By Venky Ramchandran
The opening title card of a movie proclaiming “Primarily based on True Unbelievable Occasions” (BOTIE) is probably essentially the most fascinating piece of cinematic misdirection. It’s a direct contract with the viewers, promising the scaffolding of historical past whereas reserving the best to creative invention. It additionally units in your thoughts a wild goose chase to seek for the elusive fact that went to mattress with fiction and extra importantly the fiction that was conceived for the sake of fact in search of. The important level right here is that for the longest time, this contract was largely unbreached.
When Mani Ratnam wrote “Guru”, few of us who had the broad contours of Dhirubhai Ambani’s life historical past, had nice enjoyable mentally connecting the dots whereas watching the central battle he had created between Socialist Bharat (epitomized by Mitun Dada) and the titular protagonist who epitomized Capitalist Bharat.
You possibly can argue that Guru was Mani’s cinematic pursuit for an aspirational fact. BR’s guide talks about this, if my reminiscence serves proper, when Mani talks concerning the subsequent technology who’re extra comfy with Capitalist Bharat. Guru subsequently turned a larger-than-life cinematic biography, rooted in an inspiring real-world journey however devoted to the myth-making of success. The purpose of the movie is to not current a meticulously correct historic doc, however to craft a compelling, heroic arc that captures the spirit of relentless ambition.
Given who Mani Ratnam is, at no level did he really feel the necessity to insert “actuality” into the narrative. For a director of his sophistication, it might be anathema to the “purity” he delivered to his storytelling philosophy, even because it turned extra haiku-esque over time, alienating a overwhelming majority of his viewers base.
With Aditya Dhar’s second outing within the great “Dhurandhar”, we will safely state that this BOTIE custom in Bollywood has been disrupted for good. BOTIE custom relied on conserving fact at an arm’s size. Now, as Aditya Dhar appears to inform us, we can not afford to maintain the reality at arm’s size. Now we have no selection however to be part of the Samudra Manthan, the place we’re concurrently churning the reality and the narrative till we lose sight of each. What precisely is the reality? Can fact even exist past a story?
BR was in all probability kidding when he stated, in evaluation of Dhurandhar, “I wouldn’t name this a “political movie”. This must be essentially the most political movie of 2025 that carries the torch of Vivek Agnihotri’s post-truth custom (along with his “Recordsdata” movies) onto mainstream Bollywood with vastly superior filmmaking abilities.
Aditya Dhar is aware of when to sprinkle a snowflake and wield a lumber jack onto the narrative. And the outcomes are disconcerting, even whether it is wildly entertaining. Whereas the core of the film is a dramatized, fictional account, its strongest and disorienting second arrives with the inclusion of real-life audio clips from the 26/11 terrorist assault.
The true-life audio in Durandar serves as a jarring and profound narrative disruption. The viewers is immersed within the constructed actuality of the movie—the actors, the set design, the composed soundtrack—all components crafted to inform an inventive fact. However the uncooked, unedited rage and trauma captured within the audio clip immediately shatters this phantasm. It’s a second of hyper-realism that forces the viewer to confront the true, unfiltered horror that impressed the story.
By stitching pure documentary proof right into a fictional tapestry, Durandar blurs the very ontology of its narrative. The fabricated story is all of a sudden tethered to a non-negotiable, verifiable horror, making the creative license taken within the surrounding scenes really feel ethically precarious. It creates a strong, however troublesome, relationship with the viewers’s belief.
Vetrimaran, in one among his interviews, talked about how Pa. Ranjth was first a politician after which a filmmaker. In in the present day’s put up fact world, are we coming into a brand new period of cinema the place movies have gotten autos that may play highly effective narrative video games which might be audacious sufficient to interrupt the very framework of the cinema medium?
In Greek mythology, Ouroboros depicts the snake image that would eat itself. It’s chilling to observe the hearth and rage in Aditya Dhar’s model of filmmaking birthing “ouroboros” that may devour the movie medium itself.
Few days in the past, I heard BR lament about why cinema as a cultural foreign money is getting more and more devalued. Might this be the rationale? Are we coming into the loss of life of cinema in an age of post-truth world?
