The Creative Art of Compromise

THE CREATIVE ART OF COMPROMISE

After Lagaan, Taare Zameen Par and, now, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, Aamir Khan has become synonymous with cleverly compromised creativity.

AUGUST 2008 – ON THE FACE OF IT, OUR MAINSTREAM CINEMA spans a spectrum of stories. Love stories. Revenge stories. Stories about friendship and sacrifice and betrayal and honour and tradition. But the story that plays out behind the scenes has pretty much stayed the same: about the filmmaker as Faust, and the almighty box-office as Mephistopheles. With very few exceptions (that actually prove the rule), the crux of this plot is the selling of the soul.

You want to change the world with your film, but you also want to survive in order to make your next film – so you make your peace with the kind of arrangement that’s the bedrock of any kind of marriage, especially the one between art and commerce. You learn to compromise. And that that isn’t necessarily a bad word is what Aamir Khan is apparently on a mission to prove – as actor, and especially as producer.

This isn’t the first time a superstar has channelled his energies into something other than the creation of the next superhit. Kamal Hassan has been doing that for a while now – but with a singular difference, alternating between the unusual stories that he wants to tell (Hey Ram, Anbe Sivam) and the easy entertainment that his audiences want to see (the comedies like Tenali and Panchatantiram), making his monies off the latter and pumping those finances into the former. But Aamir, somehow, has managed to ensure that the unusual stories that he wants to tell are the entertainment that his audiences want to see.

And this he has achieved primarily by making better use of the multiplex revolution than practically anybody else (something that has to be factored into the consideration of Kamal Hassan’s cinema, for Tamil Nadu is still dominated by single screens). Aamir has fashioned these multiplexes into little hotbeds of compromised creativity – compromised, because his films aren’t perfect, but creative all the same, because even these imperfections are loftier in intent than the blemishes that mar other films.

Not for Aamir the silky seductions of an easily tucked in item number, the safety net of a comedy track, or the decadent eye candy of big stars trussed up in painstakingly styled finery and deposited in the kind of mouthwateringly touristy locations that no Yash Raj production can do without. These are compromises of desperation, of selling the soul for silver, whereas Aamir’s compromises serve a higher purpose – to ensure, for instance, wider acceptance of Hindi cinema’s sole instance of a story propelled by a bucktoothed, dyslexic protagonist.

Taare Zameen Par had a truly great first half, one that ended intriguingly with the director-producer-actor in a clown suit – and during intermission, you couldn’t help but anticipate what came afterwards. Unfortunately, what came afterwards did not touch the heights of the earlier portions. The compromise, the pact with the devil manning the box-office, was that the second half became sentimental. This isn’t a problem in itself, but considering that the first half was a remarkably understated, day-in-the-life chronicle of a dyslexic child, the change in tone was tough to take – because where the film was, earlier, grittily individual, it now became generously crowd-pleasing.

But how those crowds responded – the way they never did for the uncompromised vision of, say, Sparsh (one of the finest Hindi films about disability). The compromises of Taare Zameen Par were ones you could at least respect if not respond to, for they were compromises with a measure of creativity; they did not violate the integrity of the premise with, for instance, an item number or a comedy track. And because of these compromises, the film broke out of the “nice little film that nobody saw” niche and became a nationwide phenomenon, making a topical buzzword of dyslexia and a fifteen-minute star of Darsheel Safary.

This is impossible to imagine without Aamir Khan in the driver’s seat, without the goodwill he commands within the industry and with his fans, and without the notion he’s gradually instilled in his audiences that his name is a guarantee of quality mainstream entertainment. He appears to truly believe in the films he makes, and he uses his clout as a huge star to make everyone else believe in them too. And this is surely why Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na (produced by Aamir, starring his nephew Imran Khan) is on its way to becoming one of the year’s biggest hits.

