 | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | BREAKING AWAY: Kukunoor's last two films mark a geographic shift | | Nagesh Kukunoor is still the quintessential NRI who brought us the breakthrough indie film Hyderabad Blues , the first of his seven films, eight years ago. He rolls his Rs, fusses about "hat hair" after he takes off his cap for a television interview and peppers his conversation with baseball analogies. Yet you wouldn't know it from the 39-year-old's last two films, which have marked a societal and geographic shift from the Hinglish dilemmas of the great Indian middle class to the aspirations and dilemmas of Middle India. If the heartwarmingly original Iqbal was about the small-town hearing-and-speech-impaired pace bowler's triumph against odds, his latest weepathon Dor has Gul Panag journeying from the scenic Himalayan foothills of Himachal Pradesh in search of Ayesha Takia-who, by a strange twist of fate, holds the key to her husband's life-in the deserts of Rajasthan. Kukunoor the actor, in a self-indulgent cameo as a lecherous industrialist, is perhaps Dor's only weak link. Kukunoor the writer-director, however, redeems himself by coaxing award-worthy performances from a starlet and a former Miss India to craft yet another film about life-changing, self-affirming experiences. Call it the curse of the small budgeter but ever since he strung together Hyderabad Blues for Rs 17 lakh-less than what a Bollywood movie spends on a single song sequence-he's been perceived as the "offbeat, cut-price director". A tag the chemical engineer hates. He has, after all, never stuck to formula and his films defy genre. "I like to tell stories about things that excite me and keep audiences guessing," he says. After drawing on his own experiences for Hyderabad Blues and the coming-of-age Rockford, Kukunoor came up with the fairly successful spoof Bollywood Calling. When the prison thriller Teen Deewarein, (with a disturbing subtext of male rape) bombed, Kukunoor decided to revert to familiar territory. The disappointing Hyderabad Blues-2 is probably the only lame horse in his eclectic stable, but it doesn't explain why he hasn't worked with a producer twice, not even with Iqbal's producer, deposed showman Subhash Ghai. | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | DUNE DUET: Gul Panag and Shreyas Talpade liven up Dor | | Five years ago, the frustrating hunt for finance made the green-card holder want to return to the normalcy of his nine-to-five job as an environmental consultant. "I found that with every film I had to prove myself to the producer-not only before the film began, but even after its success-that I could make another film.'' He nearly tossed away his dream of being a film maker, one that began after he exited a theatre in "complete delirium" after watching Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark. Producer Sharad Patel's untimely demise three years ago meant Kukunoor had to shelve Tandoor, about the romance brewing between New York-based Hyderabadi chef Amitabh Bachchan and a white American lawyer. A film the Hyderabad boy prepared for by taking cooking lessons in his native cuisine. The struggle has paid off with two home runs. Kukunoor could well be whipping up his favourite Yakhni Pulao for his close friends. Iqbal, made on a Rs 2 crore budget, grossed twice as much. Dor, his biggest film yet at Rs 3.5 crore, has opened favourably at the box office and is being clubbed with Lage Raho Munnabhai and Omkara as the year's best. He still has to find a backer for his big-budget dream actioner Teer, but Kukunoor is making the movies he wants to and unwinding, a euphemism for writing film scripts (he has eight scripts salted away) and long motor drives-his record was a 8,000-km criss-cross of the US three years ago in a Honda Prelude. These days, however, the rolling stone spends more time in Mumbai, bought his first cellphone last year and is making a conscious attempt to be seen at award functions. It's a tough act for the classic outsider who, in Bollywood Calling, was the target of the very system he set out to spoof. The new Nagesh Kukunoor probably owes its genesis to the fact that it doesn't always pay to be an outsider. Despite Iqbal, Kukunoor was left out in the cold-Sanjay Bhansali's melodramatic Black swept the awards and Amol Palekar's desert ditty Paheli was the Indian entry to the Oscars. | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | SPORTSTAR: Iqbal's Talpade dreams of pace-bowling for India | | He laments the loss of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, whose genre of films Kukunoor identifies himself with (Dor opens with a tribute to Hrishida). "He was my idol, yet he looked upon me as my peer,'' he says. That's why Kukunoor won't be caught making "any of these sugary sweet, over-the-top, family nonsense. When you talk of the perfect Indian middle class family, I'd rather pick Hrishida's Bawarchi." Weddings? "Surely not!'' Funerals? "Maybe.'' His next film Aashayein, which he begins next year with John Abraham, deals with death. Six months is a long time in Kukunoor's diary. "I may just squeeze another film in between,'' laughs the director who has begun casting for Bemisaal, his film-after-next. Little is known of his personal life-he doesn't clarify the "few skirmishes" he's had in the past few years. His film-a-year lifestyle leaves no room for a second life. Index
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1998 
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