Saturday, September 29, 2012
Oh My God
Define the Divine
The play Kanji Viruddh Kanji by Bhavesh
Mandalia in Gujarati (Sachin Khedekar starred in the original) was adapted into
Hindi as Krishan Versus Kanhaiya and Paresh Rawal’s appearance on stage
turned the play into a craze.
It was inevitable that this kind of success would
attract Bollywood—and the play was converted into a film Oh My God, with
due credit given to the original source, a lesser known Australian film called The
Man Who Sued God.
The idea is provocative—a man who is denied
an insurance claim because the destruction of his property was an act of God, decides
to sue God.
In the very well adapted play which is the
template for the film, Kanji (Rawal) is an antiques dealer, who merrily cons
gullible customers and does not believe in God. His shop is wrecked in an
earthquake that seemed to have targeted only his property. His house is mortgaged and his savings wiped
out; when the insurance company rejects his claim, he drags to court godmen
(and one woman) as representatives of God. If he can prove God exists, he can
claim damages from them, and if he proves God does not exist, then the insurance
company would be liable to pay up.
The case becomes big news, there are as many
people out there wanting to kill the heretic as there are supporters lauding
his courage. Then Krishna Vasudev Yadav (Akshay Kumar), a biker dude lands up
twirling a keychain and claims to be God, who has come down to help Kanji.
The play had some terrific lines that made
fun of phony religious leaders and questioned the notion of religion as a
series of unthinking rituals. They are retained
in the film (Mithun Chakraborty plays a
strange, androgynous godman, and Govind Namdeo the stereotyped fiery mahant),
but the same director, Umesh Shukla, is not able to get rid of the staginess
and use the medium of cinema more effectively to tell his story. In the play there was ambiguity about the
existence of God and irony in the way the crooked Godmen turn their defeat into
victory. The film insists on showing and
telling everything, and then underlining it for good measure, so that the
humour, the points of debate and smartly worded insights into the business of faith,
are flattened. And then the poor
production design and loud TV style acting ruins things further.
But there is intrinsic merit in the script,
there’s the superb Paresh Rawal to hold things together, and Akshay Kumar
playing a cool Lord Krishna. However, it’s not very often that one can say—the play
was better. In fact, the stage
production had been filmed (like NT Live
and Met Live do), it would probably have worked better..
Labels: Cinemaah
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