What kind of food is served on a film set? Who picked out the paintings for the hero's bedroom? What does an Executive Producer do? Our monthly column Bollywood Inside could attempt to answer these and other questions you might have about all things Bollywood but were too shy to ask.
*
The spiritual sequel is Bollywood’s latest ‘hero’ to cash in upon, at a time when the box office is becoming increasingly risky business, and when the combined powers of PR, branding, and marketing often comprise the real ‘star cast’ of a film.
Put simply, a spiritual sequel — or spiritual successor, as it is often called in the West — is a film that follows up a broad concept or genre of a film that might have already worked, though not exactly bringing back the premise or characters of the original. Although it does not recreate the same fictional world as the original, a spiritual sequel gets the legitimacy of being a successor because it may resonate genre, themes and/or ideology of the original, but mostly importantly, because it is produced by the same makers as the original.
In recent weeks, we have had Badhaai Do in the theatres, billed as a spiritual sequel of the 2018 multiplex hit Badhaai Ho. If the Ayushmann Khurrana-starrer comedy drama addressed middle-age pregnancy and the taboos it entails in middle-class society, Badhaai Do, starring Rajkummar Rao and Bhumi Pednekar, sticks to the genre while looking at homosexuality in a similar societal situation.
Around the same time, we have had A Thursday dropping on Disney+ Hotstar. The Yami Gautam-starrer tries recreating the taut hostage thriller vibes of the 2008 hit A Wednesday!, starring Naseeruddin Shah and Anupam Kher. While the original film used suspense drama to highlight terrorism, the spiritual sequel replicates the thematic mood to focus on the trauma of rape.
Lined up for release next year is the Akshay Kumar-Tiger Shroff biggie Bade Miyan Chote Miyan, an action comedy that promises to recreate vibes of the original con caper comedy of the same name, that released in 1998, and starred Amitabh Bachchan and Govinda. There is also Jee Le Zaraa, a road trip drama starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Katrina Kaif, and Alia Bhatt that was announced last year. The Farhan Akhtar film has been tipped to resonate the buddy-bonding theme of Zoya Akhtar’s 2011 release Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Several other spiritual sequels await announcement in Bollywood over the next moths.
Conceptually, the trend is not new. In the West, the spiritual successor movie has existed since the days Sergio Leone or Monty Python made films. There have been numerous other examples.
The British surreal comedy troupe Monty Python made the hilarious Monty Python And The Holy Grail in 1975, spoofing the mythical search of King Arthur and his knights for the Holy Grail. The reception that the low-budget film received worldwide saw the group release another feature production, Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, four years later. In keeping with the idea of crafting humour out of hallowed topics, this time they trained guns on Christmas and Christ, narrating the fictional story of a boy who is born in the stable next to Jesus’, and who will inadvertently be mistaken for the saviour all his life.
Leone’s Dollars Trilogy starred Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name. The epithet, however, defined a prototype — of a strong and silent cowboy antihero typified by hat, poncho, high boots, and cigars — rather than a particular character. The Spaghetti Western trilogy comprised A Fistful of Dollars [1964], For A Few Dollars More [1965], and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly [1966]. In each of the three generically similar films, the man with no name was a different character, and the plot and its backdrop varied.
Leone’s films, which redefined the laws of onscreen violence worldwide, were merely cashing in on casting Eastwood in a specific image, and in a particular cinematic milieu. It is an image that continues to dictate the Hollywood veteran’s evergreen superstardom, affecting in many ways even his latest release, Cry Macho, which dropped on BookMyShow Stream in India recently. Many others, especially stars of the action genre from Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger to Jackie Chan and Liam Neeson to name a few, have followed the template to score consecutive hits.
Come to think of it, in a way, mainstream Bollywood was always into making spiritual sequels without actually branding films with that fancy term. In the heydays of desi commercial cinema, the image and the fictional worlds that our male superstars represented on screen would resonate in almost every film they did.
So Amitabh Bachchan films were almost invariably about reloading the iconic Angry Young Man who fought for change with larger-than-life mass appeal, just as Raj Kapoor’s Chaplin-esque common man highlighting social ills would be the calling card through much of his career. Like these, Dilip Kumar or Rajendra Kumar’s status as tragedy kings, Dharmendra’s He-Man avatar or Mithun Chakraborty’s street-smart dancer/Romeo were images that were carried forward to the actors’ next releases. Similarly, Dev Anand, Rajesh Khanna or Shah Rukh Khan’s trademark romantic vibes may have changed with the changing definition of love over the decades, but thematic oneness remains noticeable across their bodies of work.
The primary objective of the spiritual sequel, whether in Hollywood or Bollywood, is mostly about setting up a quick money-making machinery while entertaining with familiar formula.
There could be other objectives too. Legalities associated with copyright are often deemed as reasons for spinning out spiritual sequels that remind the audience of an earlier film, though its different cast and characters technically makes it a different film. This happens at times when co-producers of the original fall out or refuse to collaborate for a direct sequel of the earlier hit.
In many cases, the thematic core of a hit film is too good to give up, and yet there is no logical reason to extend the story. So when Nora Ephron’s rom-com Sleepless In Seattle, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, became a superhit in 1993, the hunt was promptly on for ways to cash in with a possible follow-up. The story, about a widower’s little son establishing contact with a radio show host in a bid to find his father a partner, seemed too complete to spawn a sequel. Five years later, Ephron would return to direct Hanks and Ryan in the rom-com You’ve Got Mail, about two people dating in the cyber world without being aware that they are rivals in business.
You’ve Got Mail is counted among the best of spiritual sequels in mainstream Hollywood, sharing the themes of alienation, loneliness, and love with Sleepless In Seattle, and yet managing to narrate a credibly different story. Both films try discovering the essence of love using technology that lets people interact without seeing each other — radio talk shows were still a rage in the early '90s when Sleepless In Seattle released while online chatting was an exciting new fad when You’ve Got Mail opened around Christmas 1998.
In Bollywood, some of the current crop of films touted as spiritual sequels have wisely moved in sync with trends dictating society and times. So A Thursday finds heft in its female-centric plot and casting at a time gender course correction is a focal point of film industries the world over. The message-driven focus [highlighting women’s safety] of the film keeps it in tandem with contemporary audience expectation, and at the same time, gives it a common character with its predecessor.
For a film like Badhaai Do, besides bearing commonality of message with Badhaai Ho, the stamp of being a spiritual sequel to an unconventional hit also facilitates convenient release, given its sensitive subject. In itself, LGBTQ+ stories are still risky propositions at the mainstream box office. What made it easy for Badhaai Do to create a buzz was its branding and marketing as a spiritual follow-up to Badhaai Ho.
The spiritual sequel will always be around. In spirit and practice, Bollywood after all never runs out of ideas when it comes to finding new ways of rehashing what has worked once.
Vinayak Chakravorty is a senior film critic, columnist, and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR.
from Firstpost Bollywood Latest News https://ift.tt/ZTmkMN6
0 Comments