Devil’s Advocate is a rolling column that sees the world differently and argues for unpopular opinions of the day. This column, the writer acknowledges, can also be viewed as a race to get yourself cancelled. But like pineapple on pizza, he is willing to see the lighter side of it.
Not too long ago, when the much anticipated Shoojit Sircar film Gulabo Sitabo decided to opt for a digital release on Amazon Prime Video India, its theatrical exhibition arm especially, was rattled enough to make aggressive statements about the prospect of ‘big’ cinema heading directly to the viewer’s bedroom. The theatrical experience has long been touted and advertised by both filmmakers and critics as the original, the ideal way to absorb cinema.
Last week, two mega films, Rohit Shetty’s nth iteration of his cop world Sooryavanshi and Marvel’s first real detour in their phased progression, Eternals, made their debuts on screens across India. Despite getting mixed reviews, in some cases even getting panned by critics, the numbers show people have thronged theatres (relative to pandemic times) to watch both the event films. It proves not just that cinema is, to an extent, critic-proof, but that the big-budget film ‘event’ that many declared doomed because of the pandemic, is here to stay.
Before the second wave ravaged through India’s metro cities, I had managed to weed myself into a theatre for two consecutive weekends of some good old theatrical viewing. I watched Dibakar Banerjee’s terrific Sandeep aur Pinky Faraar with a total of two other people in the hall, and Godzilla vs Kong with about 70. I probably do not need to elaborate why that was the case. While the two cannot be compared, you could argue that the latter is almost universally rejected by critics for the faff, CGI-led trip that it is over a Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar, a deeply rooted drama about gender roles in Indian society. The fact, as crass as it may sound, is that most viewers flock to the cinema to escape, to experience a side of life that is not their own.
Event films are illusionary vehicles, created to transform the ordinariness of your own life into the living, breathing embodiment of everything that will not be you the next time you wake up.
This is not to say that serious dramas, noir or films rooted in grief and suffering should not play at theatres. In fact, in an ideal world, they would be as celebrated and collectively watched as the farcical, outlandish Fast and Furious franchise or the damningly predictable Bond franchise. But that is the thing about cinema, that like any other business, no matter how critically you want to treat it, the ceiling is set by populist opinion rather than literary critique. When it comes to the theatrical experience, recent evidence only confirms what the lovers of cinema might consider is a crude simplification. That for the business of cinema to sustain, it needs to produce more blockbusters than Oscar-worthy contenders. Yes, cinema, or any form of art for that matter, could bring value to society but it is, at the end of the day, dictated by the bookkeeping metric that decides the fate of any business – profit and loss.
This notion of cinema being driven by the idea of stardom does not just guiltily apply to India. UK’s theatres have done most of their business after the release of the latest Bond film while American theatres have reaped in significant business only with the help of Marvel and Disney. This is not a justification of Marvel-style filmmaking but like the points table after a year-long season of football, the numbers at the box office do not lie. Not at least about popularity and business at least. That said there is no straight format to this cycle anyway. Loud, masala films like Laxmii and Coolie No. 1 seemed (because we do not get OTT numbers) to underwhelm. Ridiculously cocky and undercooked, these films might have performed better on the big screen but for now, the easy takeaway is that the audience is willing to invest mind and heart at home, compared to losing itself in the theatres. The fact that Chloe Zhao has followed up the incredible Nomadland with the forgettable Eternals is proof that making for the masses is not as simple as it is made to be by the fraternity of critics. It is just as hard to strike a more universal note as it is to maybe craft a new one.
Given the pandemic, a lot of big-budget or star-driven films will probably underperform. People will not fill every seat inside a theatre just yet. But clearly, the platform you choose to showcase your art on is now becoming half the battle. I cannot help but think the brooding and melancholic Sardar Udham would have flunked badly at the theatres. As incredibly and meditatively made as the film is, do people really want to sit through two-and-a-half hours of cold fury and misery? If your answer to that question is a resounding yes, then we are part of a minority that believes value can be distinct from entertainment, as long as we get our time’s worth. For the larger section of the population in the country, maybe even the world over, cinema is supposed to be entertainment, a hallucinatory, narrative dose of something that sends them, briefly, into a direction they can neither imagine nor create for themselves.
Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.
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