Once again, you'll hear a filmmaker sigh that the Indian audience just isn't grown-up enough to understand pathbreaking cinema.
But is the palatability of the subject the only problem with a film like Nishabd? Is Lolita a difficult story to digest? After all, those news stories of 60-plus grooms buying themselves 16-year-old brides from Hyderabad, a grandpa figure enamoured of a nubile, young, 20-something should not really be alien territory for us.
So how come you could stretch out and sleep over an empty row of seats in every cinema hall in the country that screened Ram Gopal Varma's Nishabd ?
Ramu and Karan Johar may represent two vastly different kinds of cinema. Both filmmakers may also be outspoken enough to publicly poke fun at each other since neither can stand the other's cinema. Ramu has always taken a crack at Karan in his films (for instance, he has a dandy director in one of his films) and he calls Johar's works 'horror films'. On his part, when RGV's Darwaza Bandh Rakho was released, Karan had wisecracked that the title was taken so seriously that the doors of every theatre remained tightly shut with no audience inside.
Whatever their differences may be, both Ramu and Karan have, in recent times, made the same cardinal blunder. It is in the way they have gone about weaving a faulty screenplay around a bold theme, therefore rendering the whole product unacceptable. It is not the 'bold theme,' as they put it, which is at fault, it is the story telling and the story itself that have been unattractive.
Four months after the release of Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, Karan still believes that he attempted too bold a subject for his chiffon--solitaire-weaned audience. But it is this same audience that sensibly accepted, decades ago 'bold themes' like Gumraah (a lover from the past in a married woman's life), Dhool Ka Phool (a woman who has had an illegitimate child), Ittefaq (a woman who has killed her husband) and even the Shah Rukh starrer, Deewana (a married woman whose first husband turns up alive).
Why would such an audience not accept a full-bodied extra-marital affair? Earlier too, the audience had rejected a similar subject when Yash Chopra's messy Silsila had flopped. Its own hero, Amitabh Bachchan, had, thereafter, accepted that Yash Chopra had messed with the ending of the film. Normally a sensitive filmmaker, Yash Chopra had been so overwhelmed at casting a real-life triangle (the Amitabh-Jaya-Rekha dream cast) that he couldn't sift fact from fiction. He couldn't possibly tell the story as it really was without hurting his principal stars, and he was equally muddled over how to tell a fictional story. The confusion in his mind made him tamper with his own script and his story-telling faltered. That's why the audience rejected Silsila and not because they couldn't accept an extra-marital tumble.
In the case of Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, Karan made the opposite mistake. Yash Chopra had apologetically turned the other woman (Rekha) into the hero's one true love from the past, to justify his straying from the straight and narrow. Karan decided not to be apologetic but made his hero, Shah Rukh Khan, stray like a cad. K. Jo's blunder was that he made both his protagonists, Shah Rukh and Rani, two unbearably, unpleasant creatures. He ended up with a 'bold theme' which was rejected because his lead characters were so eminently 'rejectable'!
Ram Gopal Varma's Nishabd makes the same mistake with his unpalatable story of a 60-year-old (Amitabh Bachchan in a faultless performance, as always) disrupting his household by falling in love with his daughter's 18-year-old friend. Jiah, the 18-year-old who blows into their lives, is, unfortunately, so annoying, so irritatingly badtameez that you feel like throwing her out of the house within the first few scenes. There's nothing cute, vulnerable or remotely likeable in the badly-behaved, mixed up young girl's demeanour. In fact, all she needed was not a man in her life but two tight slaps on her face! And when Amitabh Bachchan (who, incidentally, is not shown with any kind of fatherly equation with his own daughter – another mistake) does not slap the young girl for her sour, intrusive ways but falls in love with her, you feel that he too needs to get his head examined.
That's the problem with Nishabd. The story's all wrong, not the basic theme itself.
And by the way, apart from 60-year-old grooms with their 16-year-old brides, the core idea of Nishabd is not a completely improbable shocker. Its maker, Ram Gopal Varma, may not be 60 years old but he is getting there and he does fancy 20-somethings like Nisha Kothari (a starlet called Priyanka whom he rechristened Nisha). The young heroine should be around the same age as RGV's own daughter, if not younger. Oh yeah, quiet operator Ramu does have a kid from the wife he divorced and left behind in Hyderabad eons ago!
