When facts fly out of the window

If Bollywood is to be believed, representing professions in a film is a blindspot for the industry, and there seems to be a serious dearth of fact checkers. For example, in the trailer of Sonakshi Sinha starrer Noor, nothing seems to be extraordinary — a happy-go-lucky journalist, struggling with her job and her love life. But as a journalist watching the trailer, one could not help but click their tongue to notice a glitch. As a city reporter, her character in the film is seen juggling “beats” between railways and entertainment, a rather unrealistic picture of the profession. While more and more art films are trying to match the realism, Hindi films seem to stretch on their stereotypes and typecasts.  

Earlier, Jolly LLB was in the line of fire for misrepresenting the lives of lawyers. While getting the nuances of a character on-screen is the least a director can do to justify his script, throwing in a creative curve and missing on the nitty-gritties of a profession is certainly not acceptable feels lawyer Manish Kenia, “What they show in mainstream Bollywood films is far from reality. Court proceedings in real-life are boring and filmmakers tend to dramatise it because it is fiction. You won’t be allowed to read newspapers, use mobile phones or even fold your legs while you are inside the court. In my 24-years of practising law, I haven’t seen a Judge yell “Order, Order’ even once. Imagine a lawyer pulling off a sequence from Ghayal where Sunny Deol is seen shouting Tareek pe Tareek in a court proceeding. That would amount to contempt of court,” he smiles.

Scene from Dear Zindagi (Photo: Youtube.com)

With Shah Rukh Khan’s Dear Zindagi receiving some mixed reactions on his portrayal of a psychiatrist, many people within the profession felt he did a good job, while others agreed that sessions do not happen on beaches but behind closed doors, and that he was glamourising the job, “Shah Rukh Khan did glamourise the role of a psychiatrist, but why not? I think he depicted the role perfectly with his humour and the use of metaphors. He played an unconventional psychiatrist in the film and did the job perfectly,” says life coach Khyati Birla. “SRK, I feel, was a good ambassador, who brought forth the idea that psychiatry can be fun. He changed the perspective of people who thought otherwise,” she adds.

Getting the brass tacks right in the first place is of outmost importance and if a writer fails to do that it is nothing but mere laziness feels the co-writer of Dawaat-E-Ishq, Jyoti Kapoor, “There’s some amount of research that the story and the characters deserve. With fiction, one has to take a leap and blend the dramatics and the facts correctly. That will make a story credible. If the research is missing and the storyline is misrepresented, it certainly amounts to laziness,” she says.

Actor Sharman Joshi, who has essayed multiple roles both on screen and stage agrees, “One should just get the basics straight from the very beginning — be it the basics of playing a lawyer, a journalist, a cop etc. Once that is set, an actor can add their own personal touch to the ‘character’. Here I say character, and not the profession, because one might not know the nuances of the profession unless he is into it,” he asserts.

National award-winning director Chaitanya Tamhane, who in his directorial debut Court portrayed a courtroom drama without the oft-seen hyperboles, explains, “There was a lot of research that went into the making of the film. We spent a lot of time in the courtrooms, taking copious amounts of notes, observing and writing. We went to every court possible to get the nuances of the each character correctly; be it the Sessions Court, the Magistrate Court or The High Court. We then brought in non-actors to avoid any dramatic accents in the film that would exaggerate the character,” he adds.

Chaitanya feels that authenticity and reality isn’t Bollywood’s concern, “If someone is expecting accuracy in depiction from them, then they are expecting the wrong things from wrong people because, the audience Bollywood caters to is completely different,” he suggests.

Quite like Noor would know, journalism requires fact checking. Maybe, this could be extended to movies could too!