Lights, Camera, Conversation… “It’s the same, just (somewhat) different”

With two recent high-profile remakes, it’s as good a time as any to discuss their enduring popularity.

Two films released in January, one Hindi and one Tamil, raise the question of why, exactly, filmmakers opt for remakes. For some, it is the opportunity to transpose a hit from one language to another, one cultural milieu to another, so that audiences who don’t know the original language, who aren’t from that culture, can enjoy the remake as a brand new film. (The problem arises when it’s an unacknowledged remake, in which case it isn’t so much a remake as a rip-off, but that’s a different topic altogether.) Then there are other filmmakers, fewer in number, who commit to a remake because they connected with the original in a wholly personal way and wish to channel the source material through their strong sensibilities, as Martin Scorsese did with Cape Fear, burrowing beneath a fairly straightforward thriller to discover a marriage on the verge of splitting up and a pubescent daughter’s sexual awakening.

But Gus Van Sant’s somewhat gimmicky shot-for-shot (almost) remake of Psycho aside, most remakes fall in the former category, adapting the source material to local tastes. Thus, The Italian Job, in Abbas-Mustan’s hands, becomes a more convoluted script, with twists and turns characteristic of these directors. Plus, we have some lip-smackingly trashy embellishments, like a villain who calls himself Spider and who honours his name by having images of the eight-legged creatures on his costumes and in his lair. Had the film consistently stooped to this level (or risen, depending on your love for lurid trash), we may have had ourselves a decent entertainer, but the directors seem to be after some sort of classy thriller that they are entirely incapable of. It’s a pity because their real strengths lie in the bad-taste department, which is as valuable a skill as any in the cinema because vulgar entertainment, at least in my book, is a very valid entertainment. (Hence the whole category of films I label as good bad movies.)

When I see a remake, the question I ask is this: What are you giving me that I didn’t get from the original? (People who haven’t seen the earlier film, of course, have no such expectations.) With Players, I sense, among other things, the assumption that audiences would want to watch a size-zero stick figure like Sonam Kapoor throwing herself into the kind of seductive number that Helen and Bindu and Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi could execute in their sleep. (Doesn’t this sort of dance item require someone with a fuller figure? What is the villain, in whose spider-embossed lair said seduction is underway, supposed to be turned on by? The outline of her rib cage as she arches in his direction?) It requires a special kind of skill to successfully infuse into a Hollywood thriller an Indian sensibility, with songs and relationship drama and scenes of comedy. In Players, these elements come off as flab, as if compensating for its lack on the heroine.

At the end of it all, you’re left wondering why they bothered. Why would I see this film when the perfectly entertaining original is at hand? And even if we consider these adaptations as Hollywood Movies For Those Who Don’t Watch Hollywood Movies, isn’t that audience left with the bewildering sense of being stranded in a no man’s land between a lean, mean Hollywood thriller that focuses, every minute, on ratcheting up the tension, and a three-hour-something Bollywood masala that simply doesn’t have enough plot points to warrant this bloated running time? Shankar’s Nanban, a remake of the staggeringly successful 3 Idiots, is equally long, but at least it’s stuffed with things, and it’s what you’d call a typically Indian movie, tailored to a typically Indian audience. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll do everything that you won’t do in today’s too-cool multiplex movies. This is a single-screen movie in every sense of the term – and yet, again, I was left wondering why Shankar bothered.

To those familiar with the original, this is a shockingly faithful remake – “shocking” because major filmmakers do not usually choose to make movies where they have nothing to do but make sure that the shots are canned and the music is recorded and the publicity is mounted. Shankar’s stamp – or vision, if you want to call it that – is in a mere handful of scenes and song sequences that feature computer graphics (and he gamely makes fun of his predilection for the same). Otherwise you feel a first-time director could have ended up with the same product, working off the same template. It would be interesting to listen to Shankar’s views about why he signed up for something where he’d have nothing to do – well, almost – but shout “action” and “cut.” Even his famed song sequences look like remakes of his own song sequences from earlier extravaganzas. I asked of this remake the question I ask of all remakes: What are you giving me that I didn’t get from the original? And the answer was “nothing.”

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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Posted in: Cinema: Hindi, Cinema: Tamil, Lights Camera Conversation