Trade Talk: Amitabh Bachchan’s latest film’s box office is a shocker
Trade Talk: Amitabh Bachchan’s latest film’s box office is a shocker
For those of us who expected success for Vikas Bahl’s Goodbye a heartfelt sendoff saga is woven around a death in a crowded family in Chandigarh, the collections were an eye-opener. And not in a good way.
Goodbye collected a meagre Rs 90 lakhs on the first day, and that too after ticket rates were reduced to Rs 150 across India.
How do we explain this abysmal paucity of patronage for a project pitching the patriarch of Hindi cinema in the pivotal part? Amitabh Bachchan, who turns 80 this week, is the pride of Indian cinema. No greater star has been born in Indian cinema. Of late all his films have underperformed at the box office. Goodbye is one of Mr Bachchan’s lowest performers in his illustrious career.
What went wrong? For one, the audience is in no mood to watch a film about death. Every family has seen enough of it during the past two years. Why would they go to the movies to see more of mortality when they’ve had more than their share of it at home?
Secondly, and this is the decisive factor, Mr Bachchan was cast as the grieving patriarch. But his character behaved most churlishly, like a very disgruntled man who blamed his entire family for not grieving as much as he did. Someone in the family, and there were so many sons and daughter filling the overflowing frames like brimming beer mugs at a crowded bar, should have told the old man to chill. Everyone grieves on his or her own. What makes your grief larger than the others?
Thirdly, and most importantly, Rashmika Mandanna making her Hindi debut was completely rejected by the audience. No doubt a spontaneous performer she looked nothing like a daughter in a Punjabi family, not with that thick Telugu accent.
So okay, Hema Malini was the queen of Bollywood despite the Tamil accent. But even she had her linguistic limits. When in Yash Chopra’s Veer Zaara she couldn’t hide her unmistakable aiyyo-yo accent as Amitabh Bachchan’s Punjabi wife, they had to write in a line of dialogue saying the wife was originally from Tamil Nadu…just like the (dead) wife Neena Gupta who looked so mismatched with Mr Bachchan in Goodbye that they had to write in a line of dialogue explaining that she was fifteen years his junior.
Rashmika looks nothing like Mr Bachchan’s daughter in Goodbye. They should have worked on their onscreen kinship. It is to be noted that the talented Pavail Gulati who plays Mr Bachchan’s son looks convincing in his part: he has played Mr Bachchan’s son in Ribhu Dasgupta’s webseries Yuddh.
Incidentally, Rashmika Mandanna and Vijay Deverakonda who are said to be in a relationship have one thing in common: a disastrous Bollywood debut in Goodbye and Liger, respectively.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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