68 where we started with, that it exceeds the achievement of the rather run-of-the-mill film it is placed inside. And it is a brave achievement, because unlike The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where Fincher, by the end of the film, had to restore Brad Pitt’s iconic stature to its most fundamental – by actually taking the actor back(by making him look young) to the early 00’s when the hysteria was at its peak – Balki not only sticks to his guns of destructing the legend of Bachchan, but he also does not display special pride in it - until the very tepid last half-an-hour of the film, where he finally falls into the Bollywood-ian trap of celebrating one’s own achievements. He resorts to shooting Bachchan in extreme close-ups, for the more wrinkles his character develops, the more Balki wants us to appreciate the authenticity of the makeup. What he does not realize is, however, that the more authentic the make-up looks, the more we become aware of its presence, and consequently, the presence of Amitabh Bachchan underneath it. However, until that point, Balki creates a character that is so good not because it is well-written, actually being one more in the tradition of children from Mumbai who are unrealistically clever and quickwitted for their own good, and elicit humour from their emulation of adult-like behavior ( a child, in a quick-fire repartee, puts down his father; another makes a closing monologue in the finale that is the turning point of the film); or because it is so well-played by Bachchan (good, as usual); but because it uses the audience’s awareness of the Bachchan legend outside the film, and uses that as a point of reference for his character.
REVIEWS
As a result, most of our astonishment with Auro(Bachchan) is not a result of how it is, but how it is compared to the real-life visual image of Amitabh Bachchan. We respect, not the character itself, but the transformation that it is a result of. Martin Scorsese understood that in Raging Bull. He was aware that De Niro’s histrionic achievement in the film was nowhere as good as compared to his turn in Taxi Driver, even bordering on being uni-dimensional, but that it could be presented as great if his bulky avatar was placed directly adjacent to his normal one. Therefore, at the very beginning of the film, Scorsese cuts from a CU of La Motta in 1950s to a similarly aligned camera CU of him in the 70s. By placing these shots in quick succession, he made you aware of the scale of De Niro’s achievement. But De Niro was never as huge an icon as Bachchan is. Therefore, Balki did not have to place the reference point (Bachchan’s real life persona) within the film, but instead; allowed it, in his pre-release blitz to exist outside the film, with Bachchan himself promoting the character, and automatically, placing himself adjacent to it. Unluckily for Balki, however, most of the rest of his film also exists in a consistent state of comparison. The reference points for the comparison to take place are either the world outside the theatre, or cinema itself. It is a new tendency in Bollywood screenwriting to incorporate events from the real-world within their ridiculous plots to induce a notion of being based in ‘real-life’ (itself disputable). But their attempt at it comes across more as a desperate scraping for narrative
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possibilities in their inability to break free from clichés. In that, they attempt, not to innovate and create a new idiom, but substitute those clichés with events from the life outside the screen. What they do not realize is that ‘realism’ exists not as a term which has a literal, definitive existence that can be incorporated within the film; but as a notion whose essence has to injected into it. Their idea of realism is to copy and paste reallife characters/events into the narrative of their films, for instance, Ajay Devgan witnesses the murder of a starlet in Hulla Bol, or Kalki Koechlin gets ridiculed for her participation in a MMS scandal in Dev D., John Abraham suffers because of 9/11 in New York, and Abhishek Bachchan’s character(Amol) only mimics Rahul Gandhi from real life in Paa. However, the fact that these reference points exist in reality still do not make their films realistic. Yes, it might assure them of not being ridiculed for the lack of logic, but realism, as aforementioned, should yield from an aesthetic approach and not a narrative one. It is a result, not of impersonation, but of creation. One could shoot an event as immediately urgent as the Mumbai terrorist attacks, but still manage to attach unnecessary sentimentality to it and make it look cinematic. Similarly, even though Abhishek Bachchan mimics Rahul Gandhi, his character exists not as a human being, but as a confirmation of a populist belief – the simplistic view about the injection of youth in politics would change the nation’s scenario – a belief endemic in films like Satta, Rang De Basanti, Yuva and Nayak. Consequently, his character and the events that hap-