Priyadarshan films and the problem of Communication
I would argue that Priyadarshan has relentlessly brought out and addressed the problem of communication in our society. This problem of mis-communication or a lack of communication happens due to different reasons. In the latest ‘Bhagam Bhag’ the small mis-interpretation of ‘heroin’ for ‘heroine’ (due to a trick of hearing and the incomprehension of a ‘Dehati’ played by Govinda for the word ‘heroin’) leads two innocent guys into a mad world of deception and merry-go-around chase. In ‘Malamal Weekly’ greed and fear involving intertwined ‘murder and lottery prize’ become the reason for people ‘to lie’ and then ‘lie over a lie’ and so all three – ‘greed, fear and lies’ multiply and proliferate. It is the same fear which leads Paresh Rawal’s character in Hulchul to go on lying in a comedy-of-errors manner to hide the fact that he is married.
Characters in his films speak a lot; they seem deeply perturbed, talking very little sense and giving vent to their frustration. Also, they are very bad listeners. Priyadarshan brings out the absurdity of over-communication as a lack of communication brilliantly. Rajpal Yadav playing Bandya is a luckless servant bound to Gundya (Paresh Rawal), an equally luckless master in ‘Chup Chup Ke’. He seems to be complaining all the time about his condition and ends up worsening it. Through all his garrulous talks, he only invites further wrath from the family of Prabhat Singh Chauhan (played by Om Puri) and their servants, the silent Jeetu (Shahid Kapoor) however gets away. Bandya’s dilemma is that nobody is prepared to listen to him; he just cannot communicate his suspicion about Jeetu or his observations about him, and gets mixed up on occasions when he makes efforts. Priyadarshan makes his heroine Shruti (played by Kareena Kapoor) mute and also suffuses her character with the innocence of color white, making a point that relentless commentary may not be the best communication exercise.
In Priyadarshan’s films, the supporting cast is important because through them he creates a world of total chaos. Films like, ‘Chup Chup Ke’, ‘Malamal Weekly’ are undoubtedly inspired form other flicks but they also show a director who has an eye for an ironically grotesque world - a world where people are driven by the weight of such compulsions that mis-communication becomes inevitable – a son thinks that by killing himself his father can use the money from his life insurance and pay off his debts, a poor person earning a rupee a day suddenly sees the possibilities of one crore rupees and ostensibly looses his head.
His side-kicks recall parodists like clowns in circus or cross-talk comedians in a music hall, and by showing the fact that they always keep getting kicked, Priyadarshan also symbolically poses the problem of the ‘Others’. The hero’s friend ironically named ‘Lucky’ played by Arshad Warsi in ‘Hulchul’, an incredulous guy who with great commitment helps his friend in carrying out pranks, always bears the brunt of people while mistakes are done by somebody else, many a times notably by the hero himself. The character of Gullu executed yet again by Rajpal Yadav has the same story to tell. An Indian taxi-driver in
His use of the side characters, and their constant haggling and heckling without essentially listening to each other, also is a caricature of a world populated with people who seem to be having an opinion and comment for anything and everything, engaged and engrossed in debates and discussions, the central point always eluding them.
Priyadarshan’s cinema does seem to have an affinity towards “The Theatre of Absurd”, a world created by Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov and others, especially in his ability of showing the impossibility of perfect communication. At the end of his films, happy endings occur, bowing to the conventionality of Bollywood and yet innocent people get trampled, end up in hospitals without any reason and fault, midway through. (The cartoonist touch given to the injuries at times seems to be keeping violence at a distance, so the audience laughs instead of getting horrified) Fate intervenes in ways never foreseen. People are unable to communicate for nearly four-fifths of the length of the movie.
In the dialogues that Rajendra Vora and Priyadarshan have constructed for his films, one finds a summary of the attempt and its likeness to the absurdist theatre in this excerpt from Beckett’s play ‘Endgame’ between a paralyzed master Hamm and his servant Clov who go on talking within a sparse room in the hour of death.
“
Clov: Mean something. You and I mean something?”
Having noted the similarity, it is however critical to state that none of Priyadarshan films match ‘Endgame’ (or others in this genre), in the play’s efficacy in showing one among many things including communication problems – a rich man’s death on another, ‘Hamm and Clov’ as the ‘mind and body’ of a single person, fascination for order in an anarchic world and so on. On this scorecard, Priyadarshan at best has been able to playfully put together witty sketches of a few ‘traditional rituals’ and ‘consumption culture’ clichés. His films need to be broken, dislocated and looked at in parts for meanings or non-meanings alike. The central preoccupations and sincerity of purpose in his work does not rise to the nightmarish visions of ‘mystery and terror of human condition’, ‘search for self’, and ‘neurosis and separation’ of the master absurdist’s, though one is uncannily aware of some traces of the same in them. Thus his films remain somewhere in between ‘just entertainment’ and ‘the possibility of absurd’.
