Shoma A. Chatterji
Ek Bachchan E Bahu Bachchan is a short film about two friends distanced in terms of age, background, status and sex, who bond because they share a common passion — they are the fans of Amitabh Bachchan. Pintu is a bald, slightly middle-aged man, who stutters in his speech and drives a cycle rickshaw in a Kolkata bylane and manages to barely survive. Mamon is a young woman, who works in a tailoring shop but often bunks work. The two are great buddies because they are crazy fans of Amitabh Bachchan. Mamon also dresses up the way the superstar did in his early films like Deewar and talks in an assumed ‘male’ voice. Pintu’s cycle rickshaw is plastered in every space with posters and pictures of Big B. The same goes for the walls in Mamon’s small room. She is very proud because most of the locals call her “Bachchan” and she is not concerned with whether they are serious or are pulling her leg.
Director Ranjay Roy Choudhury says the inspiration to make the film came from his admiration of his idol Amitabh Bachchan. “I chose Kankana to play Mamon because she, too, is a crazy fan of Amitabh Bachchan. I was looking for an original Bachchan fan to cast in my film. This took me one-and-half years to finally find one in Kankana Chakrabarty. I named it Ek Bachchan E Bahu Bachchan to show how the superstar is reflected in hundreds of his fans, and how the superstar, too, has become a composite reflection of his fans,” says Roy Choudhury. And no, he has not seen Shah Rukh Khan’s Fan.
Shot in one of the seedier neighbourhoods of Kolkata, the film captures the realistic ambience with conviction and this enhances the naïve simplicity of the characters who live and work there. The music is low key and there are clippings from some early Bachchan films. One feels that these two fans of Big B are fans of the younger Big B, and not the present one — bearded, bespectacled and aged.
The pace of the film is dynamic and filled with active mobility of two characters, who are forever chasing dreams of how to meet their celluloid heartthrobs in real life. Does the friendship get strengthened due to their common love for the actor? Or does it sustain for its own sake? This comes out over the rest of this sweet film with brilliant acting by the two major characters Mamon portrayed by Kankana Chakraborty and Pintu played by Bidyut Das.
Dr Sanjay Chugh, senior consultant psychiatrist, Delhi, says, “The word ‘Fan’ is short form of the word ‘Fanatic’, which refers to someone getting driven to frenzy due to his devotion to a deity.”
Dr Chugh points out some signs are some of the signs that might indicate that the fandom is crossing over from the aesthetic to the pathological.” But Mamon and Pintu do not have pathological tendencies. Their main focus is to meet their “God” in flesh and blood and to talk to him. They are happy-go-lucky, content and full of fun though they are very poor. Mamon also dreams of herself somewhere where Bachchan is and gets annoyed when her mother wakes her up because the dream breaks into tatters.
In Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture (2013), Mark Duffett calls fans “networkers, collectors, tourists, archivists, curators, producers and more”. That fans are different from ordinary consumers is a given. But how that difference manifests itself and evolves with politics, economy, temporality, spatiality and technology is an interesting study.
The friendship between Pintu and Mamon transcends the fandom between the two most unlikely friends when Pintu’s cycle rickshaw is smashed beyond repair when the two were attending some fake audition that promised a meeting with their favourite star. Mamon sells off her antique gramophone and sets her friend up in a brand new cycle rickshaw plastered with large mugshots of Bachchan. So, is this a film on friendship? Or, it is a film on fandom? The director leaves it open for the audience to draw its own conclusion.
from The Tribune https://ift.tt/2HObBAv
via Today’s News Headlines
No comments: