In spite of all the flak Mohabbatein was a big success. Aditya Chopra proved himself a truly gifted filmmaker with ample provision for vision. Fans were happy for Mr Bachchan. They were also happy for Shah Rukh Khan who was being, don’t laugh, written off.
A week after the release of Mohabbatein, it was Shah Rukh’s birthday. At that time it was felt by a lot of trade experts that Mohabbatein was going to be a major disaster. This was a strange and perverse presupposition and one that journalists tend to drag around in support of our dogged opinion on movies and movie stars. To his credit, Shah Rukh never reacted to any of this. Even when he was being brutally attacked, he remained obstinately detached from the spiel-spill, as though nothing the press said against him made any difference any longer.
When Mohabbatein was a roaring hit, Zoom spoke to the new baatein-kam-‘calm’-zyada Shah Rukh. When we told him people were disappointed with certain aspects of Mohabbatein, he patiently explained why he thinks Aditya Chopra had gone far beyond Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge in Mohabbatein. He spoke passionately on subtleties that are not immediately discernible to viewers. He spoke on why a Mohabbatein needs to be made and why the film is not a jugalbandi between the two principal stars Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan.
No matter how wispy its emotions, Mohabbatein was a film born of true convictions. Every single frame had been shot exactly the way it was narrated by Adi to the entire cast. Not a single shot less, not a single shot more. No actor’s role was increased because he or she was suddenly the flavour of the month/year/millennium.
While Mohabbatein was being made, Kaun Banega Crorepati happened to the nation. Amitabh Bachchan and Sameer Nair created history. Adi Chopra could have easily cashed in on Mr Bachchan’s remarkable popularity on the home-viewing medium. But his role was exactly what it was meant to be, much to the disappointment of viewers who expected a lot more than just a handful of scenes featuring the Big B.
Or Aishwarya Rai. Audiences would have given their left arm and right foot to see more of her than the ephemeral now-you-see-her-now-you-don’t appearance. In fact, Aishwarya was paid her full market price for her ‘breeze’ appearance. During the making of the film, when she injured herself all shooting came to a grinding halt, when her fleeting appearances could have easily been spaced out to absorb the losses.
But conviction is not about money. It’s about going by what you feel to be instinctively right. And we must hand it to Aditya Chopra for focussing on the six youngsters rather than the five stalwarts (Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Amrish Puri, Anupam Kher and Aishwarya Rai) in the cast .Out of the six youngsters, two Jugal Hansraj and Jimmy Shergill are cinema rejects. Hansraj, who went from playing Urmila Matondkar’s kid brother in Masoom to her leading man Aa Gale lag Jaa, had come to a career dead-end.
After playing Chandrachur Singh’s ally in Gulzar’s Maachis, Jimmy Shergill’s career went kaput in Desh Deepak’s Jahan Tum Le Chalo where he was cast as a love-smitten youngster in love with the older Sonali Kulkarni who coincidentally played Sanjay Dutt’s leading lady in the other Diwali releaseMission: Kashmir.
We may not have thought much of the six youngsters’ talents or even personalities. We may even find some of them unworthy of such a lavish launch. But does it really matter? What matters is that the film industry had six new faces to choose from. Six more reasons why the draconian star system could be combated.
What mattered was that Adi Chopra dared to be true to his convictions. If escapism is his cup of tea, he sipped from the cup daintily and confidently until the brew was imbibed fully and completely. A lot of film folks sniggered at ‘South Mumbai’ directors like Sooraj Barjatya, Aditya Chopra and Karan Johar for being pampered heirs of filmic empires born with golden spoons in their mouths.
Mohabbatein may not be your type of cinema. But it was something that its director believed in. He didn’t change his mind according to the rise and fall in market trends.
Vidhu Vinod Chopra’sMission: Kashmir, on the other hand, seemed to have undergone numerous alterations mainly to accommodate Hrithik Roshan’s changed fortunes. The actor was signed before the release of Kaho Na…Pyar Hai. He even shot for the film before Kaho Na…Pyar Hai. When superstardom sneaked up on Hrithik his role obviously had to be re-worked. Hence, we get Hrithik’s introductory sequence where he falls through the roof in a terrorist hideout. Hence, the character ends up looking adrift, unanchored and uncertain… And these uncertainties surely have little to do with the conflicts that Altaaf goes through.
For a director of such looming ambitions and talent, Vidhu Vinod Chopra trips up time after time. Altaf’s character seems to lack complete motivation. Most of the time, he doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing. The dramatic Shakti-styled father-son confrontations are without foundation. Chopra just doesn’t give the filial bond time and space to grow. He’s a director in a hurry to get on with the story, and never mind if characterizations suffer in the hurlyburly of narration.
Compare the quick-take approach ofMission: Kashmir with the lesiurely growth of the narrative, the languorous courtships in Mohabbatein. Experts said the lengthy relaxed narration of Mohabbatein would prove its undoing. Adi refused to cut a single scene. To him size matters as long as the substance justifies the length.
In the bid to make the product crisp, Vinod Chopra cut Mission: Kashmir too closely.The material looks obviously over-edited and, worse, compromised. When music composer –singer Shankar Mahadevan appears on Srinagar Doordarshan to sing Rind Poshema, television journalist Preity Zinta goes into a fantasy world where Hrithik suddenly leaves her side and starts dancing on stage. How can we have a song as catchy as Rind Poshema and not have Hrithik Roshan dancing to it?
The message of Kashmiriyat becomes commercialised and worse, still stultified, before the peculiar logistics of commercial cinema. By the same reckoning, Mohabbatein works by using commercial conventions to its own advantage. It has no “message” to give out, unless we count the message about the universal language of love and how love conquers all, and all that jazzbaat.
There are several lessons to be learnt from the success of Mohabbatein and the failure of Mission Kashmir. There are no certainties about the commercial cinema: a film with a purpose can fall flat while an out-and-out romantic escapade can work wonders at the box office. Audiences are ready and hungry for new experiences. What really tilted the scale in favour of Mohabbatein was the execution of the romantic theme, fresh eager virginal and exuberant. What titlted the scales againstMission: Kashmir was the stale thematic base for the Kashmiri conflict. More than the Kashmiriyat, it was the theme of papa as a lawmaker and son as the lawbreaker that audiences saw. Instead of Sanjay Dutt and Hrithik Roshan, they were seeing Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan battling it out up there.
The two Diwali releases were never meant to be a battle between Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan. It wasn’t even meant to be a war between the two Chopras. It was simply a battle between two films. Sadly, one of the titans had to perish. Hopefully, the two Diwali releases this Diwali would contain enough fuel to race past the success post.