One often comes across the
following
situation in Hindi films: the poor editing combined with the lack of
storyline leads to the most contrived scenes that culminate in a dance
number. If you're the guy responsible, you already know you have a
certain hit song ready for the movie. In order to do justice
to the feel of the song, you'll have to come up with a killer video for
it (a dream sequence with 10,000 fog machines, and an equal number of
backup dancers dressed in golden kuchupudi
costumes, perhaps?). The
only problem: it doesn't fit in with the rest of the movie, there's no
real room for a random dance sequence, and there is no proper way to
segue into it.
But then you remember:
you're making a BOLLYWOOD
movie, and you realize that you don't
give a FUCK about continuity, and that the budget is more
glamour-intensive than editing-intensive! And just what the FUCK is a segue,
anyway?
A very famous example of what I'm talking about: the song Tirchi Topiwale
(one of the two covers of Miami Sound Machine's Rhythm Is Gonna Get Ya
featured in the late-80s blockbuster, Tridev):
Admittedly, the song is cool, and you don't need for the video
to be
awesome, the song sells itself. And what, pray tell, happens? There's
an unnecessary pre-song sequence of comic relief, complete with
annoying synthesizer sound effects: an actress, played by Sonam,
happens to be in a villager girl's costume, drawing water at
the river
bank, a couple of movie hoodlums accost her, and Naseeruddin Shah,
local sherdil insaan,
gareebon ka devta,
aurat ki aabroo ka
rakshak,
without realizing that Yunus Pervert-oops-Parvez is filming the
whole thing, proceeds to kick the shit out of the
actor-rapists.
Once
everything is explained, Yunus Pervert decides that they do need a hero
for their upcoming song sequence, and asks if Naseeruddin would like to
be in movies. He says okay, but Pervert has one condition:
that he
wear
his (cowboy?!) hat a little crooked (tirchi)...
and the next thing you know, they're all inside a fake cave, with a
bunch of guys and gals dancing in the background, dressed in "tribal"
costumes (read leopard print skirts), and the song begins.
Coming to the point - I finally found a YouTube link to one of my
favourite Hindi songs of the 90s, Gutar
Gutar from Dalaal.
I would have been content with just a video of the song, but whoever
hosted the clip on YouTube decided to include a couple minutes
of the
worst possible pre-dance number comic relief, redolent with the worst
synthesizer sounds that are supposed to incite laughter. The sequence
was so shitty, it looked like the makers of this movie had their own
standard operating procedure to transition from a mirthless
comedy bit
to a really cool song with the typically tribal picturization. It was
almost like they were following driving directions obtained from Google
Maps, so I did a Google search for this route, and the results
are shown in the adjoining frame.
Here's the YouTube video clip, you can watch it while you compare it to
directions in the frame below (If you are having trouble with the
embed, just follow this
link to the song)
driving
directions used in Mithun's Dalaal