cover story CINEMA



BOLLYWOOD'S
Coolest Summer

THE TRENDSPOTTER'S
GUIDE TO 2004

By Kaveree Bamzai

In a suburban Mumbai housing complex where noisy young boys are playing cricket, a little girl's scrawl on a white gate announces proudly: "This is Sara's home." Sara's father is sitting by the bay window in his favourite blue corner, with his best profile turned to the tape recorder. Thirty-three-going-on-21, Saif Ali Khan is a marquee cutie, part serious actor, part fashion hottie. As the leading man of Yash Raj Films' soon-to-be-released banter-heavy Hum Tum, he is also part of this summer's army of boys turning to men, with a little help from girls on the verge of womanhood. Exit the smug marrieds with their karva chauths and shaadi songs, enter the Smart Young Singletons with snappy pick-up lines and career worries.
KYUN... HO GAYA NA - The buzz: Watch it for the Rai-Oberoi chemistry

In what is Bollywood's most youthful summer yet, over Rs 100 crore is riding on the back of at least seven big films which speak to the 70 per cent demographic segment that everyone-from politicians to advertisers-is chasing. In this season's most-awaited event, Yuva, Mani Ratnam with his unerring insight into the zeitgeist has shot three young men against the backdrop of student politics, fortuitously so in an election year. Even the maven of middle-aged melodramas, Boney Kapoor, is producing Kyun ... Ho Gaya Na, a Rs 15 crore romantic comedy where boy shares house with girl.

Conceived in 2002, billed as the industry's worst year, these are films that are personal, quirky, well-written, urbane, and well, good-looking enough to spark fashion victims. Signalling a tectonic shift in traditional format-the ultimate date movie, Hum Tum, has two animated sutradhars and the popcorn thriller Charas uses flashbacks-these movies are for young people, by young people. And, invariably, they are about that crazy little thing called "lurve" packaged with a liberal dose of designer realism. The city, Mumbai, Delhi or Kolkata, is the star with a sharp sense of atmosphere. The stars themselves have come down to earth. They are riding motorbikes, measuring their lives in coffee bar spoons and falling in love in a Delhi Transport Corporation bus.

Contemporary events obligingly provide the backdrop. In the Rs 32 crore Lakshya, an ambitious film which was much appreciated by the Cannes Film Festival jury, Hrithik Roshan's aimless young man finds himself and his girlfriend, Preity Zinta, on the icy heights of Kargil. In Main Hoon Na, a kick-ass movie which will prove that girl directors can do thrills and spills as well as boys, Shah Rukh Khan is not just sent back to school in a clever plot twist, but he also gets to save India and Pakistan from being at loggerheads with each other.

Having hidden behind love stories for so long, movies seem ready to embrace society. Full-on, with a kitschy twist. Boys and girls end up as men and women. Stars are going to bed onscreen without waiting to get married and girls are dumping guys because they disappoint them. Technicolor it may be but Bollywood is also getting more believable.


Not only has Mallika Sherawat pioneered the state-of-the-tart look, she has also made liplocks look like the old Hindi film equivalent of two flowers meeting. So much so that Bollywood royal Kareena Kapoor is kissing Fardeen Khan in Govind Nihalani's Dev. If it works for the Rs 3 crore Murder, it might for the sombre, Rs 20 crore police drama.

midsummer women
The Barist A Babe

The trunks outside Ritesh Sidhwani's office have travelled from Mumbai to Ladakh, back to Mumbai. Sidhwani is the 30-year-old producer of Lakshya, Farhan Akhtar's second coming-of-age film. And one of the trunks contains the clothes that Preity Zinta's character Romila Dutta wears in the film (no prizes for guessing who it is based on). As a Delhi student-turned-TV journalist, she is Everygirl, with no bad hair day. Arjun Bhasin, the designer who redefined youth fashion in Akhtar's debut Dil Chahta Hai, calls it her ducky (Delhi Urban Chic Young) look. So when Zinta is in college, it is ethnic jholas, crinkled skirts and cotton tops. When she dashes off to Kargil, it is everything you can pack in an airbag.

Could the Hindi film heroine be on the way to becoming the Barista Babe? Looks likely, with the gap between aspiration and achievement being bridged thanks to higher incomes and better bodies. No longer is it impossible to clone stardust. If Aishwarya Rai can spend over two hours teasing her hair into careful disarray for Kyun ... Ho Gaya Na so can a number of young women who watch her onscreen. If her designer Vikram Phadnis makes sure she-a student doing her Masters in Social Work-wears a T-shirt and jeans after a bath at home, and not a Juicy Couture jumpsuit, the audience identifies with it.