Left to its own devices – in other words, had Aamir not tirelessly spearheaded the publicity for the film and stamped his name on it – Abbas Tyrewala’s directorial debut might have been dismissed as just another love story with newcomers. But with Aamir behind it, it quickly became the must-see feel-good romance of the season. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the film turned out to be quite engrossing – witty and wise about the ways of the heart, with casting choices bordering on genius. But then the audiences already knew all that, without seeing a single frame. After all, the producer’s name was Aamir Khan.

What’s remarkable about Aamir’s stint as producer is that every film he’s bankrolled so far has become an event. Lagaan was a huge hit that went to the Oscars. Taare Zameen Par was a huge hit that went on to redefine what a mainstream audience would flock in droves to see. And now, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na is a huge hit that… Well, we’ll have to see what the lasting legacy of this trifling romance is going to be, but the way it’s caught on like wildfire, it’s, at the very least, the film that gave Imran Khan the kind of launch few films have given their leading men.

The impact of these films has been such that it’s easy to forget that Aamir Khan has taken to producing only very recently. But he appears to have a bloodhound’s scent for what people want and what will work at the box-office. He knows that, as long as his name is attached to a project, the audiences will line up for anything – even a four-hour film about cricket, or the story of a dyslexic child populated mostly by non-stars.

And that’s why there’s a greedy little part of me that wishes Taare Zameen Par had become all that it could have been – that it had not turned cute and gooey, that it had delivered on its early promise of the tough little trajectory that its protagonist would have to take to triumph over his disability. And the same part of me wishes that Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na had been better, more attuned to the locutions of the English-speaking (and English-thinking) set that the group of friends in the film primarily is.

But if Taare Zameen Par had stayed a bitter little pill, stubbornly resisting the gradual glazing of sugar, and had Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na remained an upscale Dil Chahta Hai for the just-graduated set, the reach of the films would have been curtailed – and the producer knows this. And hence the compromises. He is, after all, the canniest of businessmen, the returns on investment of whose ventures would leave leading industrialists salivating.

But, at the same time, Aamir Khan is also an artist, and at least in the films he puts his producing cap on for, he appears genuinely interested in more than just making money, and in shepherding mainstream cinema to new grazing grounds – for if that weren’t the case, he could merely divert his funds to the likes of Fanaa, which made pots of cash while doing nothing to his reputation as a stickler perfectionist. For the one question on our lips as we exited that Yash Raj production was: Just what modes of black magic were employed on Aamir Khan to make him consent to this script?

Instead, the films with his imprimatur – namely, the films that he’s not simply acting in – take on a life beyond their run at the box office (though, admittedly, it’s too soon to say that about Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na). They go on to define the zeitgeist, redefine the contours of commercial cinema, and because few others follow in these footsteps, taking these risks, Aamir Khan’s films take root as definitive pop-culture signposts.

Because for all the compromise, there’s still the creativity. Because for all the watering down of Taare Zameen Par, there’s still the highly atypical soundtrack by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, which is the closest that Hindi film music has come to channelling the indulgent, rock-fuelled angst of Pink Floyd. Because if the heroine of Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na (played by Genelia D’Souza) is a lame construct full of I-love-my-best-friend clichés, there’s still Meghna (played by Manjari), who’s easily one of the most complex female characters written for a mainstream cinema culture that’s rarely interested in women, let alone a woman who isn’t the heroine.

The character of Meghna was written by Abbas Tyrewala, sure, just as Taare Zameen Par was Amole Gupte’s brainchild – but it’s not difficult to imagine the reception these films would have received had they been backed by another producer (and if, at all, they’d been backed by any other producer). Looking back, Lagaan seems to have revitalised Aamir Khan, whose famed script sense, whose famed audience connect was nowhere in evidence in Mann and Mela, the films he made just earlier.

But practically everything Aamir has touched after beating the British at their own game in those four hours – Dil Chahta Hai, Rang De Basanti – has gone towards cementing his position as someone who’s as attuned to artistry as the audience, at least as much as is possible within the commercial format. He’s discovered a startling middle path between selling his soul and still somehow saving it, and, in the process, he’s made a fine art of compromised creativity.

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Posted in: Cinema: Hindi