Trade experts are flummoxed. How did the big budget Sunny Deol starrer, The Hero: Love Story Of A Spy (with Preity Zinta and Priyanka Chopra), not get a 'bumper' audience in Punjab, where every film starring Dharmendra or his sons, Sunny and Bobby, is guaranteed to be a hit?
The industry was banking on this film, since it repeated the successful team of director Anil Sharma and Sunny Deol who bust the box-office with Gadar: Ek Prem Katha in 2001.
The Hero did not do too well in other centres either -- except Mumbai -- despite being head and shoulders above the regular commercial potboiler, and releasing in the middle of the summer holidays, amidst an embargo on new releases.
It has the ingredients that always work well in India -- patriotism, Pakistan-bashing, action, romance.
But, say the analysts doing a post-mortem, it didn't have one vital ingredient: emotion.
The hero of The Hero (Sunny Deol) has no family (What? No noble, sacrificing mother!), there is no flashback about his father or brother being killed by terrorists (as in John Mathew Mathan's Sarfarosh), the romance (with Preity Zinta) is perfunctory, but the two most liked scenes in the film are the ones in which Sunny rescues Preity from the Pakistanis and the other when they meet on the day of his engagement to another woman.
Some emotion there, but not the flood of tears audiences want to get their money's worth of catharsis.
The character of the spy is almost robotic in his devotion to his duty to his country. He even marries a Pakistani girl to reach her treacherous father's inner circle. He rarely smiles and never weeps, while men on television, that has millions of viewers hooked, weep copious tears to compete with the non-stop wailing of the women. In India, it would seem, people like men to shed a few tears. Leave the stiff upper lip look to the Brits.
The previous film by the Anil Sharma-Sunny Deol team -- Gadar -- did not have such high-tech action and effects, but had loads of emotion. So, while our filmmakers still don't have a clue about what audiences want, they know what the audiences don't want -- laconic, brusque, unemotional heroes.
However, the hero in Yeh Dil wept all through the movie and people thought he was a wimp. So the trick to successful moviemaking in India may lie in the precise balance of the hero's tears -- too many and he is a loser, too few and he is a freak. The heroine's tears also matter. Not all that much, though. That is part of her function, after all.
So, The Hero gave the audience lavish sets, extravagant action, great foreign locations, even a lesson on how to make nuclear bombs. While all they wanted was some good old-fashioned rona-dhona (tears). Sharma could have saved a bundle on expensive special effects and thrills and invested in some glycerine instead, had someone told him earlier that tough guys do cry.
Dilip Kumar is the best actor in Hindi cinema because of the heavy-duty tragedy he did in most of his films. Amitabh Bachchan howled for his mommy in Deewar and because a superstar. In more recent times, the biggest stars, Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan, are champion weepers.
Indians have a thing about tears. Our television has nothing but melodramatic soap opera on all the time. Our favourite love stories are ones in which the hero and heroine die in the end; we weep at weddings.
How did Anil Sharma even imagine nukes could substitute for sentiment?
Incidentally, Sharma is reported to have said, on television, that critics who did not like his film are gadhas (asses). What about audiences in the whole country, who snubbed his Rs 55 crore (Rs 550 million) opus? Maybe Sharma is trapped in a nation of asses and should consider moving to Hollywood?
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