For the actors, the freedom to dress in a more realistic fashion is as refreshing as the scripts coming their way. Like Rani Mukherjee in Hum Tum-she goes from being an 18-year-old on her way to college in New York to being married to being on her own again at 28. "I observed a lot of 12-21-year-olds, the way they talk, the way they dress. I wanted them to identify with me," she says.

Much as in the real-time world, girls are smarter. "What do you do?'' says Kunal Kohli, director of Hum Tum. "Men do take longer to mature.'' In the first half of Kyun ... Ho Gaya Na, Vivek Oberoi plays a surfer dude who thinks he knows it all: "Pyaar aur haar Arjun ki dictionary main nahin hai (Love and losing are not part of Arjun's dictionary)." Rai knows better: "Pyaar ko waqt nahin, ek lamhe ki zaroorat hai (Love needs just a moment)." Quite.


FINDS OF 2004
Amrita Rao & Bhumika Chawla

They were found in 2002 and 2003 respectively, but this is the year they may well set trends. Rao, the sweet adolescent of Ishq Vishq, plays an Avril Lavigne lookalike complete with elbow warmers, wrist studs and chunky army shoes. Chawla stays pretty but takes a designer leap from Tere Naam's behnji. Both do saris as well. Rao does them with a twist, like the noodle strap of Mandira Bedi. Chawla remains virginal and flower-fresh. Girls, take your pick when you go to your tailor. Or, as in Rao's case, just take your scissors to your printed T-shirt and bare your toned midriff.
Sneakers
Shoes become sensible. College kid Rani Mukherjee in Hum Tum wears sneakers, not the heroine's all-time best friend: high-heeled boots.
Nose Rings
Go with the smudged kajal, give a grungy image. Seen on Amrita Rao in Main Hoon Na.
Bags
Bags have become important. For Delhi girls Preity Zinta in Lakshya and Kareena Kapoor in Yuva, the jhola is back.



the dramboats
Very Preppy

If Hollywood actors can emote with their hair (as Tom Cruise did so badly but famously in Mission Impossible II) why should Indian leading men be any less? So there is the aimless, pre-army Roshan in Lakshya looking like Oberoi, Saif looking like Cruise in one part of Hum Tum and Oberoi looking only as he can in Yuva.

Actors are being urged to play truer to type. While Shah Rukh's films are now written entirely around his basic character (big brother/wise guy/hero No. 1), even lesser stars find directors urging them to be themselves. So Abhishek Bachchan wore much of his personal wardrobe in the Rs 6 crore Run, but in the Rs 25 crore Yuva, where he plays a street-smart dada who gets embroiled in fights-call him a retrosexual-he has a thicker stubble, unruly hair and a singlet/pyjamas. In Hum Tum, Saif wanted to get so much under the skin of his character Karan Kapoor that sometimes he wore his own clothes. "I have seen all those phases myself. I was in boarding in Sanawar and at Winchester, so I understand these different kinds of guys I play in the movie,'' he says.

The new hero surfaces everywhere: even Akshay Kumar has researched his role as a Crime Branch officer in Madhur Bhandarkar's Aan. Stars don't mind looking goofy to fit the role. Back in 2002, when Farah Khan was shooting Main Hoon Na at Darjeeling's St Paul's School, no one imagined Shah Rukh's Missoni striped sweater, airplane collar and high waisted bell bottoms would be acceptable (all designed by NIFT graduate Sanjeev Mulchandani and run through director Karan Johar). "I am told it is the skinny Prada look of the season," says Farah. "Believe me, all I wanted him to look like was Amitabh Bachchan from Don."


HUM TUM

The buzz: When Harry Met Sally, but no fake orgasm.


the song
Qawwali

A qawwali was once a staple in the Hindi film. It allowed for a play on words and for the hero and heroine to meet in a social situation-remember this was a time when Muslims were seen onscreen as something other than militants, Pakistanis or cardboard characters. Then good Muslims disappeared, and so did the qawwali, surfacing only intermittently in Pardes where it was shot in Fatehpur Sikri and in Fiza where it was shot in Mumbai's Haji Ali.

