All in the (disjointed) family

Nonika Singh

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Once upon a time there was a family. It had the sanskari babuji, an ever-sacrificing maa, an ideal bahu and a dutiful beta. One odd member transgressed the family’s lakshman rekha, bringing in all the drama. But all is well that ends well, and they all lived happily ever after. Where? Of course, on our silver screen where our filmmakers have romanticised the picture perfect image of Indian family and its values. However, those sugar sweet and saccharine-dripping characters have all but given us diabetes. Until, today.

Cut to 2016 and you can barely rattle a few names of family films. In the celluloid world, conventionally ruled by mere paas ma hai, suddenly the genre called family films loaded with classic old-fashioned values is all but a thing of the past. Filmmaker Shirish Kunder feels family films, the kinds Barjatyas revelled in, are passé. According to Rahul Mittra, CEO of Waves Cinema, a majority of the audience, which falls in the category between 18 and 25, won’t settle for old wine in a new bottle.

“The multiplex audience is driving the change. Not in the least bit interested in sermon-heavy family dramas, what gets them going is experimental films and newer genres,” says Madhureeta Anand, director of Kajarya.

As a result, dark cinema rules and sex comedies are the new gods of marquee. However, what ultimately works is content. Superstardom can be a catalyst too. So a Prem Ratan Dhan Payo hits the bull’s eye even if it harks back in time and dittoes the usual Barjatya formula. Mittra quips, “Take away Salman from the film, and I doubt if it would have found favour with the audience.” Quality certainly propels a film, a family film too. It is not as if family-oriented films are not being made at all. As Anand says: “Every Diwali and wedding season, we feel nostalgic and want to celebrate family among other things and so it’s back to a Dilwale.” Then the two blockbusters of the recent times, Dil Dhadakne Do and Kapoor & Sons, are essentially family films, though couched in a new language, contemporary in both content and treatment. Call them dysfunctional if you want; these are, but, a reflection on the modern Indian family. Here divorce is a reality, there is room for a gay family member too and bickering is a normal part of peoples’ lives.

Take Piku, for instance, essentially about father-daughter relationship. But director Shoojit Sircar’s law of emotion is markedly different from the regular sob stories. The idiosyncratic father here even has the gumption to talk about his single daughter’s sexual life and gleefully gloats how she is not a virgin. Yet the film, sailing high on believable flesh and blood beings, powers family ties more than the average melodramas. Anand says the earlier “family dramas rang false back then too but in today’s time, these are completely irrelevant.”

So throwback to yesteryear when weepy tearjerkers were the stuff a family film was made of, is unlikely to happen.

Sure at the end of the day, like most real families, the reel family stays together. That is why Sujoy Mukherjee, producer of Hai Apna Dil Toh Awara!, feels that whatever the new avatar of family films, family values per se can never go out of fashion.

Indian cinema has realised that a family film must hold the mirror to reality, warts and all. What is even more refreshing is that the banners backing this slice of life scripts are backed by the same producers, who gave us all that unbelievable mush. If Karan Johar was behind the over-sentimental Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gham, his production house etched a real family portrait and served us the bitter-sweet Kapoor & Sons. A bit quirky, a whole lot flawed, but relatable all the way. And that’s where the crux lies. The ever-beautiful, ever-selfless prototype of family is being replaced by the modern family or with newer more cutting-edge stories.

And this isn’t a new fad or a cyclical development. The change is here to stay. As life moves in the six-lane highway, films can’t be stuck on a narrow path. In days when the world of entertainment is a click away, families can’t be viewed as a standalone phenomenon but have to be part of the ever-changing world view.