In all the online discourse I’ve seen around Ra.One, what makes me want to tear my hair out is when the movie’s apologists say things like “Okay, it isn’t a great film — but you have to respect all the hard work that Shah Rukh and his team have put into it.”
In other words: never mind that this is a cringe-inducingly uneven, appallingly written and imagined movie that manages not only to insult Chinese people, South Indians, homosexuals and other groups I’ve no doubt overlooked, but also offends the intelligence of anyone who knows anything about good science-fiction, good fantasy or good video games, and yet we are all still dutybound to scrape at the altars of the obscenely rich Bollywood deities who condescended to bring it to us.
To clarify, I have no real issue with anyone honestly thinking Ra.One was a good film (though I wouldn’t want to spend much time talking about movies with them). But whenever I hear the “respect the money and effort” plea, I think about the many people I know who have been struggling just as hard to realise their cinematic visions and to bring them to an audience in more difficult circumstances.
I think, for example, about Shekhar Hattangadi, the associate director of a little film called Teen Behenein, which was made by Kundan Shah for Zee Telefilms six years ago. For the past few weeks, Hattangadi has been in Delhi with a single DVD of the movie, screening it at colleges and auditoria, trying to spread word about it through his contacts. For reasons that are unclear to me, there is no expectation that this film will get a commercial release or a DVD release anytime soon. This is a pity.
Teen Behenein, inspired by countless tragic stories from across India, is about three young sisters from a lower-middle class family who decide to commit suicide to relieve their parents from the burden of heavy dowry demands. It isn’t a great film — it’s a little tacky in places, and occasionally struggles to strike a balance between gritty, issue-oriented cinema and something that will simplify an issue for a general audience. But it works extremely well when it focuses on the interactions between the three girls on the last day of their lives: their personal equations, their responses to the interruptions that delay their plan, the slivers of hope filtering in through their despair. At a screening I attended, the audience didn’t seem to care for the inclusion of songs in what was expected to be a strictly “realist” film. But I liked the way the musical interludes (mostly gentle and tuneful) punctuated the narrative and captured the girls’ vacillating moods.
The three central performances (by Amrita Subhash, Shiju Kataria and especially Kadambari Kadam as the youngest sister) are very strong, but there’s a notable subtext here. If you see the discipline of good theatre acting in this film, that’s because Shah and his team extensively rehearsed every sequence — choreographing the characters’ movements within the small space that the story is set in — before they switched on the cameras. The result was that very little film was wasted on retakes — and this was important for a low-budget production. Given some of the crud that not only makes it to multiplexes these days but also gets ridiculous amounts of media coverage, I think it’s a pity that films like Teen Behenein — low-key, well-intentioned, flawed in some ways but with many strong points too — aren’t assured even a TV screening.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
