Bollywood goes rustic

The Swiss Alps and the Austrian countryside will continue to feature in Yash Chopra’s movies. There is a gloss about these locations that the veteran filmmaker feels magnetically drawn to. However if Yash loves the NRI romances, the other directors who make movies for them prefer smaller towns. Maneesh Sharma (Band Baaja Baraat), and Habib Faisal (Do Dooni Chaar) are makers who are exposed to the authenticity of the Indian heartland.Shaad Ali took Bunty Aur Babli to Uttar Pradesh. Abhishek Bachchan even got nostalgic about UP because his “roots” are there.
But this summer Bollywood goes more rustic. Says a trade source, “The small town authenticity has moved a big distance even from the Bunty Aur Babli days. It’s no longer chocolate small towns in films likeIshaqzaade, Shanghaiand Gangs of Wasseypur. Your filmmaker just traveled a few extra miles further to put smaller towns on the Hindi cinema map.”
For Shanghai, Dibakar Banerjee shot for around 42 days in Latur and Baramati. Yes, this is Union Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh’s constituency. And the people of the place remember just two recent events here. One is Riteish Deshmukh’s wedding to Genelia D'Souza and the second is the shooting of Shanghai that brought them in close proximity with Emraan Hashmi, Abhay Deol and Prosenjit Chatterjee.
Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur tells the little known story of organised crime in one of the dustiest places in India, Dhanbad. The place that is notorious for its coal mafia will go down in the history books for being the one with the maximum real characters (or you may say non star actors). According to Manoj Bajpai, “The film is replete with characters that are rooted in the milieu.”
Interestingly, films are shifting from the NRI stories of the early 2000s. Punjabi still is the dominant flavour of a lot of our recent cinema but not the Canada variety. Instead it’s the Northern flavour of UP (Tanu Weds Manu), Bihar (Gangs Of Wasseypur), MP (Paan Singh Tomar), and rural Maharashtra (Shanghai).
A Delhi-based exhibitor says, “Interestingly we have our own audience bank now. Delhi films are emerging almost like a separate genre and all of them are leaving a mark with people who are increasingly looking for authenticity in cinema.” The reason why real India is becoming such a rage in our movies is because of the indigenous lifestyle and economic boom in these towns; the additional box office revenues coming from here; increasing number of script writers/filmmakers who now understand these towns.
Ironically the small town girl who once wished to ape Sonam Kapoor, because she is a fashion icon, will be happy to know that the 'star-beti' is now learning the mannerisms of a UP girl from Delhi University because her director Aanand L Rai has asked her to do this for their next film outing.