#COMEDY SHORT FILMS IN TELUGU 2013 SERIES#
Even a solid series like Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story uses its ‘90s setting to supply the personality of its protagonist rather than directly seduce its viewers.īut Dil Bekaraar continues the Taj Mahal 1989 legacy. But there’s a marked difference between revisionist art – where parading time is a distinct part of subverting it – and art that exists only to vacantly placate the escapism of its audiences. One might argue Tarantino does the same, most notably with Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.
Taj Mahal 1989 pushed not just those buttons but the very limits of nostalgia fetisization – the craft itself started to feel incidental, like an afterthought to the flowery inflections of old-school India. TVF’s Yeh Meri Family pushed those small-town-summer buttons, and an entire sub-genre was born where Phantom cigarettes and Campa cola bottles were written into stories as though they were World War II artefacts. The idea of watching the pre-internet age on the internet quickly morphed into a cottage industry. Then began the streaming era, when OTTs decided to amplify the irony of digital content exploring analog times. The lesser-known comedy, Hunterrr, starring a colourful Gulshan Devaiah, accomplished the same – wearing its time as a pun that knew when to recede. The era informed the central conflict without defining it. Dum Laga Ke Haisha did it well, ensuring that the environment – the music, the visual grammar, the Kumar Sanu easter eggs – rarely overwhelmed the soul of the film. This started as a playful textural device in the mid-2010s, when just about enough time had elapsed to reminisce about the ‘90s as an innocent decade caught in the throes of adolescence. Nostalgia is a business just as much as love, sex or patriotism is.īut the problem is the way these shows are composed – with the maturity of excitable kids at a fancy costume ball. On paper, there’s nothing wrong with this. Like mournful uncles who keep invoking the “good old days” to chastise the impulses of modern youth, these titles are naked reactions to the sociopolitical complexities of today. These are not period stories so much as veiled invitations to look back on simpler times and sigh at the past. There has been a minor avalanche of Hindi films and shows set in the pre-and-post-liberalization India of the 1980s and ‘90s. Over the last few years, a new genre of Indian storytelling – one that solely hinges on the warm intonations of oldness – has emerged. All that’s left is a hollow assortment of characters who become both artistic and cultural surrogates, a confused tone and an extended montage of #YouRemember moments. It’s cute for a scene, two scenes maybe, but then there’s no escape once the novelty wears off. Casting veteran actors from the ‘80s – Raj Babbar, Poonam Dhillon, Padmini Kolhapure, even perennial light-eyed sidekick Tej Sapru – is pointed enough, but the show insists on turning its production design and script into a museum of retro references. The Habib Faisal-directed series treats time as a financial sponsor, as though it were a product that needs repeated representation on screen: Think Pass Pass and Coca Cola in Subhash Ghai’s Yaadein, or a brand/app in a new-age TVF or Dice Media production. I can handle it if the setting is the background, but in Dil Bekaraar it’s the all-consuming hero that keeps screaming for attention and validation. Not a scene passes by without a jarring reminder of just how adorable and ‘prescient’ the year 1988 was. Cast: Akshay Oberoi, Sahher Bambba, Anjali Anand, Raj Babbar, Padmini Kolhapure, Poonam Dhillon, Sukhmani SadanaĪn adaptation of Anuja Chauhan’s 2013 novel, Those Pricey Thakur Girls, the sunshiney ten-episode-long Dil Bekaraar has a terminal nostalgia problem.
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