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COVER STORY: LAGAAN
Looking Forward To A Fresh Past
Tired of campus romances, Bollywood has taken a flight
back in time to come up with big-budget period films
By Himanshi Dhawan
In times of trouble,
man turns to prayer and a filmmaker to his muse. This summer the muse
has taken flight back into time. Tired of college campus romances, directors
have regressed, literally, to their school history books. Besides the
clash of the two titans-Lagaan and Gadar (both released on June 15) Sanjay
Leela Bhansali's Devdas, Santosh Sivan's Asoka the Great, Sanjay Khan's
Maryada Purshottam Ram and Priyadarshan's Chandrashekhar Azad are in the
pipeline. So is this the return of the mighty king and the glorious age?
"Perhaps," feels director Shyam Benegal, "If Lagaan and
Gadar do well, they could start a trend."
Gadar is love in the time of Partition. Folk-singer
and truck driver Tara Singh (Sunny Deol) and ballet-dancing student Sakina
(Amisha Patel) fall in love amid riots and killings with a hearty mix
of lassi and bhangra thrown in for colloquial flavour.
Great effort was made to add authenticity. Ninety
per cent of the shooting was done on location in Rajasthan and Punjab;
steam engines were brought from Delhi's National Rail Museum and villagers
(some 20,000 of them) used as extras in the gory train scenes. Director
Anil Sharma might have needed a strong heart to withstand not just the
bloodshed, but also the investments (Rs 18 crore to be precise). Sharma,
who had worked on the script for almost a year, had 70 per cent of it
complete before he realised that the project required much more than the
initial estimate. But passion for the subject ruled. "Why did we
have to wait for Richard Attenborough to make Gandhi? Gadar has been made
to that scale. It's a subject that has been glossed over too often,"
he says.
Bulging purses also played a big hand in the
making of Devdas, a set design that unlike other Bollywood projects saw
a lot of paperwork before it was finalised. Based on Sarat Chandra Chatterjee's
classic of the same name, art director Nitin Desai recreated 19th century
Calcutta in Mumbai's Film City over a period of six months for a rumoured
Rs 11 crore. Landscaping of 3.5 acres and colour-coordinated flowers outside
the homes of Paro and Devdas were some of the details Bhansali insisted
upon.
And things didn't get any easier with the Rs
25-crore Lagaan. Desai took two months and tremendous patience to give
the feel of cracked earth in the tiny hamlet in Bhuj. Over 25 trucks of
earth was transported from the Rann of Kutch and spread on the village
floor and left to dry in order to give a "cracked, dry effect".
While Desai sweated over the right "drought"
effect, art director Sabu Cyril sat up two days and nights to create a
1940s Calcutta street, complete with a tram, for Hey Ram. "I used
the engine of an ambassador car to run the tram," he says. He also
remembers sourcing and photocopying old copies of Time and Life magazine
to prop up a street bookstall and the Waterman pen (not the more expensive
Parker) that Kamal Haasan uses to express himself against the socio-political
scenario. Such bric-a-brac also engrossed Benegal during the making of
Zubiedaa. "Locations and buildings were not as difficult to get as
details like matchboxes, electrical fittings and art-deco furniture,"
he says.
In contrast to the grandeur of the sets and
fashion statements made by the petulant Karisma as Zubeidaa, in Asoka,
slated for release in 2002, director Santosh Sivan gravitates towards
starkness and simplicity. The film explores the change within Asoka (played
by Shah Rukh Khan) from a warrior to a votary of Dharma. Set in the 3rd
century B.C., it seeks to portray a realistic image of the era, bereft
of excessive accessories and ostentatious costumes. In some scenes, Kareena
Kapoor appears without make-up. "I wanted to capture the essence
of the people," says Sivan.
The saga of personal trial and tribulation,
however, has not done well at the box office going by releases like 1942:
A Love Story, 1947-Earth and Hey Ram. Despite a stellar cast and attention
to detail, the films either flopped or, like Hey Ram and Sazaa-e-Kaalapani,
did average business in Tamil Nadu and Kerala respectively. Hollywood
has been luckier with its period films. Schindler's List in 1993, Braveheart
in 1995, The English Patient in 1996, Titanic in 1997 and Gladiator in
2000 won both commercial and critical acclaim.
High risks have, however, not deterred future
plans. Sanjay Khan has been planning his "magnificent obsession"
Maryada Purshottam Ram for the past four years. With Amitabh Bachchan
as Dashrath and Jackie Shroff as Ravan, Khan's focus is on fashioning
the "greatest epic in Indian mythology to a realistic film with technical
excellence". Exotic locales like Malaysia, Sri Lanka and the Andaman
Islands are being considered and shooting will begin some time next year.
And any hopes of seeing Abhishek Bachchan or Hrithik Roshan in the role
of Lord Ram are squashed. The idea is to capture an innocence and freshness
in the film. "If Dharamendra or I were to say 'I love you' to Sita
do you think the public will believe it?" Khan queries.
Trade pundits feel that big banner films like
Lagaan have succeeded in creating a hype around a genre that had its heyday
in the 1940s and 1950s with stalwarts like Prithviraj Kapoor and Sohrab
Modi. But unlikely as the packaging may seem, period films with their
opulent sets and ostentatious costumes might just be the breath of fresh
air the dream factory of Mumbai is searching for.
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