Cinema Marte Dum Tak (Amazon Prime Video, 6 Episodes)
Series creators : Vasan Bala and Samira Kanwar , Writer: Rigved Siriah, Director: Disha Rindani, Xulfee and Kulish Kant Thakur
Rating: ****
Once upon a time, there lived Kanti Shah. Some filmgoers would have heard of his sleazy cinema.Kanti was proudly cheap and tawdry. Four of his disciples, Vinod Talwar, J Neelam, Kishan Shah(brother of the legendary Kanti) , and Dilip Gulati now crawl out of the woodwork to tell us about themselves and their cinema.
I have to confess that I had no knowledge of these master storytellers , the royalty of pulp cinema, until this series unraveled their multilayered mystique.
I am sure if any of the four stalwarts of sleaze read my comments they would completely miss the sarcasm, and happily so. Amazon’s unparalleled achievement in this series is that it brings out these low-level firebrands from hibernation and gives them a chance to tell us all about their art without judging them.
For, art it is. And who are we to judge them and looked down from our collective noses at what we think of as the stink they created on screen circa 1990s. So cheap and cheesy were their products that they never got noticed beyond their target audience: the men in lungis doing their own lungi dance in the theatres.
Wet dreams became daytime reality thanks to Neelam, Vinod and gang. If nothing else it is incredibly gratifying to see their self-belief. These four directors and their actors like Sapna Sappu and Amit Pachori speak of their horny halcyon days with such affection, passion and sincerity, who are we to remind them that they were never going to be acknowledged in any book on cinema history?
This is where this series plays a crucial part. It rips apart the hypocrisy of segregating a Sapna Sappu from any mainstream actress who objectifies herself to be noticed. At one point Neelam, the only female filmmaker among the foursome who are spotlighted in the series(and certainly not the lamb among the wolves, if anything she is shown to be aggressive than her male counterparts)… at one point she tells us she came to the film industry to be an actress.
“Like Aruna Irani, Farida Jalal,” Neelam adds quickly.No Katrina-wali dreams for these streetwise film folks of different strokes(thodasa dabble meaning ho jaye).
Just goes to show how self-aware these merchants of sleaze are. The series respects this self-awareness.At times the four filmmakers are taken so seriously it feels like a satire. But rest assured, there is no mockery. Only affection and respect here. Three cheers to that.
