Rang De Basanti

Rang De Basanti (RDB) is not a patriotic film. It has got nothing to do with any 'awakened generation.' RDB is a 'psychological thriller.'

The main characters in the film are shown as happy-go-lucky bunch of young people who see their life in a closed boundary of a university. They are least interested in current affairs; prefer watching 'Fashion TV' to News Channels. How come these students end up assassinating a politician and start talking about revolutions?

When these students without having any previous acting experience, start acting in a historical film with them acting as certain historical revolutionaries, the pressure is too much for them to handle. Their minds start playing games with them and they start thinking the way the revolutionaries thought. That is when the psychological changes begin to happen and it aggravates with the dying of their friend, the Air Force pilot. The subsequent statements of the defense minister trigger the young minds whose brain is already playing games. They now start perceiving to be those revolutionaries and they act in exactly the same manner.

Ideally it should have been shown that only after they stop their acting for the film they realize the gravity of the situation and they wish to bring the reality before the world. As this was not shown clearly, RDB wavers in its screenplay.

Shafaat Khan’s Marathi play ‘Shobhayatra’ made into a movie of the same name is a story about people from different walks of life who dress up as freedom fighters for a procession organized by a gangster. In this film too these people get psyched by the characters they play. The person playing Gandhi is a RSS sympathizer who wants to play Bose but is offered the role of Gandhi because of his physique. This guy after wearing the getup of Gandhi even starts thinking like Gandhi.

In both RDB and Shobhayatra the people selected for playing roles of historical characters have no previous experience of acting. Hence the psychological transformation happens in a quick time.

Even in case of professional actors such transformation may happen. Dilipkumar himself went into a depressed state in his real life after playing tragedy roles like ‘Footpath’ and ‘Devdas’ at a stretch and was refusing such roles after this depression!