This year, it just refuses to go away. Maqbool saw its resurgence in its devotional form and then Tabu danced to it with complete abandon in Noor-un-Ala, in Meenaxi: Tale of 3 Cities. The words were written by M. F. Husain and they invoke the divine light of beauty. In Main Hoon Na, in a number inspired from Bombay Dreams, the West End-Broadway musical which she co-choreographed, Farah has put the qawwali on coke, with Sabu Cyril's neon-bright sets (comprising leftover props from Dreamz Unlimited's Asoka which were painted fluorescent). The qawwali even figures in Raghu Romeo, Rajat Kapoor's Rs 80 lakh entertainer, where Vijay Raaz plays Salim to Maria Goretti's Anarkali.

What explains the Sufi strains? In one word, the influence of A.R. Rahman. In another word, that of Nusrat Fateh Ali. And in a third, the overkill of item songs. Why have a Ukrainian belly shake in Deewaar's Marhaba when Sushmita Sen can swivel hers so sensually in Tumse Milke Dil Ka Jo?

REDISCOVERY OF THE YEAR
Sushmita Sen
Abhishek Bachchan

Both actors have the same predicament. In a world of toy boys and bimbos, they look like what they are, a man and a woman. In Sen's case, she is a woman with both a sense of humour and a sensual face, not an easy combination in an industry where unvarnished sex appeal is a woman's breast bet. "She was cast even before me,'' says Shah Rukh Khan about Sen in Main Hoon Na. "Am I glad.'' In Bachchan's case, he has an honest face and an understated acting style (not counting his dancing which makes him look leaden footed). "I wanted only him," says Mani Ratnam of his role as a low life orphan who escapes to Kolkata after a massacre on the Uttar Pradesh-Bihar border in Yuva. The two of them have been on the brink of a breakthrough for the past four years. Could this be their moment? Their big summer?


the setting
Reality Bites

Hindi movies have very rarely been set in an identifiable place or even a time zone. Chandangarh is a favourite destination in the imagination of the Indian filmmaker, primarily because of the problems real themes encounter.

Now, though, reality is biting. "My Mumbai is not the Hiranandani Gardens or the Bandra Kurla complex where most movies are shot," says Hum Tum's Kohli. It is, instead, the Art Deco Apartments overlooking Marine Drive. Lakshya's Delhi is not early morning in Connaught Place or late nights at a Gurgaon farmhouse. It is instead sunkissed Humayun's Tomb and Tughlaqabad. Yuva's Kolkata is as much upmarket St Xavier's College as downmarket Howrah Bridge. "There is so much history there," says Ravi K. Chandran, the cinematographer of Yuva. "Even the dust there has a texture."

The big mansion set in a Resident Non-Indian mindspace, with its helipad and its greens across which the hero races, his hair blowing behind him, is being scaled down. Gloss plus realism gets more bang for the buck.

the period
Yesterday Once More

Remember the '70s? Every young director in Bollywood does, from 36-year-old Tigmanshu Dhulia to 38-year-old Farah. Sujoy Ghosh first rediscovered the period in Jhankaar Beats and subsequently movies have mined its rich legacy, whether in Manmohan Desai visuals or R.D. Burman music. In Main Hoon Na's chase sequence, the cycle rickshaw is called Dhanno (Hema Malini's horse in Sholay, wherever you are, take a bow). Shah Rukh's name is Major Ram Prasad Sharma and his brother Zayed Khan is called Lakshman Prasad Sharma-for those who don't get the joke, that is from Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Golmaal. Sen's character is wearing knotted blouses a la Zeenat Aman in Satyam Shivam Sundaram, and just in case you missed the point, she is called Chandni Chopra.

It is not surprising. Most directors were in school then and movies were the only entertainment. It is what unites a Ghosh who spent much of his youth in Kolkata and Birmingham with Rohan Sippy, who witnessed cinematic history in the making.

Even Yuva's premise, that of student politics meeting a bleak street ethos, is a throwback to the Jayaprakash Narayan days. Yet, the movie's setting does not ring so false in a careerist, me-only era of outsourced Indians. Mani sir, as he is known, taps into the core of a glossy generation struggling to define itself in the time of changing roles of women (Rai is shown as being far more focused than Oberoi in Kyun ... Ho Gaya Na), of parents (Saif's parents in Hum Tum are divorced), and indeed of men (Fardeen Khan plays a lost boy in Govind Nihalani's Dev). Even Main Hoon Na's premise of friendship between India and Pakistan, so Utopian when shooting began in 2002, is now looking imminent. "Hindi movies are not so unreal, after all,'' laughs Shah Rukh.


