In a new installment of Subhash K Jha’s series This Day That Year, he focuses on the ‘Classic’ dance of the bizarre with a look at a B. Subhash film.
This column sometimes blurs the brilliant to celebrate the bizarre. B Subhash’s Classic Dance Of Love, released on March 18, 2005, is noteworthy for its tawdry trippiness. Too pathetic to be profane, too absurd to be funny Classic: Dance of Love is a nightmare of a film designed to set your teeth on edge.
Isn’t this the same B. Subhash, who made Hemant Birje swing from vine to vine like Tarzan? B. Subhash is back. This time, it’s the music-video girl turned actress Meghna Naidu swinging from a tree top to seduce good old Mithun Chakraborty, crooning ‘Le le mujhe le’ (take me take me).
Mithun and Subhash go back a long way. And you wish they had stayed there. They had collaborated aeons ago, in the 1970s to be precise, in that fluke hit Disco Dancer. What they’ve done together in Classic: Dance Of Love could, in one word, be described as bizarre.
Playing a freaked-out god-man, Mithun breaks into a disco jig with iron shackles around his ankles and neck.
It’s a hard task to perform. Is Mithun up to it? It’s hard to answer any question about this eminently questionable product without wincing or giggling—depending on the threshold of the viewer’s patience.
You could smirk your way through this outlandish and brackish brew about an Acharya (Chakraborty) who disapproves of a prostitute, Doli (Meghna Naidu)’s liaison with a tycoon’s son (wondrously wooden newcomer Vikas Bharadwaj). After calling her the most uncharitable names in the book of misogyny (“Women are the passport to hell,” our disco-dancing god-man rants at a religious congregation that seems like a grotesque parody of a Roman gladiator’s arena), he suddenly starts to lust after the not-so-luscious Lolita who struts around in so much makeup; you begin to worry for the future of the cosmetic industry.
You also begin to wonder what the white elephants of the film-making fraternity in Bollywood, who once made successful films, are going to do with their extinct abilities. B . Subhash is clearly way out of line. In no part of the world would this incoherent bundle of joyless footage be allowed to pass off as cinema.
In true democratic spirit, B. Subhash has his say. Just what he says is indecipherable even to the most diehard potboiler-lover in the audience. The portions where the modern-day Menaka (Naidu) tries to seduce the designer-Vishwamitra seem to be inspired by V. Shantaram’s Pinjra, where a straitlaced schoolteacher Sreeram Lagoo was seduced by the village nautanki dancer Sandhya.
The age-old conflict between spiritual and carnal love is reduced to a booming farce by this uncontrollable piece of tripe. The film has no sense of rhythm, not even once in the dozen-odd songs composed by Bappi Lahiri that keep recurring with annoying persistence.
Meghna Naidu seems like a brutal pantomime of Bipasha Basu in Jism and all the other femme-fatales, fake and otherwise, which have emerged on celluloid in the past few years.
Without the poise of Bipasha or the sex appeal of Mallika Sherawat, B Subhash’s film is like an aging dowager whose face-lifts cannot hide her sagging fortunes. As for Mithun, what exactly is he doing, mouthing inane spiritual wisdom and lusting after Naidu in a drunken stupor?
The final nail in the coffin is middle-aged character-actress Himani Shivpuri getting into a tight black dress to perform what’s loosely and lecherously termed a ‘sexy dance’ by the demented villains of the show. Too weird to be sexy and too diseased to be passed off as a cruel joke, this is a film that needs to be put on a leash…fast.
