'Tezaab' director N. Chandra thinks it's a bad idea to remake his film likely to star Ranveer Singh and Janhvi Kapoor

Bollywood has truly run out of ideas. How else do we explain this mad rush to remake any and everything? Producer Anand Pandit is planning to remake Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara, the 2006 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello. Let’s hope it will be better than Rohit Shetty’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Comedy Of Errors.

Now someone wants to remake N Chandra’s Tezaab and Chandra thinks it’s a bad idea, that classics should never be remade.He is right.

But who told Chandra that Tezaab is a classic? I mean, does he even know the definition of a classic? Mehboob’s Mother India is a classic and it was a remake, and a far better film, than the original Aurat .

I remember Sridevi’s classic response to her Himmatwala being remade . “Why would anyone want to remake Himmatwala? It isn’t Mughal-e-Azam.”

Tezaab is no Mughal-e-Azam, though it is not as bad as Himmatwala. But its politics of violence is certainly problematic. The protagonist Munna, played by an over-the-top Anil Kapoor, is a rebel without a cause, without any pause but with a lot of applause. Goondaism was given a celluloid sanction in N Chandra’s Ankush (a far better film than Tezaab). Street hooliganism and violence were blown up into a 70mm spectacle in Tezaab.

The film’s true hero was Saroj Khan’s choreography. What it did to Madhuri Dixit’s career is the cinematic equivalent of a divine intervention. Ek do teen chaar is a very mediocre song written by Javed Akhtar. It came to life once Madhuri stepped on stage to dance to it.

A remake of Tezaab sounds as exciting as a dip into bath tub already used by a bather.

Some films have reason to be remade. With the passage of time some classics could be given a new interpretation. A filmmaker may have seen a film thirty years ago which he loves and he might feel he could give that subject a more technologically advanced twist than what was done to it earlier. A writer may feel that he could tweak certain aspects of an old script . No harm in that.

But I feel certain classics are sacrosanct and inviolable. You can’t remake Sholay, Mughal-e-Azam or Gone With The Wind or Ben Hur. No one should dare to tamper with these classics because this scripts couldn’t be carried any further. But there are other films that can be improved on.

Martin Scorsese, who is one of the most respected directors in the world, remade the 1962 classic Cape Fear very successfully. Scorsese got his first Oscar for best director for a remake The Departed.

Javed Akhtar, who wrote some of the most brilliant screenplays in the 1970 and 80s, would like to see his Arjun, directed by Rahul Rawail and featuring Sunny Deol, remade. “I feel I had made some mistakes in the second-half and somewhere I am aware of those mistakes. If it is remade, I’d correct those mistakes,” he admits honestly.

Salim-Javed’s film Haath Ki Safaai was based on a 1959 film called Do Ustad, which starred Raj Kapoor and Sheikh Mukhtar. Salim and Javed saw Do Ustad and they sensed the potential in the plot that was lost in translation. Ibrahim Nadiadwala bought the rights of Do Ustad and Salim-Javed rewrote it as Haath Ki Safaai which was a hundred times better film although Do Ustad.

But Tezaab? Honestly, like many successful films from the past, it is unbearable in the present. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out as badly as Ram Gopal Varma’s Aag (Sholay), Satish Kaushik’s Karzzz (Karz) and Tharun Kumar’s Nayi Padosan (Padosan).

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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