Biopics Caught between banal Bollywood fantasy

Biopics: Caught between the banal and Bollywood fantasy

CHENNAI: The family of Raja Ravi Varma has objected to how the icon painter has been portrayed in the film 'Rang Rasiya' (literal meaning: 'colourful playboy'). The trailer seems to show Varma, instead of being enthralled by divine inspiration, as a voyeuristic womanizer.

'Rang Rasiya' may only be the latest in a series of biopics that have tried to fit that genre in a Bollywood mould — in which artistic licence extends to include maudlin melodrama and even the song-and-dance routine. 'Milkha Singh' and 'Mary Kom' used typical Bollywood gimmicks bordering on absurdity with an eye on the box office. Yet, both the films retained the services of the real-life Milkha Singh and Mary Kom as consultants and so there were no protests regarding the authenticity of the movie.

But in the case of 'Rang Rasiya', Indira Devi Kunjamma, the granddaughter of Varma, has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi against the film and sent a legal notice to director Ketan Mehta. "The book is a work of fiction and the filmmakers should clearly state it's a dramatized version of a Marathi novel and, therefore, based on a fictional, imaginary story," says C M Prasad, 57, great-grandson of Varma.

The film's problems indicate the difficulty Indian cinema has with the biopic genre, experts say. While the Bollywood fantasy mould is not a great fit for a biopic, the other danger is sanitization that pushes the film to the banal and the boring.

Film-maker Gnana Rajasekaran — who made the Tamil biopic 'Bharathi' about poet Subramaniya Bharathi, as well as two others on political leader Periyar and most recently about maths genius Srinivasa Ramanujan — says he does not believe in trading fact for fiction when making a film on a real-life person. "The farthest I've strayed in terms of 'invention' is perhaps to show the character of the person," says Rajasekaran, who now heads the government of Kerala's KR Narayanan National Institute of Visual Science and Art in Kottayam. "For instance, if the written biography states the person is timid, I make a scene to exhibit that personality trait."

But critics had panned Rajasekaran's 'Periyar', wondering how a film about one of the most interesting personalities of Tamil Nadu could have bored the audience in its attempt to be comprehensive and factual. Rajasekaran couldn't avoid being hagiographic about Periyar who defied convention in all its forms — from attending a nudist camp in his youth and rubbishing idols of Hindu gods to marrying a much younger woman in his ripe old age.

"Remember that biopics are anyway always about heroes and so most of them are hagiographic. There's no way anyone will make a critical biopic in cinema," says film-maker K Hariharan.

Rajasekaran says: "I never make up things about real-life people just to entertain the public because I feel the authenticity of the biopic is lost."  Source