By Raja Sen(Rediff)
It is the pop culture reference to beat all pop culture references. Late last night, driving around, a friend asked if I remembered where her car stood. Near the bushes, I said dramatically in Hindi, pointedly using the words 'jhaadiyon ke beech.' The words, spoken with an obviously sinister rasp, immediately made another friend respond with a barrage of questions about standing in a park and wearing 'a check-coat.' Our palms met in a gleeful five, our collective hat doffed toward the greatest black comedy Hindi cinema has ever known.
It's been 26 years since Kundan Shah's seminal Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, a film whose sheer iconicity beggars description. Imagine the Star Wars [ Images ] characters in Pulp Fiction with even more quotable dialogue, and you'll begin to get an idea of the shadow cast by the cult of JBDY.
No wonder it takes half a second to slip into a quotefest, all us fanboys pouncing on the most innocuous and generic of quotes -- the aforementioned bushes referring to a scene when Naseeruddin Shah's [ Images ] Vinod grilled Pankaj Kapur's Tarneja in front of the press, provoking him into a fit of rage.
Considering the fact that I have to rein myself in instead of going on and on about the ludicrous nuances of that wonderfully loopy plot, it is no surprise that we, the children of the 1980s, are mad about the one truly effective and potently funny satire, the one good black comedy, that our cinema has managed to successfully make. It is even lesser of a surprise that Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron continues to inspire filmmakers to this day, to the extent that the JBDY-style flick has, today, become a bonafide sub-genre in our cinema.
It is a dreadfully sobering fact, however, that this is clearly the one genre all our new-age directors, the sort who love handheld cameras and the word Edgy, are getting disastrously wrong. Every few Fridays another outrageously over-the-top movie attempts to string together some manic shenanigans and bottle up lightning in a manner clearly derivative of The Film -- and singularly fails. They're all trying far too hard to be clever and absurd and whimsical and profound, all in the same breath, and falling flat on their faces. It's tragic.
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3 comments:
Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro is a masterpiece. In one interview Naseerudin Shah explains how tough it was to put this movie on track. The producer ran out of money and the project would going to be shelved. But Naseer´s persistence in taking this project ahead worked. He encouraged the producer and director to continue with the work and not worry about financial matters.
In present day I believe a movie like this can´t be made. Not because there is lack of talent, which isn´t the case.
The problem is that "off-beat" cinema is giving merely pretentious films that are either attempts to copy genuinly good films from the west, such as: "Mumbai Meri Jaan" ( reminds Innaritu´s films; or soulless flicks such as Bandarkar´s "Traffic Signal".
Then we have commercial cinema where quality reaches new lows with each film.
Rajiv - Complete agree. JBDY can't be remade even though directors are trying to make a film like JBDY in films like Sankat City - still they are failing to make an equivalent film. People say Andaz Apna Apna as the best comedy but I think JBDY is the best comedy ever made in Indian Cinema. The act of Om Puri in Mahabharata scene and the coffin scene is class!!
And thanks for that info about Naseeruddin Shah who made this project go on. Didn't know that.
Naseer had to use his own camera as there was no money to buy a camera, and at the end of the film, his camera was stolen!!
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