I was drawn to film criticism pretty early on in life. There was no Internet then. I was yet to read Ebert. Every Sunday, though, I looked forward to Khalid Mohamed’s reviews in The Times of India. I wasn’t reading to decide if I wanted to watch the movie or not. The film outing was a fortnightly affair, but I made sure I consumed everything that was shown on cable – the good, the bad and the ugly. Mohamed’s reviews, hence, had no bearing on whether I eventually watched the films or not. They just made me realise the purpose of film-viewing wasn’t restricted to getting your money’s worth.
When I reported to work as a full-time journalist a couple of years later, incidentally at the DNA office in Mumbai, I was asked what I wanted to start off with. I said, for some reason, I wanted to be a film critic, gullible enough to think a journalist could get away with “only reviewing films”. The editor didn’t ask the question again, and put me on the City reporting team (later, I moved to the Sunday team, where I wrote film-related features for five years). Fortunately, I was also asked to review films.
I was 21. Press shows were always at Famous Studios in Mahalaxmi then. You didn’t even need an invite – you could just land up at 6pm on a Thursday evening and a screening would commence. Overcrowding wasn’t a problem – the same faces turned up every week. Forty-odd film critics, who even seemed to take the same seats every time.
Many reviewers turn up with their mama, bhanja and colleagues. It’s a regular movie-watching experience, where uncles and aunts feel the need to take calls and announce loudly that they’re watching a movie, and people trample on feet while going on loo breaks during songs. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – why must a critic’s film-viewing experience be different? Change is good sometimes.
Some of it isn’t great. The film business is even more closely intertwined with its reportage now – as with most other fields – and few news outlets remain completely sacrosanct. You can’t just be a film critic at most organisations, as I realised on my first day on the job. Critics review films in the same week actors appear on their shows promoting those films, filmmakers are often friends, and the owners sometimes have a financial stake in the movies.
Earlier this month, Talvar and Jazbaa released one after the other. Apart from sharing a lead actor, both films were produced by conglomerates that own a fair share of media outlets.
Film reviewers in India are a divided bunch (and that’s fine). Sometimes, a Queen or a Humshakals comes along – films that bind the community together, ensuring reviews and ratings are either overwhelmingly stacked against or in support of the film. But in almost 45-48 weeks of the year, every scathing review of a film is followed by half-page ads of the same film announcing 4-star reviews.
Some even factor in audience response, where ratings reflect a film’s box office potential. I often get an adverse reaction to a positive review of a lesser-watched indie in the same week I pan a more mainstream film. “You aren’t in sync with audience tastes,” is the staple line, because there’s a belief that a critic’s review must reflect that of the audience. Nothing can be further from the truth.
Maybe you can manipulate reviews, but I would like to believe it’s hard to sustain it without the consumer eventually catching on. Every reviewer’s name is attached to her or his work and honest or not, an opinion gets built around the critic’s body of work over time. Sharp, unreliable, scathing, flaky, perceptive, consistent, corrupt – these adjectives get attached to the reviewer, even if she or he may be all of those things on different days, or none of them at all. Film critics remain, after all, Philippe Petits on a tightrope.
(Aniruddha Guha is a Film & TV critic. Follow him on Twitter: @AniGuha.)
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