Where is my cow?

For a while now, I have been meaning to write a blog post on Rowdy Rathore.  But just when I figured out what I wanted to say, Baradwaj Rangan beat me to it.

To be fair, he does it better than I would have. So let me speak of a couple of peripheral observations that I had while watching the movie.

First, I think the appeal of Rowdy Rathore is rooted partly in the fact that it seems to be very obviously winking at the audience. The poster art is a masterpiece — it is so deliberately lurid that I couldn’t help but smile. (It also occurred to me, in passing, that Sanjay Leela Bhansali probably made a deal with Prabhudeva years ago that they would share a colour palette, and that whatever was left over after the former was done with Saawariya would be the latter’s to play with.)

The second is a slightly more sober observation: I noticed this not just in the three versions of this film but also in a bunch of others — the stakes have constantly risen in the way films portray evil. Maybe it is because we are exposed to filmi villainy so often that we are desensitized to the more garden-variety bad guy (smuggler, gangster etc.). I don’t know. But every once in a while, someone finds it necessary to up the ante. When they remade Agneepath, for instance, it wasn’t sufficient to disgrace the teacher by making him seem like he visited a prostitute — they had to make him rape a crippled schoolgirl. This movie decides that the way to make the villain despicable is to have him rape a cop’s wife over several days while the cop looks on helplessly. Where will this stop?

Linked to both these observations, but in a meta sort of way, is a conversation I had a friend of mine recently. She asked me how Rowdy Rathore was, and I immediately said, “Fantastic! It was exactly what it intended to be.” I meant it in a half-serious, half-sarcastic sort of way, but the comment led to a discussion on whether a film should be judged by its content or by its ability to do what it intended to do.

In general, I believe in the latter concept more than she does. A trivial example would be movies across different genres that I love in equal measure. A trickier example would be something like Nishabd, which I found to be a very well made movie about a subject that not many people were okay with. But the whole conversation made me wonder. Would I have been okay with a film that glorified, say, child abuse, just because it was a very well made film about the subject? The answer is obviously no — we all have our holy cows.

But what does my threshold of tolerance indicate, in and as of itself? No easy answers, I’m afraid.