A frontbencher’s view: Shake a leg

We all owe a big time thank you to Prabhu Deva and Remo D'Souza. For one simple reason – after maybe ‘Dance Dance’ in 1987, they came out with not just one well made movie, which had dancing as the main story but have now come out with a sequel.

One of the most intriguing part of Hindi cinema has been this fact that while we have zillion of movies, which had great songs and dances and dance sequences as part of the storyline. Basanti’s stand up to Gabbar and dance act, Vyjantimala’s ‘Hoton pe aisey baat’, which had a phenomenal performance from her which added to the super suspense climax of ‘Jewel Thief’ are some memorable cinema moments that come to my mind.

But think about this how many movies have we made devoted to dancing as it is. How many of our movies have been made till date, which celebrate dance. And this will bring you to another startling fact. The 1980s are panned by critics as Indian cinema’s most depressing era where we either had trashy south remakes, which worked at the BO but were forgotten by the time next Friday came around. Amitabh’s best work in 1980s had increasingly started looking like a repeat of what was done by him in 1970s. In this era, in yours truly’s opinion we had at least three of Indian cinema’s best dance movies and its two dancing stars come out.

The first two were of course by a well-known, but forever branded as B-grade, director called B Subhash. He made ‘Disco Dancer’ and ‘Dance Dance’ and made an icon out of Mithun, Bappi Lahiri and dancing. Fact is that while today a lot many associate Mithun with his bulk-outrageous Ooty made cinema. There was a time when every youngster in this country wanted to be the next Disco Dancer, there was a time when being called Jimmy on the streets was a cool compliment. Coming to the point these movies made us celebrate us dancing like never before and then he followed it up with another called ‘Dance Dance’. This one had brazen western tunes lift from Bappi Lahiri, but the masses did not give a damn and we had fanatical dancing across cinema halls to a ‘Zoobi zoobi’ and a ‘Dance dance’ in theatres. Mithun had us on our feet yet again.

Around the same time, out of nowhere came a third gem. Pahlaj Nihalani teamed up with Shibu Mitra and Bappi Lahiri and released in the fading winters of 1986, a movie called ‘Ilzaam’. This one had a slightly above five feet dynamo dancing as if all his body was a bunch of breakable stretchable bones which could put a well chewed bubble gum to shame. Indian audience was rocked by this pint size wonder. We woke up to break dance and everyone was a “street dancer” then. Govinda, ladies and gentlemen, had arrived and how! He stole the thunder from Mithun himself is the biggest compliment you can pass on to this man and he was surely a better dancer by a million miles.

And then we forgot this genre.

Like it happened in winter of 1986, in the month of February like ‘Ilzaam’, Remo D’souza, out of the blue brought back dancing as the hero in our movies with ‘ABCD’. It had fresh faces. They did not have the ‘initial crowd pulling’ brand value in today’s hit and run brand of cinema making but they had two things which will always draw audiences to the theatre – sincerity and energy. ‘ABCD’ also had the classic cornered underdogs v/s ruthless manipulator with all the power of the planet, played ever so ably by Indian cinema’s best dark man since Amrish Puri – KK Menon.

It was probably strange that while TV was ably displaying that dance in itself could be a compelling story telling point to pull audiences in our makers as usual were late to notice this trend, maybe it was the success of ‘ABCD’, which made Farah Khan make a ‘Happy New Year’, which again had a dance oriented climax –though in a buffoonish way.

‘ABCD2’ might or might not be as good as its predecessor. It may or may not work at the box office. But dancing seems to back as genre in apna bollywood, let’s just shake a leg to that, shall we?

- Rahul Deo Bharadwaj