Bollywood conquers the world: Globalisation according to Don II
Dec 26, 2011
by Shiv Visvanathan
Don II is a startlingly impressive film. Superbly edited, it is slick, quick and audience-friendly with a wonderful cast of actors and a simple, almost bare, plot.
An Indian don, based in Thailand, wishes to extend his activities to Berlin. He is being hunted by European mobsters who are desperate to eliminate him as he is underselling them — and by his old and lovely nemesis, Roma. The wily Don weaves a plot of his own, anticipating their every move, to justify the oft repeated slogan: Don ko pakadna thoda namumkin hai (It is a little impossible to catch the Don).
There are no memorable characters in Don II. The actors play types. Shah Rukh, Priyanka, Lara, Boman are no more than masks, script roles mouthing dialogue. The movie is a genre film, utterly professional, and underlines Bollywood’s mastery of the global crime thriller. Move over Tom Cruise, Don II is here.
It is therefore not the plot that intrigues, but the film’s underlying messages about globalisation.
Don II shows that globalisation first began with crime, and is viewed best through its annals. Criminal organisations relocate as rationally and easily as corporate firms and their decisions are just as eventful and consequential.
Raju Shelar/Firstpost
More critically, the criminal mind knows that its real mirror is the corporate brain. Nothing is more corrupt and corruptible than the banking system. Don realises that all he has to do is subvert a few banking officials; skeletons in their cupboard are metaphorical keys that can open any vault. Inevitably, the vice-president of Deutsche Bank is an Indian.
The globalisation game played out in Don reveals that it is crime that benefits from speed, technology and the information revolution. Investigative justice is like a Stegosaurus, a dinosaur with two brains with messages moving slowly between the brain and the tail. By the time the police take a decision, the plot has raced past them. Oddly this comic vulnerability provides a sense of a lag, of twentieth-century minds desperately trying to adapt to a twenty-first century rule game.
Globalisation is also writ large in the more usual ways. In Don II, Bollywood signals its ability to absorb and mimic the best of Hollywood. Here Farhan Akhtar combines a collage of scenes from Die Hard, Mission Impossible, Thomas Crown Affair, and The Transporter to produces a fast paced film with original Indian touches.
If crime is global, so now is the female body. Desire has no nationality and woman’s bodies circulate faster than currency. The feminine body is now acquiring a global chic, a style which is common to all metropolitan centers of the world.
Bollywood is cheeky in signaling its mastery of the international thriller genre. In one scene, James Bond appears as a silhouette, evoking Russia With Love or Gold Finger. Bond is deeply embedded in the global psyche and the intelligence agent of yesterday has evolved into the present-day criminal hero. But Bond is also passe, an ultra nationalist creature, held captive to a high-ranking bureaucrat like M, a man who cannot sustain relationships and substitutes brash sexuality for love.
Our criminals are more nuanced, more global, shrugging Bond off as an ancestral back drop.
Don II also attempts to establish continuity with the original Don starring Amitabh Bachchan. When Shah Rukh Khan acted in part I, critics waxed nostalgic, slamming his efforts and the film. Nothing rose to the level of the evergreen Amitabh Bachchan classic, not even Kareena Kapoor in the Helen-inspired item number, Yeh Mera Dil. This newer and slicker sequel includes quotes from its distant ancestor but moves light years ahead, reducing Amitabh and Helen to anachronisms. The effect is achieved through speed: razor-sharp editing and a script that races as fast as a Ferrari.
There is no better symbol of Bollywood’s global coming of age than the car chase. The legendary plots where the horse (Basanti) chases a car or jeep are now passé. Now honour and horsepower belong to the Porsche, Jaguar and the Maserati. To drive anything less is to be reduced to the parochial.
Speed is now the index of civilisation.
Shiv Visvanathan is a social science nomad.
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