Reflections

A successful run by Zoya Akhtar’s Luck By Chance and a reasonable response to Shah Rukh Khan-produced Billu are encouraging signs. This week’s release,Umesh Shukla’s Dhoondte Reh Jaoge,a comedy that builds upon the glitz and glamour of the movies,only drives home the point.

While the film industry is a comfort zone for filmmakers,a subject they know only too well,Shukla points out it is also a formula that hardly fails. “Films are about subjects that the audience can relate to or have stirred their aspirations. The world of cinema is a heady mix of both. Today,your average moviegoer can,at a certain level,relate to this world — more than he ever did in the past. He also knows from the many rags-to-riches stories that this is one industry where everything is possible.”

Screenwriter Mushtaq Shiekh,who wrote Farah Khan-directed Om Shanti Om and more recently Billu,too agrees that such films feed on the audience’s curiosity: “The industry offers a strange dichotomy. While it’s the most exposed industry,it remains the most unresolved mystery. The audience is aware that there’s so much more to this eco-system than what they gauge from the media.”

The draw of such films also lies in the many “references” to Bollywood’s big names and the emulation of their mannerisms,which offer a sneak peak into the real world of the stars. After all,filmmakers draw from the world they live in. While Om Shanti Om skimmed the surface,building upon real-life stories of veteran actors and their lives,Luck By Chance had stars like Aamir Khan and Akshaye Khanna offering a slice of their personalities through a mere scene or two.

Shiekh equates this phenomenon to a whodunit where the audience goes to the theatre merely to test their own knowledge and draw parallels. “A film buff loves it when he or she can figure out which star is imitated or referred to,” he says.

But such films aren’t merely a success formula for filmmakers; the industry forms their universe and finds its way into the stories they tell. Akhtar hence takes offence when her film is referred to as a spoof. “My first film is about the film industry probably because it’s the world I know and grew up in. But I don’t intend to poke fun at anyone. It’s my perspective of my world and while I have borrowed from elements in the industry,all characters merely build upon real people and are fictitious.”