Small Film, Big League

ON A RECENT JANUARY EVENING, I was out with my family hoping to catch a pleasant late-evening cinema, and we ended up watching a movie that I initially had not the least intention of sitting through. It had a low-profile star cast, a debutant director, a weak pre-launch marketing programme and an inelegant alliterative title. On the face of it, Band Baaja Baaraat couldn’t, and didn’t, strike a single chord with my cinematic yearnings.

However, deprived of any better alternatives that particular evening, and unwilling to submit to dejection and turn homewards now that we were at the theatre, we took the plunge, strengthened by our conviction that if the movie turned out to be the poop it threatened to be, we would exeunt midway.

Given our apprehensions, what we didn’t expect was to remain glued to our seats for the next two and a half hours, enjoying one of our most pleasant cinematic experiences in a long time.

Band Baaja Baaraat is a simple story of two young college graduates, a boy and a girl (a favourite Bollywood trope) from your average, north Indian, middle-income families, who decide to set up a wedding-planning company. They start out very small in the pokey, homely, middle-class neighbourhood of Janakpuri in west Delhi, but dream of someday making it big in the business by taking on plush marriage assignments from the high rollers of south Delhi, particularly that stretch of multimillionaire mansions and splashiness, Sainik Farms.

From the most generous critic’s perspective, Band Baaja Baaraat will never be an iconic film. It’s meant for the masses, to stoke momentary, thoughtless escapism, and has its ample share of weaknesses in direction and script.

Nonetheless, snarky critics apart, it gets one thinking about what is it that made the film such a riveting watch, and one of the biggest Bollywood successes of the past year, which was littered with the rattling skeletons of more expensive and grander films with beefier scripts and the biggest names in the industry. I would say that the beauty of BBB lay in its believable treatment of issues that the young couple faced while setting up their business, and in developing characters that seemed to sprout from the very earth of west Delhi. The filmmakers carefully created a facsimile of the real, raucous, bruising, exhilarating world in which we live daily, incorporating the minutiae of emotions, behaviour, physical environment, dialogues and maddening details of wedding planning, and wove it all into a compelling narrative.

They also brought into it the innocence of young, first-time entrepreneurs, the gender-based misinterpretations of the consequences of impulsive sex (the boy thinks it’s a one-off thing, the girl falls for the boy—all very conventional but nevertheless convincing), the clash between gung-ho, can-do effrontery and cautious, long-term planning, and the pain of callow love. None of this is groundbreaking, but the film’s delight lies in its consummate threading together of disparateness.

In this age of multiple entertainment choices, many of them non-familial, some involving head-banging and others social stiffness where pretence is its own reward, there still exist things that give us the kind of pleasure embedded in listening to, seeing or reading good stories. Whether in the form of literature, cinema, theatre, or any other, we enjoy immersing ourselves in a world created in a good story, one that mesmerizes us in its plots, drama, emotions and intricacies, and transforms us from being mere spectators to the unfolding narrative, to becoming, at some level, a part of the journey that is the story itself.

Perhaps we find in the story a reflection of our own—our personal—world, so that the story speaks to, and of, each of us alone, giving us solace and comfort and even validation of the world to which we belong.

In the flamboyant but entirely unreflective and non-ironic world of mainstream Hindi cinema, movies bullheadedly compete with each other for the level of absurdity and/or frivolity with which they can invest their stories. This past year in Bollywood has had its share of superfluity and twaddle whether it was the Shah Rukh Khan epic My Name is Khan, where the intensity of emotions was cloying and strangulated to death by a mindless script; or the star-studded Rajneeti, an indigenised take on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather that was reworked into a story more about perverse doings in a semi-feudal political dynasty than about politics at large; or the absurd Tees Maar Khan, which became (in)famous thanks to a Katrina Kaif item-number and a grossly insulting dialogue in its promos, which mocked the idea that sex workers deserve any kind of rights and respect.

So, at a time when movies are defined by celebrity actors who unconcernedly ham through them as well as sensational, often nonsensical dialogues, profligate sets, elaborate dances, masterful cinematography designed to distract from the poverty of ideas and, of course, high-decibel marketing gimmickry, Band Baaja Baaraat’s success is testimony to the axiom that all a good movie needs is a good story and sincere acting. This movie is the story of the small fry that swallowed the big fish.

Ananth Nath