Inauthenticity, over-the-top performances, over-dramatisation, continuity errors and inconsistency are all a part of the ‘Bollywood cinema’ that we make exceptions for. We make those exceptions because they entertain us, because they star the larger-than-life actors and because they work so marvelously with cinematography, locations and dream-scapes, we succumb to them. All along understanding that nothing can be 100 per cent, nothing can be perfect. Nothing that is real will translate well on screen and will make us feel good about ourselves, or send us back truly entertained. That’s because ‘realistic’ cinema at a point of time was grimy, gritty and dark.

Sooraj Barjatya, Karan Johar and others of their ilk brought a slice-of-life drama from ordinary life and made it extraordinary with heightened emotions and colourful scapes. And there was a time when this really worked, think back to Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Barjatya slowly realised that his cinema had become a dinosaur – it was too sweet to digest, and in its inherent unreality (there may be very few families actually like the ones he portrayed), in his inherent moralising and ethical trip, he was alienating an audience that once loved him. That’s because too much of a good thing can be bad, especially if your pulse remains on what you want to say, and not on what your audience wants to hear.

Johar brought a younger sensibility to Barjatya’s cinema – a youthful exuberance, the pain of love all candy-flossed into ‘happy times’. And he succeeded – his movies evolving with his own evolving thoughts and sensibilities, and his courage to be bolder with his themes on screen. While his themes are generally relevant to the time, his films are still packaged in unreality. With My Name Is Khan, Johar remained true to what he wanted to say – that one man can be larger than life. And that man, for most part was Shah Rukh Khan. What?makes it difficult is that Shah Rukh, himself, is larger-than-life as a person and an actor. Can you identify with Khan? Or do you watch him because after all these years, Shah Rukh remains watchable?

Farhan Akhtar changed everything. He can be blamed for the fall of unreality and the rise of realistic candyfloss. The moment Dil Chahta Hai hit the screens – a film still considered seminal in many ways – he changed the notion of what people expected from Hindi cinema. He gave us real life, real dialogues, real people, real emotions, real insecurities, actual incidents picked up from real life and then blended with just enough glamour and colour to become believable and likeable all at the same time. Akhtar realised that it is important to connect with the film, and the youth that he represented would expect this, having been exposed to international cinema that creates easily-identifiable characters. Similarly, Imtiaz Ali brought freshness to characters and dialogues, because he picked them up from real life. Jab We Met was not larger-than-life – it was life-sized. Zoya Akhtar exorcised a ghost with her first film – the desire to spoof this very sort of over-the-top Bollywood and its myriad idiosyncrasies. Dibakar Banerjee, Vishal Bharadwaj, Anurag Kashyap, Abhishek Kapoor, Shimit Amin, Ayan Mukherjee...are all the new breed, even if with their own brand of cinematic overtures.

After all, if you want to make epics, you do it with epic characters the way Ashutosh Gowariker would, or in some ways Sanjay Leela Bhansali would; not making real people epic-sized. The audience must be given some credit – they don’t need things hammered into their head, they do generally, get it; and they don’t identify with emotions worn on the sleeve at all times. While Johar’s themes work, messages are important and cinema continues to have an audience; if he chooses to have critical acclaim rather than the loyal-popular vote and choose not to go the way of Barjatya, he must reinvent his own cinema, tone down his own emotions and learn the art of underplaying with subtlety, rather than overplaying with blatancy.

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