Beyond the trailer

Shardul Bhardwaj

Sarah Deming’s lawsuit against the distributors of Drive (2011) read “bore very little similarity to a chase, or race action film”. The trailer made the promise of a conventional Hollywood chase action film but Drive, the film, is a brilliant portrayal of a situation where a stunt driver finds himself in a failed heist. The action in the film is motivated by the story rather than the other way round. The trailer clearly fails to inform the audience of this fact.

Trailers are the third most watched things on YouTube. There are special agencies like BBDO that deal in making trailers to boost boxoffice sales for a film. The central concern in making a trailer is how the star value, action, scenes, funny dialogues can be used to boost the market returns. The prototypical trailer, as we see today with its quick montages and heightened music, was pioneered by Pablo Ferro, who made the trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) and Dr Strangelove (1964). The trailer first came to film theatres in America in 1913 for a Charlie Chaplin film as a marketing stunt by Nils Grenlung, the advertising manager for Marcus Loew theatre chain, to boost sales.

Over the years, this marketing stunt has transformed into a mere strategy to entice audiences to the theatre and is, more often than not, misleading and manipulative. In a star-crazed nation like India, it is used repeatedly to lure audiences and does a fairly good job in creating false impressions. For instance, Om Shanti Om (2007) used 31 filmstars, including the likes of Rekha, Dharmendra and Jitendra in one song sequence to create a buzz around the film. 

Similarly, based on the trailer, audiences went to see their favourite star Amitabh Bachchan in The Great Gatsby only to be disappointed by his negligible presence in the film.

In today’s day and age, it has become paramount for distributors and producers to fit a film into a particular genre like an action, crime thriller, comedy or drama film; it is the trailer of the film, which becomes the product of packaging the film in neat little boxes for the audiences to merely open and consume. In most cases, it’s impossible to know how the film will look like because the trailers are generally made when the film is being shot.

The trailer for the recent Asghar Farhadi film Everybody Knows creates the impression that it is a fast-paced crime drama where the omnipresent question of “Who hurt Penelope Cruz’s daughter?” takes centrestage. A look at Farhadi’s previous films, recurring themes, central concerns and portrayal of his stories runs as a contrast to this most recent trailer; the trailer looks like a reduction made for audiences to be spoon-fed at the cost of the film itself.

Farhadi’s stories are not about finding out the criminal but exploring the nature and causalities of crime itself. It’s a deeper exploration of the societies and people in which a crime is committed than a simple whodunit story of blacks and whites. In The Salesman (2016), the husband is seen trying to determine the identity of the person who attacked his wife. The attacker is found but the film does not end there, in fact Farhadi’s exploration of the civilised world’s criminality to a criminal starts here.

Sarah Deming’s court petition against the distributors of Drive was rejected by a court in America but her gripe does not seem unjustified. The trailers have had a corrosive effect on the cinemagoers. In an environment where most audiences choose to not go to a cinema hall due to easy digital availability of content, it would be harmful for the distributors and producers to be making misleading trailers and categorising films into neat piles of predefined genres.