By Raja Sen(Rediff)
It is the pop culture reference to beat all pop culture references. Late last night, driving around, a friend asked if I remembered where her car stood. Near the bushes, I said dramatically in Hindi, pointedly using the words 'jhaadiyon ke beech.' The words, spoken with an obviously sinister rasp, immediately made another friend respond with a barrage of questions about standing in a park and wearing 'a check-coat.' Our palms met in a gleeful five, our collective hat doffed toward the greatest black comedy Hindi cinema has ever known.
It's been 26 years since Kundan Shah's seminal Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, a film whose sheer iconicity beggars description. Imagine the Star Wars [ Images ] characters in Pulp Fiction with even more quotable dialogue, and you'll begin to get an idea of the shadow cast by the cult of JBDY.
No wonder it takes half a second to slip into a quotefest, all us fanboys pouncing on the most innocuous and generic of quotes -- the aforementioned bushes referring to a scene when Naseeruddin Shah's [ Images ] Vinod grilled Pankaj Kapur's Tarneja in front of the press, provoking him into a fit of rage.
Considering the fact that I have to rein myself in instead of going on and on about the ludicrous nuances of that wonderfully loopy plot, it is no surprise that we, the children of the 1980s, are mad about the one truly effective and potently funny satire, the one good black comedy, that our cinema has managed to successfully make. It is even lesser of a surprise that Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron continues to inspire filmmakers to this day, to the extent that the JBDY-style flick has, today, become a bonafide sub-genre in our cinema.
It is a dreadfully sobering fact, however, that this is clearly the one genre all our new-age directors, the sort who love handheld cameras and the word Edgy, are getting disastrously wrong. Every few Fridays another outrageously over-the-top movie attempts to string together some manic shenanigans and bottle up lightning in a manner clearly derivative of The Film -- and singularly fails. They're all trying far too hard to be clever and absurd and whimsical and profound, all in the same breath, and falling flat on their faces. It's tragic.
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