The Brangelina Effect

Spectator...

I don’t know about you, but looking at Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and their son Maddox caught by paparazzi travelling in a rickshaw in Monday’s papers left me with a distinct sense of unease.

You just had to see the pained expressions on the faces of the stars to realise what tension they were undergoing.

Think about it: with the kind of hysteria and feeding frenzy amongst the media that their visit has evoked, all you needed was one over-enthusiastic reporter giving chase in a car on Pune’s traffic congested roads for disaster to ensue.

Even Princess Di, who was in a Mercedes, did not survive a paparazzi chase. The mind boggles at the recipe for disaster that Sunday’s photo-op truly was.

Anyone with even the slightest intelligence knows that auto-rickshaws are amongst the most dangerous forms of transport. No more than tin contraptions on shaky wheels, they survive on will power and good luck at the best of times. To further endanger this shaky proposition by introducing the presence of two of the world’s most wanted stars — was asking for trouble. Whichever spin doctor advised this move ought to thank his lucky stars that disaster didn’t ensue.

Having worked on the unit of an international film being shot in India, I have a fair understanding what must have led to this move: film units are a world unto themselves. For a few months when you’re shooting a film on location, the real world recedes and you feel you’re in a bubble of your own. The sense of being under siege is a very real one.

After the bad press that Brangelina’s minders received for their heavy handed ways with the media, press advisers must have thought one way to appease the media — give them something to nibble on to buy time — would have been a ‘sighting’ of the couple.

That’s when the stars — or someone close to them — must have suggested an auto-rickshaw ride. Not a four wheel drive — but an auto-rickshaw ride! Street cred at any cost.

Never mind the millions of dollars of insurance riding on the stars, never mind the child whose life was being endangered, never mind that a simple press conference would have served the purpose better.

How different all this is for the Indian media spoilt on sound-bytes and photo-ops from Bollywood stars. Here you can’t get the stars to stop talking to the press on most occasions.

But for the moment, a tattooed newly reformed serial mother with child-bearing lips, her seriously cute hunk of a Hollywood superstar, and their brood of beautiful children that collectively make up the Brangelina Effect, presses a multiple of right buttons the world over— and the madness surrounding them is not going to go away.
s_malavika@dnaindia.net