Bollywood goes retro to boost box office sales

Bollywood harks back to the 1970s with days of stylised movie dialogues, cliched plots and elaborate dance sequences.

MUMBAI: Bollywood is harking back to the 1970s with days of stylised movie dialogues, cliched plots and elaborate dance sequences in an attempt to boost box office takings after a disappointing 2010.

Despite its prodigious output, Bollywood movies have had a torrid time this year, with only a dozen out of more than 200 films working favourably with audiences.

“The 1970s and 1980s were amongst the golden eras of the Indian film industry,” said Bollywood director Sajid Khan, whose successes include Heyy Babyy and the recent comedy Housefull. “We need to give the new generation a taste of the old music,” he said.

Housefull found box-office success with the remix of a popular hit song from the 1981 Amitabh Bachchan movie, Laawaris. It appears, the most popular trend in Bollywood now, is to use songs of the 1970s and 1980s from Bachchan’s prime and remix them with retro takes.

“Bollywood is in search of its roots. Looking to the past is a way of looking to the future but not when it is used as an easy way out,” said film critic Shubhra Gupta in the Indian Express newspaper. While many complain of the lack of originality that seems to have got the industry in a fix, films such as Once Upon A Time in Mumbaai set in the 1970s, about a power struggle between two gangsters with big hair, huge moustaches and wing-collar shirts, remain an absolute hit. The film took nearly INR580 million at the box office after its release in July this year.

Golmaal 3 was another hit comedy that released for the recent Diwali holidays. The film ran a story about the capers of a group of young friends and was based on the 1970s film, Khatta Meetha.

Action Replayy was yet another 1970s based production that released this year. The time-travel romance starring Akshay Kumar and Aishwarya Rai, was loosely influenced by the 1985 Hollywood hit, Back to the Future, bombed at the box office failing to impress audience. Superstar, producer and director Shah Rukh Khan also used a 1978 hit, for his feature film Don: The Chase Begins Again in 2006 where he constructed a contemporary remake of Ambitabh Bachchan’s Don. After the success of the first film Khan decided to follow it up with a sequel.

However, the list of old Bachchan classics are in still in the swivel  as the 1980s Satte Pe Satta, the Indian adaptation of Hollywood musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is to be remade, starring Bollywood’s original bad-boy Sanjay Dutt.

In recent years, Indian filmmakers have started making movies with modern themes, for a youthful, well informed and more intelligent audience trying to mark away from the traditional, typical themes of stylised romantic love.

Issues like extremism, the life of call centre workers, rock bands, weakening relationships among city-dwellers and central characters with a disability or illness, have all been tackled in the past. While some modern, real-life themes have worked, others have not, pushing filmmakers to return to the tried tested and worked formulae.

A successful year-end would help raise spirits in Bollywood, which was hit last year by the producers’ boycott of multiplex cinemas, swine flu fears and a string of big budget failures. The global economic downturn has also taken an adverse toll on overseas takings.

Overall revenues for Bollywood have fallen 14 per cent to INR89.3 billion, consultancy KPMG said in a report for the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry released earlier this year.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 7^th, 2010.