The biggest Bollywood hit of this year as all media has been informing us is debutant Sagar Bellary's 'Bheja Fry'। Made on a shoestring budget of 65 lakhs, supposedly the film has earned Rs. 5 crore, that is nearly 10 times of the initial investment.
No, I am not going to go gaga over, how a 'small, low-cost film' has cracked the code and went on to rake the money while biggies have bitten the dust with alarming and almost clinically precise regularity. My point is a little different.
For those of you, who don't know, 'Bheja Fry' is a copy of french film 'Dinner le Cons' and a scene by scene copy। So, what's new in this? A number of Indian movies are copies of foreign films, why am I singling out this movie? Simply because I don't want to heap praise on a director who debuted with a copy, even though he has struck gold. Did you appreciate the guy in your class who scored high marks by cheating? If not, then why go on tom-tomming about making a hit film that is nothing but a copy? What kind of newer generation of film makers are being escalated into stardom? If people can't be original even in their first film, what do you expect them to do in their next releases when they have got more pressures from producers, distributors and may be critics!
(Just imagine, they copied 'Derailed', itself a flop film, to make 'The Train'. Even its tagline 'Some lines are never meant to be crossed' was lifted from the original!)
So, Sagar Bellary may be the blue-eyed boy of this idea starved film industry which thrives on DVDs of foreign flicks and media may fall head-over-heals reporting the economics of his HIT, I am not flattered.
