Grumpy Nostalgia
Both the Deol brothers’ careers have the arc of a boomerang — success goes and comes. After Gadar (2001), a dry spell struck Sunny Deol’s career. The reason he furnishes in the episode is the professionalisation of the film industry, the industrification of it: “After 2000, it started changing more rapidly. The corporates came in and suddenly those producers who worked with passion, they disappeared.” Deol is mourning the loss of turf to a more professional cinema. Later, he quips, “I am not so fond of bounded scripts; I have never read a script,” referring to the Eighties and Nineties as a period where films were shot on the fly, with shreds of conviction and a wisp of a narration. (The other reason for him not reading scripts is medical: Deol has said in other interviews that he is dyslexic.)
In 1998, Hindi cinema got “industry status” making the financing of films less dubious (less mafia), protecting films from copyright violations and piracy. It produced a sea change as the new millennium poured in and a new kind of cinema congealed on a new kind of audience — the diaspora lassoed in, of which Johar played a major, path-breaking role. Deol was lost in this sea change, and uses the vocabulary of “passion” to explain this change, an inability to distinguish professionalism from passion, an inability to see a change in taste as a change in love. Johar adds spice to this claim, building on the idea of passion, with that of family: “There was a feeling of fraternity, everybody called each other for everything.” (There was also much more of a struggle to secure finances and films were a much more dangerous profession, with death threats and actual violence woven into industry practices.) After a point, you can only hope the men see the light. A career fades for more reasons than just one, and the loss of passion, certainly, isn’t that.
Sunny Deol is back, however, scream-acting with such temerous strength and simplicity in Gadar 2 (2023), opening up single screens, and also, potentially, hopefully, Deol’s flagging career. We are in the age of action films, and Deol, with his body unadorned by abs, just a pindi rage, can possibly chart a new lifeline for the quickly tiring genre. Johar, refuses to speak of the success of the film as a phenomenon that charged a very different demographic, a different audience. It is easier, I suppose, to speak of success generically, universally. Like it just happened, and it happened everywhere.