a daily Ghazal show, runs unboxed writers, is the editor of Chicken Soup for The Indian Woman’s soul, the author of Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/perfect-eight-9380032870/p/itmdf87fpkhszfkb?pid=9789380032870&_l=A0vO9n9FWsBsMJKAKw47rw–&_r=dyRavyz2qKxOF7Yuc ) and an artist.