Why I will not watch ‘Heroine’.

You know a country’s film appreciation skills are in the doldrums when Ram Goal Verma is a joke, and Madhur Bhandarkar is a hero.

Since 2001, the guy has been churning out films that are mediocre at best, and outright offensive at worst. Throwing in every known stereotype known to man, Bhandarkar makes films that are supposed to be gritty. But in reality, are quite shitty.

Cardboard characters, drugs and alcohol, moronic depiction of gays and lesbians, adulterous wives, scheming companies, news hungry journalists – its one mixed bag of stereotypes bundled in one after the other. It’s like a video game, where the locations change, but the characters and plot remains the same.

Without even watching it, I can predict the story. There’s a girl who is an outsider to the industry. She makes it to the top in a male-dominated, power hungry world, and then things start going downhill from there on. There will be cheating wives, creepy producers, drugs, booze, and a friend who is like a voice of conscience in the protagonist’s head.

Madhur Bhandarkar often says that his films hold a mirror to the society. But in reality, his films are tinted glasses through which we see things the way we want to.

Often touted to be the filmmaker for the Common Man, Bhandarkar’s claim to fame are the four National Awards he has picked up over the last decade. But take a look at the list, and you’ll see that not all of them were a result of great choice.

Chandni Bar winning the award in 2001 is understandable. It was a well enacted film, and a woman centric film in a time when Govinda was among the top heroes is commendable. But Bhandarkar continued to milk the whole ‘outsider woman in a cruel man’s world’ theme in each and every film after that.

Satta (2003), about a woman politician, was chosen over Munnabhai MBBS, Pinjar, and Ek Hasina Thi. Page 3 (2005) was chosen over Black Friday and Sarkar. Traffic Signal (2007), we were made to believe, was better than Chak De India, Taare Zameen Par and Guru.

Even a layman can tell that the babus sitting in the Selection Committee aren’t exactly experts on the subject. But then, this was the same committee that awarded Saif Ali Khan the Best Actor for Hum Tum.

A hair-raising decision.

So why do his films do well?

My theory is that his films give the viewer a voyeuristic joy in depicting the world of glitz as a mucky, immoral world. The kind of viewers who’ll walk out of the hall and say, “Sahi bola. Saare actress saale randiya hain.”

Thank you very much, Mr. Bhandarkar, but I don’t want you to hold a mirror to the society. May be if you tilted the mirror towards yourself, you’ll see a filmmaker who keeps repeating the same formula and playing to the galleries.

I understand the Page 3, Fashion, and film worlds might be murky. But then, which field isn’t?

But now my only fear is that Bhandarkar will release a film called ‘Critic’. The story of a young woman who struggles to succeed in the world of critics, a world that doesn’t understand ‘realistic’ films.