Saturday, June 8, 2013

HARISHCHANDRACHI FACTORY: THE MAGIC OF THE MOVIES


This year marks the 100-year anniversary of Indian cinema, and more specifically 100 years of the Mumbai Film Industry. This is now a well-known and widely celebrated fact, with even the Cannes Film Festival joining in to commemorate the most prolific film industry in the world. To mark the event, I thought I'd do some celebrating on my own. So I watched Paresh Mokashi's delightful film Harishchandrachi Factory to join in the fun. 


This film could have been many things. It could have been a true-to-life biopic, telling us about Dhundiraj Govind Phalke's journey of how he made the first feature film to be produced out of India. It could have told us in detail how this printing press-wala came to pursue his dream of making a film. It could have interspersed the good bits with the bad bits, also telling us how this once rich and successful man died in penury and was all but forgotten by those who once enjoyed his films. But Mokashi chooses not to stick too close to facts in this real life story. Instead, he decides to tell a comic slice-of-life tale - much like the cinema of Hrishikesh Mukherjee. The film papers over all the bad bits and transforms the good bits into really good bits of situational comedy. To add to this, Madhav also puts in Chaplinesque montages which run in fast-forward in the parts where Phalke is learning how to make a film, run a projector, or actually filming scenes of his mythological, Raja Harishchandra.

This film could be criticized for its cinematic liberty, but I think Mokashi did the right thing by making HF a laugh riot. He also plays up the fact that Phalke was trained as a magician. This ties up later when Phalke shows his mini films to his neighbours and they react with the wonder of little children who have just been mesmerized by a magic trick. 

Also interesting is the fact that although the movie camera could exactly replicate reality, its function somehow got appropriated to telling stories. In Phalke's case, cinema becomes a medium for telling stories born out of India's mythology, and two new genres of film-making come into being - the mythological and the sci-fiction film (Phalke's films included rudimentary special effects - another instance of why his role as a magician is important). Another aspect that the film does not downplay is the pivotal role of Phalke's wife Saraswati in collaborating with him in his endeavours. She not only partly finances the film by selling of her ornaments, but also participates in its shooting, development and editing.

I did watch this film in the theater three years ago, and saw it the second time only recently - and was thoroughly entertained. This film can easily be a mood-lifter, right up there with Andaz Apna Apna and Singin' in the Rain. The film has definitely exercised  a great deal of poetic license, but it does full justice to its subject - the sheer magic that is cinema.