All will be well, thanks to Obama-'bhaisaab'

His office may be located in a place called Aram Nagar, but independent filmmaker Subhash Kapoor, 38, is a restless man. His film, Phas Gaye Re Obama, is in the final throes of editing. He himself is in that hyper-energetic state of nervousness normally seen in teenage girls before their first date, in fathers pacing outside a maternity ward, or in Tendulkar when he’s on 97 and the ball suddenly stops coming on to the bat.

But Kapoor’s anxiety is understandable. The release of his second film is less than a month away — timed to ride the wave of Obamamania that is already sweeping over the media in view of the American president’s imminent visit to the city. By an ironic coincidence, the release of his debut feature, Say Salaam India, was also timed to coincide with a momentous event — the 2007 cricket World Cup. It was a cricket film, and it sank at the box office when the men in blue crashed out prematurely after losing to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. So Kapoor, understandably, is not keen to draw too many parallels between his first film and his new one.

Gangsters hit by recession
Phas Gaye Re Obama (PGRO) is a satire. “It is about the recession’s impact on the underworld in UP,” says Kapoor with a straight face. The plot is simple. A millionaire NRI businessman (played by Rajat Kapoor) goes bankrupt in the US at the peak of the recession in 2008. Unless he finds $100,000 within 30 days, he’ll lose his home. So he returns to India, to sell off his ancestral haveli in UP, and rebuild his life back in the US with the sale proceeds.

But as soon as he lands in UP, the NRI is kidnapped. The gangsters, who are initially delighted at having landed a ‘target’ worth at least Rs50 crore, are shocked to discover that their prisoner is penniless. That’s when the film takes off, as the NRI comes up with an idea whereby all of them can make some money.

But how can gangsters in UP be affected by the recession? They don’t hold jobs, they don’t pay EMIs, and they don’t play the stock market either. Kapoor explains, “They have guns but no bullets, jeeps but no petrol, cell phones but no outgoing calls. There is a dialogue in the film where a gangster cribs, ‘kidnapping karo to ransom nahi milti hai, hafta mangne gaya to log hamse udhaar mangte hain.’”

In all this, Obama-bhaisaab, as he is referred to by the characters, is seen as a potential saviour, the only one who can change things around by doing something about the mandi or recession.
In terms of the script, the real innovation is the way in which the complex securitisation and serial-selling of defective mortgages that led to the financial crisis is represented metaphorically in the transactions of the gangsters, where the NRI businessman himself becomes the worthless ‘security’.

Given that there haven’t been too many successful satires in Bollywood, where does Kapoor locate his product in terms of filmmaking tradition? “PGRO is my humble tribute to Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron,” he says.

Journalist-turned-filmmaker
Kapoor, the son of a Delhi-based businessman, holds an MA in Hindi literature and was active in Delhi University student politics. “Those years, 1988-1994, saw intense debates within the student community — over Mandal, over the rath yatra and the Babri demolition,” recalls Kapoor. He travelled extensively in Haryana, Rajasthan and UP as a student. “This is partly how I acquired some degree of familiarity with the lingo and worldview of the characters portrayed in PGRO.”

After college, Kapoor worked as a journalist for six years, writing for Hindi papers, and later covering politics for Business India Television. It was when working as a broadcast journalist that he woke up to the possibilities of the audio-visual medium, and dumped journalism for cinema.

He has no formal training in filmmaking, nor did he ever assist anyone in films before taking the plunge. “I’d visited a film set only once before I started work on my first film, and that too in Delhi, not in Mumbai.” He moved to Mumbai only in 2006, when he started work on his first film.

Though tense about his forthcoming film release, Kapoor is taking heart from the slew of successful indie films this year. He hopes that PGRO, made on a shoestring budget of Rs3 crore (the budget of an average mid-size Bollywood film is around Rs25 crore) will keep up the momentum created by Tere Bin Laden, Love, Sex Aur Dhoka, Udaan, and Peepli [Live]. “Two of these, Tere Bin Laden and Peepli [Live], were satires,” points out Kapoor. “I hope Osama has made it easier for my Obama, by proving there is an audience for such films.”

‘Every day is a fight’
 So, has life finally become easier for the independent filmmaker? “No,” says Kapoor. “I don’t think it’ll ever be easy. For the indie filmmaker, every single day is a fight: you’re fighting for a better deal with the distributors, with the exhibitors, for your posters, for your hoardings, its never-ending.”

But what does he mean by ‘fighting’? Don’t all filmmakers have to do it? Kapoor gives an example. “Multiplexes have people called programmers, who decide the show timings. If it is a big-starrer film, or even if it has mid-level stars, they’ll give it a good six shows, and good timings. We all know  how important the timings are. For a film like mine, I have to constantly fight with them. I may have made a good film, but if they give me a time like 9.30 in the morning, nobody is going to watch it. And they’ll offer me 2.30 in the afternoon and 10.40 in the night. If I want three decent timings, I have to fight with them.”

Kapoor continues, “There is also the struggle of making the film with less money. We had originally planned with my producer to do the shoot in 40 days. Later we realised that we didn’t have such resources. So I had to shoot this film in 30 days. In any case, I see all this as part of the fun and challenge of filmmaking. What I know is how to make a film, but I’m not a specialist in marketing. So we go to these big distributors and they say, bada star nahi hai, itne paise mein kya release hota hai, put in another Rs5 crore in promotion, etc. This is where you really have to fight.”

At the same time, Kapoor dismisses all talk of any ‘indie film boom’. “A small budget is not the only or even the primary marker of an indie film,” he says. “A lot of trash gets passed off as indie cinema. A sleazy sex comedy is also an indie film these days. There was this film called Hello Darling. Have you seen it? Any film that doesn’t have big stars is often referred to as an indie film.”

So what, according to him, makes an indie film? “A fresh story, with fresh ideas and script, made  with limited resources,” he explains. “It definitely cannot be what the mainstream has been doing. If Salman Khan does songs and fights, and if I get Rajat Kapoor to do the same, just because Rajat is doing it doesn’t make it an independent film. It has to do something different.”
At any rate, Kapoor’s post-Obama plans do sound very different from the regular box office fare. “My next film is a satire on the judiciary,” he says. “I am also developing another script about two losers, tentatively called KLPD.”