Bombarded with an endless rain of stupid kitsch every week, we have gradually come to expect very little of the Hindi film industry.That has meant that when Bollywood has churned just decent, watchable fare, we have risen in collective applause, we have stretched ourselves out of our balcony seats to show them how many bagfuls of gratitude we are ready to part with for giving us what is otherwise very basic fare. Madhur Bhandarkar’s cinema is a classic example of this thanksgiving ritual, when 2 oz. of sincere filmmaking has attracted 8 oz of applause from all and sundry. Bhandarkar is a better than average filmmaker only because he makes decent movies in the popular language of Hindi and his movies are generally watchable, in comparison to other more highly anticipated box office flicks. But even if his two attempted zeitgeist flicks, Page 3 and Corporate had that element of sincerity built into the script, with Fashion, Bhandarkar seems to have given that element a decent burial. This is not to suggest that Fashion is a failed film but it is to suggest that in Fashion, Bhandarkar’s elemental strengths as a filmmaker has transformed into his biggest weakness. 

I would like to read Page 3, Corporate and Fashion as wired like an unintended trilogy because they are set within a clearly defined and stylised locational and vocational framework – ‘site-specific’ one may say – and have that peeling-the-onion kind of narrative where that framework comes undone at the end, while all through an I-told-you-so kind of protracted sanctimony hangs over the film.

Bhandarkar’s genre of filmmaking has a realistic ecosystem in a more scopophilic sense than what most Hindi cinema aspires to be. His characters are real and because they are real, they are also typical of their profession (frivolous in Page 3, ambitious in Corporate, ambiguous in Fashion, etc etc). They are also in typical situations — endless parties, corporate conflicts, fashion battles. Bhandarkar picks his characters first, works hard on their typicality and creates a topical and compelling dramatic universe around their bare and essential flaws and frailties. This is the premise in all the films. What changes from film to film are the props. His is essentially the same story of human follies tested and mended under different and difficult professional compulsions.

But alas, typicality is just a misstep away from stereotypicality!

Initially, in films like Page 3 and before that in Chandni Bar, we were deeply impressed by Bhandarkar’s efforts to stick to a believable plot with a believable stock of characters. Along with Ram Gopal Verma (whose decline is the stuff of another article), Bhandarkar introduced a new kind (at least by the standards of Hindi cinema) of realist cinema that was stripped of the usual excesses of an average commercial film. His settings were low key, next-door and somewhat marginal. His characters spoke like us. The trappings were few. And the outcome was generally cathartic, bordering on the tragic. Such subtleties were visible up to Corporate though in an increasingly self-indulgent way. In Fashion, however, in spite of the apparent signs of its predecessors, the only feeling left at the end of the film is that of deja vu.

In Fashion Priyanka is made, broke and made again. The entire premise, from her small-town origins, to her gay friend who midwives her career, other friends and even the two subplots are out of an omnibus of stock characters. From beginning to the end, from Priyanka’s first entry to her last hurrah, stereotypes march across the screen, as if in a race with the petulant models who walk the ramp on screen. There is no real suspense in Fashion; no real, robust characters but believable caricatures, and a straightforward unravelling of a story that was apparent in the beginning.

Also, in Page 3 and Corporate, Bhandarkar borrowed the choric element from the classical Greek theatre. The hoi polloi, who populate and keep busy the gossip mills had been employed to cunning effect in Page 3, and in Corporate, to an extent. That gave the audience an eavesdropper feeling, adding to the overall disgust the audience felt at being privy to the world of the swish set. This gave Bhandarkar an opportunity to control the spectators’ receptive emotions in a way very few filmmakers in Bollywood could. In Fashion, Bhandarkar ditches all that for a straightforward whirlwind narrative that maps the career of an ambitious model. Either Bhandarkar was extremely confident of his script or he was comfortable in the many stereotypes that cushioned it. Either way or because of them Fashion has shaped up as a boring, predictable and a largely unexciting film. And a film that is a caricature of Bhandarka’s earlier cinema.

A concluding note on Bhandarkar’s titles. Page 3, Corporate and Fashion are monolithic, all encapsulating titles that mirror Bhandarkar’s own moral universe; to be the last word, the narrative God of the stories he would want to tell. There is no need for that little unsaid, that touch of suspense that attends every act of naming. Bhandarkar wants his films to be the encyclopedic reference points about the worlds his films inhabit. And that is the reason for his undoing.

If Bhandarkar wants to sustain himself as a filmmaker of repute, he will do well to leave his current preoccupations with stock characters and tell-all scripts. Or else, Bollywood might lose a promising filmmaker to his own deliriums.