Anil Kapoor and Mallika Sherawat in one episode of Darna Zaroori Hai; (left) Gael Garcia Bernal and Vanessa Bauche in an Amores Perros story

Q. What connects Lewis Carroll, Satyajit Ray, Ram Gopal Varma and Roopa Ganguly?

A. Portmanteau

When Carroll coined the term while writing Through The Looking Glass, he couldn?t have imagined that a couple of centuries later a maverick Bollywood director called Sanjay Gupta would suddenly discover new meaning in the word.

?Portmanteau?, simply put, is a word that is formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words. Like animatronics comes from animation and electronics. And from that originates a ?portmanteau film? ? a film consisting of several different short films, which may or may not be tied together by a single theme or premise. The shorts may or may not be directed by a different director.

The common thread between the smaller films can be in the theme (Kapurush/Mahapurush and Darna Mana Hai) or in a character (Four Rooms) or in a location (Sin City) or even one incident (Yuva and Amores Perros).

While Bollywood has largely overlooked the portmanteau format, Ram Gopal Varma turned to it in 2003 when he produced Prawaal Raman?s six-in-one scare saga Darna Mana Hai. It didn?t set the box-office ablaze but it sure sparked quite a trend.

Last Friday saw the release of the sequel Darna Zaroori Hai ? this time with seven stories by seven directors ? and now comes Sanjay Gupta?s dramatic entry into the many-in-one genre. The director best known for his unabashed ?inspiration? from foreign films ? Kaante, Musafir and Zinda ? plans to make a 10-in-1 movie tentatively titled Dus Kahaaniyan which will have 10 small films, of 10 minutes each, directed by as many directors.

If the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, Istvan Szabo, Wim Wenders and Spike Lee got together to direct separate stories of 10 minutes each in Ten Minutes Older, Dus Kahaaniyan will have new-age film-makers like Vishal Bharadwaj, Sudhir Mishra, Hansal Mehta and Apoorva Lakhia joining Gupta to tell their own 10-minute tales.

?Sometimes short stories are equally good and are worth telling,? feels Mishra. ?The short story can take all sorts of forms. It can turn around in the end. It can be just a feeling that touches you. Not every experience that a human being goes through has a reason or explanation but it does have an impact. The short-film format allows a film-maker to capture that spirit in the set time-frame.?

Years back, Ray had tried his hand at the multiple-film format in Teen Kanya and Kapurush/Mahapurush. Keeping the flavour of the original short stories untouched, he wove together three short films ? Postmaster, Monihara and Samapti ? in one single movie. There was never an attempt to co-relate the smaller stories to arrive at a bigger picture as they were self-sufficient in their own right.

Trial and error

Perhaps that was the biggest mistake Raman made with Darna Mana Hai when he wanted a seventh background story to piece together the six scary episodes ? the tagline read ?six stories, one ending? ? thus limiting the prospects of Bollywood?s first true portmanteau movie experience.

?The whole idea was to give the audiences a complete entertaining package with no scope for the audiences to take a breather,? says Raman. ?What we should appreciate is the fact that Mr Varma actually pushed the envelope to give India this form of experimental cinema.?

What Ramu also did was to take the stand of producing a Darna film every year as an annual series regardless of its acceptance at the box-office. And with just a couple of days of shoot needed for the small episodes, the biggest of stars were willing to jump on to the bandwagon. So a single Darna Zaroori Hai could pack in as many as 10 big stars including Amitabh Bachchan, Mallika Sherawat, Anil Kapoor and Bipasha Basu, something only the Johars and Chopras could otherwise afford.

But then a portmanteau film comes with its own charm where a new crew sets up a new location every second day to make a new story. ?Logistically it becomes an elaborate set-up with different sets of cast and crew all making one single film,? explains Arindam Sil, who not only acted in the six-in-one Ek Mutho Chhobi but was also executive producer. ?As far as the creative aspect went our only goal was to make every story so unique that it wouldn?t allow the preceding story to stay with the viewer.?

At one level, a portmanteau film throws up the biggest challenge for a film-maker. Says Mishra: ?A short story is a visual form, almost anti-dialogue in character, since a dialogue would always offer an answer to a question which itself will be questioned. So it is the true test as a film-maker.?

Humpty Dumpty had once told Alice: ?Well, slithy means lithe and slimy??.

With Bollywood waking up to mix-and-match movie magic, one needs to wait for one big Crash.