MUMBAI: In the midst of all the chaos
over Sanjay Dutt’s sentencing, the news of the death of Italian director
Michelangelo Antonioni hardly seems likely to raise much notice. Yet his death
is oddly highlighted by all the chaos at the court, and it is not really because
of his films.
Hard-core film buffs will be mourning the passing of the director of L’Avventure and Zabriskie Point, but frankly we won’t be among them. Antonioni’s chilly genius didn’t really evoke great devotion, and the reason we’re noting it at all is not for his films directly, but for perhaps the most brilliant ‘borrowing’ ever made by Bollywood: Blow-Up, Antonioni’s most commercially successful film, inspired the ultimate Indian cult movie: Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. Kundan Shah’s razor sharp satire loosely took Blow-Up’s gimmick of a photographer accidentally stumbling on a crime in the pictures he has taken, and made it into his madcap yet mordant farce.
Watching the Sanjay Dutt circus playing ad across our TV screens and in the papers, one has to wonder if something similar isn’t going on. Shah took some of the best acting talents of the time, put them through some of the best slapstick sequences ever filmed and used it to paint an unexpectedly corrosive view of a society where everyone—government, industrialists, media—is corrupt, except the two innocents at the centre, who didn’t want to be heroes and end as dupes.
All the fun and frolics of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron serves—until the shattering last scene—to distract you from the real problems of collapsing flyovers and corrupt institutions, and there is a sense that the Sanjay Circus has served the same purpose, perhaps even unwittingly on the part of Dutt, who may partly be playing the dupe role of the photographers in the film.
Because where are we at the end of this marathon trial? With the underlings, many of them dupes themselves in jail or on death row, while Tiger Memon is presumably building flyovers in the Gulf. Dawood Ibrahim, the other prime mover, is so well ensconced in Pakistan that all the immense powers that the US wields there have been unable to get him to justice. On the other hand, despite the efforts of the Srikrishna Commission, the perpetrators of the ‘93 riots, whose actions pushed Memon into his deadly plot, have escaped scot-free.
This has been angrily raised in court by some of the bomb blast accused, and the state has made vague promises of action, but we’re willing to bet these will go nowhere. Why bother when the Sanjay Circus, conveniently coming at the end of the trial, has made everyone forget all that went before? And with the Circus set to continue, with Supreme Court appeals, camera crews camped outside Arthur Road jail and reams and reams devoted to the agonies of Dutt, his family and Bollywood which apparently stands to lose billions of rupees (the mathematics behind that calculation seems to assume that Dutt’s films would have been all hits, which is quite an assumption), who will be surprised if the demands for action on the Srikrishna report are quietly forgotten.
“Yeh sab kya ho raha hai, beta Duryodhan?” asks the stage Dhritarashtra helplessly at the end of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, as the play collapses into a melee of costumed characters from other plays, a dead body that manages to do a pretty decent job on stage and a welter of deals being struck backstage.
Watching the end to the TADA tamasha, we’re as clueless as he is. Somewhere there are dupes being set up, somewhere deals are being made and God knows there are a hell of a lot of dead bodies from riots and blasts and the years in-between, all asking for answers. Will they get them? Will Srikrishna be re-opened? Will Sanjay-baba be set free by the Supreme Court? You know the answer, from Antonioni, via Shah: Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro!
Hard-core film buffs will be mourning the passing of the director of L’Avventure and Zabriskie Point, but frankly we won’t be among them. Antonioni’s chilly genius didn’t really evoke great devotion, and the reason we’re noting it at all is not for his films directly, but for perhaps the most brilliant ‘borrowing’ ever made by Bollywood: Blow-Up, Antonioni’s most commercially successful film, inspired the ultimate Indian cult movie: Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. Kundan Shah’s razor sharp satire loosely took Blow-Up’s gimmick of a photographer accidentally stumbling on a crime in the pictures he has taken, and made it into his madcap yet mordant farce.
Watching the Sanjay Dutt circus playing ad across our TV screens and in the papers, one has to wonder if something similar isn’t going on. Shah took some of the best acting talents of the time, put them through some of the best slapstick sequences ever filmed and used it to paint an unexpectedly corrosive view of a society where everyone—government, industrialists, media—is corrupt, except the two innocents at the centre, who didn’t want to be heroes and end as dupes.
All the fun and frolics of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron serves—until the shattering last scene—to distract you from the real problems of collapsing flyovers and corrupt institutions, and there is a sense that the Sanjay Circus has served the same purpose, perhaps even unwittingly on the part of Dutt, who may partly be playing the dupe role of the photographers in the film.
Because where are we at the end of this marathon trial? With the underlings, many of them dupes themselves in jail or on death row, while Tiger Memon is presumably building flyovers in the Gulf. Dawood Ibrahim, the other prime mover, is so well ensconced in Pakistan that all the immense powers that the US wields there have been unable to get him to justice. On the other hand, despite the efforts of the Srikrishna Commission, the perpetrators of the ‘93 riots, whose actions pushed Memon into his deadly plot, have escaped scot-free.
This has been angrily raised in court by some of the bomb blast accused, and the state has made vague promises of action, but we’re willing to bet these will go nowhere. Why bother when the Sanjay Circus, conveniently coming at the end of the trial, has made everyone forget all that went before? And with the Circus set to continue, with Supreme Court appeals, camera crews camped outside Arthur Road jail and reams and reams devoted to the agonies of Dutt, his family and Bollywood which apparently stands to lose billions of rupees (the mathematics behind that calculation seems to assume that Dutt’s films would have been all hits, which is quite an assumption), who will be surprised if the demands for action on the Srikrishna report are quietly forgotten.
“Yeh sab kya ho raha hai, beta Duryodhan?” asks the stage Dhritarashtra helplessly at the end of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, as the play collapses into a melee of costumed characters from other plays, a dead body that manages to do a pretty decent job on stage and a welter of deals being struck backstage.
Watching the end to the TADA tamasha, we’re as clueless as he is. Somewhere there are dupes being set up, somewhere deals are being made and God knows there are a hell of a lot of dead bodies from riots and blasts and the years in-between, all asking for answers. Will they get them? Will Srikrishna be re-opened? Will Sanjay-baba be set free by the Supreme Court? You know the answer, from Antonioni, via Shah: Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro!
