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| Loud, dark, funny |
| Jai Arjun Singh / New Delhi Aug 09, 2009, 00:05 IST |
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The sub-genres of slapstick comedy and black humour, when treated with subtlety, are hugely satisfying.
Nearly everyone who has worked on a comedy film will tell you that it’s a bloody difficult job. Crew members of many classic laugh-a-thons recount that no one even cracked a smile while the filming was on — so intense was the experience. Actors swear that it’s the toughest thing to get right: Naseeruddin Shah, one of our finest, most dedicated artistes, told me recently that he suffered from serious performance anxiety when he took his first steps into the comic genre — this despite the fact that he already had a dazzling resume in both theatre and film. Writers and directors know that there’s no surefire formula and that however hard you toil on a script, you won’t know if something is working until you’re on the sets, executing it, improvising with the performers until an “Aha!” moment materialises.
And yet, it’s a matter of record that the best film comedies or comic performances rarely get their due. The Oscars are famous for overlooking “lighthearted” films (however masterfully made) in favour of tearjerkers (however contrived). In general, movies that make you laugh simply aren’t taken as seriously as movies that make you cry.
Even worse off is the sub-genre of loud, deliberately unsubtle comedy. To start with, it simply isn’t to many people’s tastes. Secondly, it invites condescension the way few other genres do: you often see critics using the phrase “…descends into slapstick”. But slapstick comedy, like any other artistic mode (including its equally maligned cousin Melodrama), can be done well or done poorly. Pankaj Advani’s Sankat City, which hurried in and out of our multiplexes a few weeks ago, does it very well for the most part.
This film, about a small-time crook (Kay Kay Menon) who gets into the bad books of a sadistic gangster (Anupam Kher) and is given three days to retrieve a large sum of money, has so many things going on at the same time that it leaves you feeling giddy. It’s brimming over with good ideas, verbal gymnastics and visual gags; you expect it to trip over its own cleverness, but it holds its ground. Though it’s loud and ribald, it establishes a lunatic tone and sticks with it, right from the opening shot where a man dressed in a gaudy Rakshasa costume is shown pursuing another man in Deva get-up through the busy streets of Mumbai. Variations on this bizarre chase recur at different points through the film, as it cuts between characters and sub-plots.
Some of the “humour” tracks in today’s mainstream films comprise cheaply thrown together situational comedy that tells us nothing about the characters and that doesn’t even have a particular reason for being in the film. In Sankat City, on the other hand, the comedy is organic to the film’s central theme of what people — from different rungs of society — can do for money. The greedy godman, the desperate small-time producer, the hilariously decrepit life-sized statue of the Air India Maharaja …these are all vital to the movie’s tone.
If good slapstick comedy tends to be undervalued, another comic mode that’s sadly underused is black humour. It’s no coincidence that Sankat City has a few scenes that pay tribute to the 1980s classic Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, which was one of the very few genuinely dark comedies made in India. Advani’s film also resembles Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! in its depiction of an aspirational, amoral social class, but it’s ultimately a one-of-a-kind movie: deliberately exaggerated and caricatured, often playing like a skit that presents characters as archetypes without worrying much about realism. It’s one of the most boldly entertaining films I’ve seen in a while.
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