Finding controversy: An outrage to grab attention

The recent controversy around Deepika Padukone’s cleavage and watching her film Finding Fanny have convinced me that it is high time the country holds a national debate on mediocrity.

People who feel the controversy was manufactured to generate publicity for Finding Fanny are not completely off the mark. The recent history of Indian cinema is punctuated with such attempts at free publicity. By design these tricks involve some genuine participation on the part of the celebrity, which makes it impossible to conclusively call them publicity stunts. Still, a section of the Twitter crazy crowd has gone hoarse holding the high moral ground on behalf of Ms Padukone and for them her outburst cannot be seen as a publicity stunt.

The question isn’t whether or not the controversy is manufactured; the question is how long are we going to fall for movies like Finding Fanny? Finding Fanny is what happens when a road trip goes horribly wrong, when pretentiousness masquerades as performance taking the audience to newer higher and hitherto unknown levels of boredom. Manufactured as a quirky comedy the film lacks any craft though at various points in the film it appears as if the cinematographer shot a few sequences not for the director but for his own personal portfolio. The film is poorly written, cheaply acted and is festooned with funny English accents. The film stands out as a mediocre piece of cinema, which should not have been produced in the first place.

A manufactured controversy for a manufactured film should not have alarmed me so much but for the recent examples of blatant objectification of women which went completely unnoticed by both the film fraternity and the media.

To me Priyanka Chopra playing Mary Kom is a more of a problem than what has happened to a picture of Ms. Padukone. The Priyanka Chopra-Mary Kom debate points to some real issues about national identity and how we treat our heroes. But since that debate cannot be fit into 140 characters it doesn’t find the kind of attention and media space that it deserves.

To be sure I find nothing wrong with Ms. Padukone’s outburst except that I suspect it is as hollow as it sounds. Her tirade against objectification of women sounds like the voice of someone who just woke up to reality. I wonder what world does Ms. Padukone think we live in? Her anguish at seeing her own self objectified and the subsequent outburst it led to seems to me to be yet another example of how easily celebrities brandish innocence when it helps them.

A similar vein of innocence can be seen in Finding Fanny too where the director assumes the audience is as innocent as the director (and perhaps the writer too,) and would not catch on when the director lifts trobe after trobe from quirky Hollywood road films in order to create a truly Indian experience in English.

Truth be told, my problem with both the film and the controversy seems to be that they have somehow clicked in the minds of the people. Critics are raving about the film and fans are raving about their courageous starlet. To me, the truth is out there but no one seems to care. Deepika’s film is as mediocre as the controversy she’s tried to generate.