Age no bar: Amitabh Bachchan and Sharmila Tagore in Viruddh

It’s vintage season in Bollywood these days. A time to go romancing the old, and forget puppy love and candy floss tales and all that jazz about dil vil pyar vyar involving the young and the well-toned. For, our filmmakers have suddenly woken up to the fact that there’s life after 50 and that it’s high time they showed it that way.

The result: a slew of films celebrating late middle age (or dare we say it, old age) relationships are about to hit the multiplexes. Viruddh, starring Amitabh Bachchan and Sharmila Tagore, which released recently, will soon be followed by Hriday Shetty’s Pyar Mein Twist, which shows a grizzled Rishi Kapoor and a mature Dimple Kapadia, both with grown-up children, falling for each other. Two more films with middle-aged protagonists are on the anvil ? Romesh Sharma’s Dil Jo Bhi Kahey and Ravi Chopra’s Babul.

Needless to say, all of them are keen to duplicate the success story of Baghbaan, where Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini portrayed an ageing couple whose relationship had lost none of its sweetness despite the passage of years.

So what prompted this sudden shift in the way Hindi films depict the elderly? After all, not so long ago, Bollywood had pretty rigid rules when it came to roles involving senior citizens. The thundering paterfamilias, the frosty matriarch, cutesy dada dadis or sad old parents cruelly treated by their evil progeny ? these were Hindi filmdom’s stock-in-trade for the elderly.

But today, those tatty stereotypes seem to have been turned on their heads. Which is why you may see a 50-something asthmatic policeman do some serious ass-kicking (Khakee), or find a sixtyish and still-in-love couple (Viruddh) delighting in the simple pleasures of life and then standing up to society when it threatens to destroy their lives.

This change, believes sociologist Anjan Ghosh of the Centre for Social Sciences, Calcutta, has been largely due to the fact that in recent years, the elderly in the urban middle and upper middle classes of our society have changed as well. “They are now a huge consuming group,” says Ghosh. “Once ensconced within the family set-up, the elderly are now emerging as a nuclear sub-set. Economically independent, autonomous, living on their own, and free to make their choices, many of them are adopting younger mores.”

In fact, these men and women are not ruling out anything from their lives ? not the possibility of adventure and certainly not of romance. “Hence, the acceptability of films that show romantic affiliations among the elderly has also gone up,” says Ghosh.

Take Shibani Basu, for instance. The 59-year-old housewife whose son and daughter are both studying abroad, claims she doesn’t feel “old” at all. “I don’t think I am over the hill just because I am 59. I am in good health, and so is my husband. We are free to enjoy ourselves, travel, basically, do whatever we want to do.” When you tell her about the storyline of Pyar Mein Twist, she is very interested. “I’d love to watch it,” she says, “There should be more films like this. People of our age are having romances, and movies should be realistic enough to show that.”

Filmmakers who are scrambling to tap into this sociological trend are, however, careful to point out that these movies are meant for everybody, and not just for people who are on the wrong side of 50. “It’s the audience that has come of age,” says Hriday Shetty, director of Pyar Mein Twist. “They have begun to accept middle-aged protagonists.” Adds Mahesh Manjrekar, who has directed Viruddh, “The youthful love stories are becoming repetitive. So we are experimenting with older protagonists.”

Of course, the huge star power of Amitabh Bachchan is nearly always a part of that experiment. So much so that it could be argued that an avant garde older generation notwithstanding, films depicting the old in a feisty new light may never have come to pass had it not been for that one-man phenomenon called Bachchan. From Baghbaan to Viruddh to Babul, it’s he who straddles them all.

However, Shetty feels the trend is not just about Bachchan. “I wouldn’t say scripts are deliberately being written for older actors. Amitabh is the exception, but barring him, how many older actors do we have?”

But Bachchan or not, the fact remains that there are now plenty of takers for movies that explore relationships between people who are in the autumn of their lives. As Ghosh remarks, “They are putting old wine in a new bottle, as it were, to target a much more heterogeneous block of older people.”

One will, of course, have to wait and see how far Pyar Mein Twist and the rest of them go towards becoming geriatric passion plays. Will our filmmakers, for instance, do a movie like the 2003 Hollywood flick Something’s Gotta Give where Jack Nicholson plays a 60-something rou? who claims never to have sex with any girl over 30 and then falls in love with the mother of his current girlfriend? Or are we going to have more of the Baghbaan variety ? brilliantly idealised, heart-warming visions of mature conjugal love? Time, as they say, will tell.

With reports from Lata Khubchandani in Mumbai