THE WRITING
Abbas Tyrewala


Bole to, Munnabhai MBBS' dialogue writer is hot property right now. When he came to Farah Khan, she was still struggling with a title line. Tyrewala, who co-wrote Maqbool with Vishal Bharadwaj, told her: "Don't worry, main hoon na." He was hired. The 29-year-old Tyrewala is a graduate of St Xavier's College. The secret of his success: he listens to what his characters have to say.

THE LIGHTING
Ravi K. Chandran

The man who shot Dil Chahta Hai has a reputation, and rightly so. In Yuva, he has shot Abhishek Bachchan's edgy character with a grainy effect while Ajay Devgan's composed young man is shot in green, a peaceful colour. For Vivek Oberoi, a yuppie, the frame has only him. "Mani's brief was: it is about three youngsters, but it is not Dil Chahta Hai," says Chandran. Not from any angle.

THE DIRECTING
Tigmanshu Dhulia
In a country of hype, Dhulia has managed to keep his head down, making the kinds of films he wants to. It is not easy, he says. "I always want a kahani mein twist (twist in the story)," he reveals. Well, in Charas there are enough to keep anyone involved. His Haasil made Irrfan Khan a much-wanted actor and with Charas, Dhulia hopes his close friend will ascend to a new level of sympathy.


THE THRILLS
Aan

With its sketches from Heat, Godfather and Scarface, Firoz A. Nadiadwala's room shows he likes his Hollywood movies. This producer of big budget spectacles is just wrapping up the Rs 20 crore Aan, where Akshay Kumar has dangled from a horse as he shoots in the air. Not a surprise that Kumar and Suneil Shetty are his favourite actors.


wheels
Speed Demons

There was always something about that Rajdoot, the ultimate male accessory. When Rishi Kapoor took baby Dimple away from it all in Bobby, it set a million wheels in motion. This summer, Dhulia pays obeisance to it and to Sholay's immortal dosti in Charas, where Uday Chopra's street-smart guy and Jimmy Shergill's Scotland Yard policeman bike to the hills. Apart from there being no other way to make Chopra look interesting, the bike also serves as a not-so-discreet product to be placed. In Main Hoon Na, the bike makes a solitary appearance, when Zayed enters college on an LML, wearing a leather jacket, tattoos and a Triumph belt. In Yuva, it is student activist Ajay Devgan's preferred mode of transport. But coming up now: a full length Harley Davidson movie, Dhoom, starring Abhishek, Chopra and John Abraham. And why not? As the era of the date movie dawns, so does the best way to take that trip.[img][/img]

from the editor-in-chief



While elections and cricket are dominating the collective mind space, there is a moveable feast to look forward to this summer. A number of Bollywood releases with unconventional themes by a clutch of young directors who are prepared to think out of the box is preparing to hit movie theatres. Each year, we have one film that defines the direction Bollywood is heading toward. Last year, Koi ... Mil Gaya, which not only resurrected Hrithik Roshan's career but also raised the bar for special effects in India, won the sweepstakes.


NEW FORMULAE: Our past covers on Bollywood trends
This summer, Bollywood seems to have decided to get in touch with its inner self. Relationships are being explored-between men and women, between parents and children, even between society and its citizens. The budget is no longer an issue, the mindset is. A Rs 6 crore Run can try to occupy the same space as a Rs 25 crore Yuva, that of young people struggling to define their identities. The settings are contemporary and the situations often more so-if Lakshya is a love story set against the backdrop of Kargil, the Rs 20 crore Main Hoon Na revolves around Project Milaap, a move to broker peace between India and Pakistan.

This youth quake heralds the first wave of big commercial multiplex movies. Over 40 films will hit theatres this season, but India Today has focused on seven which seem to stand out for their experimentation in structure, characters or story. These movies have some of the industry's biggest stars, from Shah Rukh Khan to Aishwarya Rai. One of them is directed by the path-breaking Mani Ratnam (whose every film is an event), and another has been put together by one of the industry's brightest film crews-director Farhan Akhtar and his team. The films careen from the romantic comedy Kyun ... Ho Gaya Na to the dark Yuva, which, unusually for a Hindi film, begins and ends on Kolkata's Howrah Bridge.

Senior Editor Kaveree Bamzai, who spent time in Mumbai speaking to many of the bright young people at the cutting edge of this change, says the excitement is palpable. Suddenly scriptwriters are the hottest item in Bollywood, cinematographers are being spoken of in the same breath as the stars, and even fashion experts are being employed by costume designers to check what look will work when the movie is being released. No one, she says, is over 40.

Get your popcorn ready for a blockbuster summer.