My life but your story: The ethics of a biopic

The legal action on Gulaab Gang by its purported subject has turned the spotlight back on practices in the business of biopics

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She had already begun work on her novel when The Bandit Queen, a film based on the life of the female bandit Phoolan Devi, was released. Devi was a low-caste woman who became a famous gang leader and endured gang rape and imprisonment. Roy was incensed by the way the film portrayed her as a victim whose life was defined by rape instead of rebellion. "When I saw the film, I was infuriated, partly because I had grown up in Kerala, being taken to these Malayalam films, where in every film - every film - a woman got raped," Roy said. "For many years, I believed that all women got raped. Then I read in the papers how Phoolan Devi said it was like being raped again. I read the book the film was based on and realised that these guys had added their own rapes... I thought you've changed India's most famous bandit into history's most famous rape victim." Roy's essay on the film, "The Great Indian Rape Trick," published in the now-defunct Sunday magazine, eviscerated the makers of Bandit Queen, pointing out that they never even bothered to meet Phoolan Devi or to invite her to a screening.

- Author Siddhartha Deb, in a March 5 profile of Arundhati Roy for The New York Times Magazine

It took an Arundhati Roy to protest against the portrayal of Phoolan Devi in Bandit Queen, for which Roy lost friends in the film world. The movie made Shekhar Kapur's international reputation as director. His blog recounts how he shot the gang rape scene and rates Bandit Queen as his best film. (REAL TO REEL LIFE)

Despite the film's success, and it catapulting Kapur to Hollywood, Hindi cinema woke up to the power of biopics only in the last year and a half when it delivered one hit after another drawn from true stories. The Dirty Picture rubbed shoulders with Paan Singh Tomar which bumped up against Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, each film winning its lead actor a Filmfare award or a National Award trophy. And on International Women's Day came Gulaab Gang, a story based on grassroots-level activist Sampat Pal. She challenged the movie in court and got a stay, which was revoked in less than a week.

It remains to be seen whether Gulaab Gang will run to packed houses. On social media, another story around a woman, outlier Kangana Ranaut as Queen was giving queen bees Madhuri Dixit and Juhi Chawla a run for their money.

Powerful stories
Biopics, portraying a real-life person on screen, score over fiction because of the powerful stories of grit, guts and glory they offer. They are also controversial for precisely this reason - they touch real lives, drawing from true stories. People whose stories are shown may not agree with their life on celluloid, with parts added, blown out of proportion or cut out.

Though Hindi cinema has started scoring with biopics in recent years, Hollywood has for long pulled in audiences for true-life stories. The Martin Scorsese-Leonardo DiCaprio partnership specialises in biopics, following up The Aviator's success with The Wolf of Wall Street. Both got king-size Oscar nominations. The Aviator's story was based on Howard Hughes, drawing heavily on a book by Charles Hingham, known for writing controversial biographies.

The Wolf of Wall Street's muse was Jordon Belfort, who was jailed for securities fraud and got $1 million for the sale of screen rights to his life story, said the UK's The Guardian newspaper, something for which he has been criticised as he has paid only $11.6 million out of the $110.4 million he was bound over to pay victims as part of his sentencing in 2003.

This brings us to the question of financial compensation. Many times - though not always - the path of a Bollywood biopic is littered with the subject of the story, or its close family, feeling short-changed. The realisation that the story, which will earn big money for everyone associated with the film, has left them out in the cold.

Subjects of research
"I spent hundreds of hours with Leo doing everything you could imagine, from hanging out socially to showing him what it's like to be on drugs," Belfort told The Guardian. "I took him through the stages and I was rolling on the floor in his house as he was filming me."

Across the globe, Balwant Singh Tomar, nephew of Paan Singh, who was part of the same gang of dacoits, recounts a similar tale of hand-holding a film crew. "I spent five months with them (the film crew). I told them the huge, complete story; took them into the jungle from morning to night. I got nothing," said Tomar, who farms near Gwalior and has lodged a complaint against the producers of the Tomar biopic.

DiCaprio won an Oscar nomination for an almost real-life performance. It is this authentication that Irrfan Khan also managed to achieve in Paan Singh Tomar, the story of an athlete who turned into a dacoit. Khan won a National Award for his role, besides delivering a success at the box office.

Balwant Singh Tomar's view is contradicted by a report in The Times of India citing Tomar's son, who Business Standard could not trace, saying Balwant was not promised money.

"I have no written agreement. The elders told me, these are big people, they will pay. Even Phoolan Devi got money, I was told, when her film was made," said Balwant.

Biopics in Hindi cinema earlier tipped only a hat to their subjects. Datta Samant was the 'inspiration' behind Deewar, Aandhi got quite close to Indira Gandhi's life, the only time a movie was allowed to get away with portraying the political first family of the country.

Now, with a more corporate culture, the business seems to be open to acknowledging a biopic. But it is a case of one step forward and two steps back.

Money is not the only issue that gets in the way of a real-life story well told. Dogging biopics are issues of glorification or, in the opposite case, infamy that these films can bring to their subject, or to the family a dead subject has left behind.

Embellishment
The police officer who shot dead Tomar gave several interviews after the film hit the screens to say that a dacoit had needlessly been made famous, and how proud he was of killing Tomar in the line of duty. This is a treacherous path for Hollywood as well. DiCaprio, despite riding The Wolf of Wall Street wave to the Oscars, said it was a cautionary tale. The daughter of a man linked to Belfort's fraudulent schemes attacked Scorsese and DiCaprio for glamourising a lifestyle of "fun sexcapades and coke binges".

At the opposite end of the scale, Silk Smitha's brother put forth his viewpoint, denying that his sister consumed alcohol, smoked on a regular basis, or had sexual relations with several men. The makers of The Dirty Picture said the movie was not based on Smitha's life.

Several film-makers do leave this leeway to cover themselves in case of a lawsuit. "There is a definite grey area somewhere," said writer and film commentator Jai Arjun Singh. "You stir up interest in an audience by saying it is based on a tragic, real-life figure but you make it different enough so you have a loophole."

Singh, a columnist for Business Standard, says embellishment of a real story may be a necessity. He recounts how even a film made with great integrity such as Attenborough's Gandhi cast an attractive and well-known American actress in the role of the photographer who meets and interviews Gandhi. "Any commercial film will make nods like that for a larger audience."

It is not embellishment but showing real people captured in a two- or three-hour capsule high on entertainment that may be the problem.

Novelist Paul Zacharia, in a tribute to Silk Smitha, said, "For the viewer her body was the story and the role. The viewer saw a woman with big breasts and big buttocks, a wide and enticing belly that arched out into undulating, curvaceous hips, smooth thighs and long legs. She had languid and challenging eyes and a smile that had a sardonic definition. My friends who knew her professionally say that she was a genial woman, though without close friends, and willing to help out a guy with money for the evening's drink."

It is this nuance of character that biopics need to address to adequately compensate real people for sharing their real-life stories on reel.