Bollywood Laughs at Itself

The box-office failure of An Action Hero proves one thing: Bollywood can take a joke about itself but the audience cannot. Director and co-writer Anirudh Iyer, who has spent 10 years being an assistant and associate director on movies such as Bobby Jasoos (2014), Tanu Weds Manu Returns (2015), Happy Bhag Jayegi (2016) and Zero (2018), has always liked the actors he has encountered more than their image. Yet, he wasn’t sure whether Akshay Kumar would accept the cameo in An Action Hero, where he tells the hero in trouble not to tell anyone that he met him. That is behaviour considered typical of Bollywoodians who usually keep a distance from those in trouble. But says Iyer, Akshay found the scene hilarious and agreed to do it instantly. Ditto for Malaika Arora, who immediately accepted the cameo of an item girl performing at a mafia don’s family wedding, which is one of the many urban legends about her. The film doesn’t spare anyone. Not the mafia don, who turns out to be a Dawood Ibrahim-like figure. He is hurt that he was killed by RAW agents gone rogue in D-Day, the movie, and the action hero’s statement that dons are not relevant anymore. Not the TV anchors who go from calling the action hero anti-national to a super patriot by the end of the movie. Certainly not the general public, who go from baying for the action hero’s blood, to declaring that he symbolises Naya Bharat: “Ghar main ghus kar mara hai (he has hit them where it hurts most)”. And not even the Indian techie who doesn’t like to get his hands dirty. After doing the basic hacking into the security system our hero needs, he says the rest of the work will be done by a Chinese hacker, because “they are better at labour jobs”. Everyone seems to have enjoyed the joke, except the audience. Does it cut too close to the bone in a year that #BoycottBollywood has trended almost every day on social media, with some song, some movie, some comment? One can only hope it will not put off actors such as Ayushmann Khurrana from making such movies and letting his politics speak through his art. There are few actors left who still do what they believe in, and who are working for change. If audiences don’t appreciate their efforts, they cannot complain that Bollywood is stuck in a rut. As for Iyer, he still believes that humour is the best possible tool to tell the truth because humour doesn’t attack. “It just sits inside your subconscious and forces you to think,” he says. The biggest joke is the name of the movie itself given that Khurrana plays an action hero who spends most of the movie reacting, rather than making things happen.

Rare Candour

At the Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Ranbir Kapoor spent some time analysing his films, especially those he described as disasters. He said one of the reasons Shamshera flopped was because he stuck a fake beard which inhibited his facial expressions, that the box-office failure of Jagga Jasoos (2017) really hurt him, and that Bombay Velvet (2015) deserved the fate it had. Rarely do actors accept the failure of their films with such good humour and grace. He will need loads of both qualities when his new film, Tu Jhoothi Main Makkar, releases in March 2023. Yet, social media was more interested in his statement that he was open to working in Pakistani cinema. At a time when the industry is making movies such as The Legend of Maula Jatt and Joyland, why ever not? Oddly though, Joyland is a collaboration of an Indian producer, Apoorva Guru Charan, and Pakistani director Saim Sadiq, both of whom are graduates of Columbia University, New York. Joyland won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

Scene and Heard

Sometimes casting a little-known actor can be a stroke of luck. In An Action Hero, Gautam Joglekar, who plays Katkar, the mafia don loosely based on Dawood Ibrahim, played a small but significant role in 1991’s Prahaar: The Final Attack, the movie that made Nana Patekar a star. Joglekar is a theatre director in Mumbai, and Anirudh Iyer says they stumbled upon him. He also happens to be the son of the beloved director of Chashme Buddoor (1981) and Katha (1982), Sai Paranjape. Sometimes it can take a lifetime for talent to be noticed.

About The Author

Kaveree Bamzai

Kaveree Bamzai is an author and a contributing writer with Open

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