The barber of Bollywood

COMEDY is rare in Bollywood and even in our middle-class lives. Bollywood creates slapstick, an assortment of laughs, or a set of jokes repeated to the point of redundancy. Billu is that rare exception of a movie, a comedy of Bollywood reflecting on itself. It is a full-blooded comedy, Rabelaisian to the core. It demands that we laugh at ourselves. The trouble is, as a middle-class, we think that tragedy begins when the joke is on us. As a result, we forget that we are such an outrageously comic people. Otherwise, we would never survive our bureaucrats, our politicians, our intellectuals. We are not just a comic society but our secret is that we are the sum total of our stupidities, which add up to something we alchemically call wisdom. Our middle-class wants to be a superpower, a knowledge society, when we are a nation of clowns, almost slapstick in our desires and dreams.

Billu is the tale of a collision between the lives of a village barber and a film star. It is a brilliant move because nothing is a greater tribute to Bollywood than the barber shop. The barber saloon is pure opera. There is nothing authentic about it. It is makeup, make do, make-believe. Every person, tired of the reality he calls the mirror, reworks himself knowing that a massage is the cheapest therapy and a haircut, a literal shortcut to fantasy. The movie opens with the full semiotics of the barber shop, like an everydayness reaching out for its dose of dream-time. The saloon is a sensorium where, between touch, gossip, ear and odour, the ambience of a movie is created. A tired citizen enters and a fan is reborn.

The fan is the common man, who transcends his everydayness by immersing his soul in a movie. A movie becomes a sacrament and a star, a temporary God. A fan is a Janus-faced figure, one face confronting the mob, the other peering at the crowd. Between mob and crowd and the doubling of the two, Bollywood confronts the fears of democracy. A charged-up mob is sheer terror, an effervescent crowd is an electric community. Both border on irrationality but the logic of irrationality can be life-giving or necrophilic.

Billu is a story of a village of hysterical fans dying to see a shooting. The story goes that one of them, a non-entity, knows the star. To a collection of fans, anything touched by a filmstar partakes in his mana, his power, even if it is the local barber and a failed one. The whole film is a comic tale of how everyone wants to meet the star and sees Billu as the gateway to heaven. Only Billu is reluctant and hesitant as he gets browbeaten by wife, children and the school principal. Billu might be a movie lover but he is not a fan. He is too sceptical, too commonsensical, too ironic and too dignified to be a fan. He knew the actor years ago but realizes the distance between them. Common sense recognises the distances a fan erases in the act of immersion. A fan wallows in myth, common sense, lives out its own sociology, which recognizes the limits of mobility- eventually a barber is a barber and a film star a film star.

As the fans go hysterical becoming a mob, Billu is bribed, threatened, blackmailed, begged for an introduction to the star. As in a split-level film, the movie reflects on the nature of the film itself. A film is every man’s opera, the fusion of myth and sociology. The wisdom of Bollywood shows that in India, even the village itself is not rural reality but a mere film set. It is a message that without fantasy, everydayness is impossible. Sometimes nothing happens in a life. Gossip is a recognition of what happens in other lives. It is a sense of the fact that while history happens around us we live in repetitive time, each day echoing another. What saves us from madness and boredom is film. Fantasy creates sanity by telescoping film and reality in the life of a fan.

Yet dreams, to be dreams, must occasionally be real. Suddenly Billu the low-caste barber, defeated by life, fashion and technology, laughed at by the village, suddenly becomes twice-born. The filmstar comes home. The star was once a star-struck fan that Billu had helped launch to stardom. A gift always demands a recognition. Miracles and everydayness share a strange reciprocity. One without the other is impossible.

Of course, Bollywood is Bollywood. The stupidity and faith of the fan is echoed in every film script. It is a recognition that we are realistic about our Gods. We only pray to them. We are religious about our film but fantasy is what provides effervescence. Our Gods have to work hard to sustain our belief in them. We can be blessed by the gods but we need to be touched by a film star. Bollywood needs only to be Bollywood, ridiculous, sublime, incredulous, impossible as ever. All we demand of it is the magic of entertainment. The film spoofs itself and all the pantheon of Khans. It also shows what Orson Welles once said of Italy - that it is a nation of fifty million actors and the worst ones are on stage. India goes one better. It is a nation of one billion actors and critics merged in the figure called the fan, whose endless faith and exuberance, twins our dreams and realities together.