FOR THE LOVE OF CINEMA

If you are a diehard fan like me, and love cinema in all its many-splendoured glory from the biggest blockbuster extravaganzas to the most measly productions, the duds delivered by the biggest stars to the runaway hits served by rank newcomers, A-list studio movies to B-grade grindhouse classics, muti-award winners to the unmentionables… here’s a pair of documentaries that will warm the cockles of your movie-loving heart.

‘The Romantics’ traces the life and times of the legendary filmmaker Yash Chopra, who represents Hindi cinema as an icon to emulate. Throughout a stellar career that spans half a century, from ‘Dhool Ka Phool’ in 1959 to ‘Jab Tak Hai Jaan’ in 2012, Yash Chopra conjured a new wave of Indian magic in cinema. He is a filmmaker who has done it all — played by the book, experimented, made blockbusters, suffered flops, succeeded, failed but never stopped making movies till he was 80, while building an empire called Yash Raj Films or YRF, a behemoth in the Indian film business.

Through a series of personal interviews with the people who have lived and worked with him across the years — his closest family members, actors, technicians and others — we get to know the many parts of the man called Yash, up close and personal, as a sibling, husband, father, friend, and of course, director. Many of the behind-the-scenes stories are sure to bring a smile to your face, and perhaps, a tear or two.

The highlight of ‘The Romantics’, however, is a never-before-seen extended interview of the notoriously reclusive man currently at the helm of affairs at YRF, an acclaimed director and producer himself (need I even mention DDLJ!), and a man who has an instinct like no other as to what might work and what might not when it comes to the audience and Hindi movies — the one and only Aditya Chopra, son of Yash Chopra.

What Aditya gives the audience is a ringside view of the circus of filmmaking, with details that will make you sit up and take notice of how astute he is as a producer and director, and a shrewd businessman. He will also remind us how, and why, YRF stands tall as one of the biggest studios in the Hindi film industry.

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Now take a breather for a moment, step away from the glitter and glamour of the A-list world and look a little further where the lights aren’t as bright or the buzz isn’t as big, where the stars aren’t ‘super’ and the stories aren’t ‘critically acclaimed’… the underbelly of the beast called Bollywood. A place where the toil of filmmaking dusts on a layer of grime on cheap greasepaint, and the game is one of survival. Where the people wear their passion on the sleeve and swear that they will live and breath cinema till their last breath… ‘marte dum tak’.

‘Cinema… Marte Dum Tak’ is your guided tour into the world of what is known derogatorily as ‘B-Grade’, sometimes even ‘C-Grade’ cinema where plots are as wafer-thin as their budgets, where the cinematic language is coarse and the grammar is just functional, where the double-entendre laden dialogues make middle class pseudo-morality cringe… where sleaze sells more than nuanced performances.

To Gen X movie lovers, titles like ‘Jungle Beauty’ or ‘Kunwari Chudail’ will instantly paint a picture of a certain kind of movie that usually peddled simple stories of sex, violence and horror, or a mix of these. Women characters would often be dressed in skimpy clothes that revealed much more than they covered, and the men would be a caricaturishly black-or-white mix of goody two shoes and moustache-twirling villains. The formula was simple — a song here, a bedroom scene or rape there, a fight or two in between, a witch, zombie or bloodsucking vampire, perhaps a jungle sequence, a bathing scene.

During the late 80s up until the turn of the century, these movies found a place of great success in the dingy single-screen theaters of the time, patronised by the lower income groups and daily wage earners, and the more repressed of the middle classes. Regardless of their apparent lack of high artistic or thematic value, they were hits in their own right, and made good business sense for their makers. Distributors and exhibitors of these movies were a happy lot during the heyday of B-Cinema.

It is in this backdrop that ‘Cinema… Marte Dum Tak’ introduces us to four popular directors of this genre — J Neelam, Vinod Talwar, Dilip Gulati and Kishan Shah. They open their doors and hearts to us in what may at first seem a superficial, even alien, world, but will soon develop into a very personal and bittersweet revelation of the trials and tribulations of what it meant (and indeed continues to mean) to be a filmmaker in that genre.

The stories are in some parts humorous, and in other parts tragic. You will tear up as much as you will smile because they are, after all, people just like us, with feelings and emotions, with broken lives full of ups and downs, somehow held together by pride, and an undying passion for cinema along with everything it has given them.

The series features interviews with people, many of whom you may recognise, who have also been an integral part of this golden age of B-Cinema. However sceptical you may be in the beginning, it will end with a lump in your throat.

That’s it, no spoilers here to sully your experience. There’s much much more to this documentary series than is revealed here.

Watch it. Watch them both — for the love of cinema!

For more information:

The Romantics: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26542635/

Cinema… Marte Dum Tak: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21908844/