By Subhash K. Jha
While watching the hideously-botched epic "Submergence" last week, I was reminded of "Mehbooba", the 1976 classic-gone-wrong which had everything going for it -- a dream team of filmmaker Shakti Samanta, a popular lead pair in Rajesh Khanna-Hema Malini and a reincarnation plot based on a novel by pulp fictioneeer Gulshan Nanda.
Above all, the divine melodies of R.D. Burman, including the immortal "Mere naina sawan bhadon", should have ensured a long run for the film.
It bombed. The disaster shook the whole film cast.
Several years later, Jeetendra went bankrupt when he poured whole and soul into a period drama, "Deedar-e-Yaar". Another seemingly foolproof epic gone bust.
Why do lavishly mounted, impeccably packaged films sometimes go wildly out of control? Kamal Amrohi thought his "Razia Sultan" would be another "Pakeezah".
The box office had other plans.
After "Sholay" Ramesh Sippy thought "Shaan" would tear the box office apart. Instead, it proved to be a big embarrassment to all involved, in spite of a dream starcast and R.D. Burman songs that are played to this day.
A very handsome production traversing many continents, Australia's finest filmmaker as director, and a charismatic lead pair couldn't prevent "Submergence" from, well, submerging. The movie, a purported love epic, is one of those well-aimed misfires that Hollywood serves up once in a blue moon.
In the narrative of catastrophic epics it ranks right up there with Richard Attenborough's "A Bridge Too Far", Michael Cimono's "Heaven's Gate" and Guy Ritchie's "King Arthur, Legend Of The Sword".
Catastrophe strikes the film's charming couple long before the man is kidnapped by Islamic Fundamentalists in rural Africa and locked into what looks like a fairly habitable room for a low-income Mumbaikar. So, okay, the hideout doesn't have a window. But we've been in far more suffocating places than James McAvoy. This film, for example.
Long before MacAvoy, making a big song and dance of his broken body and tattered soul, is held captive, the director Wim Wender's vision is imprisoned by the couple's inability to generate mutual passion.
Indeed, Alicia Vikander and McAvoy look more like two people trying to be politely receptive to one another's eccentricities than the desperate lovers that the script so desperately wants them to be -- while we are left desperately seeking an escape from the claustrophobic conflicts of two hearts that belong to two separate planets.
Perhaps the very talented lead pair found itself together in the wrong film. If David Lean were alive he may have created another "Ryan's Daughter" for Vikander and McAvoy. Wim Winders seems bored with the idea of letting the lovers find their mutual passion. Their lovemaking is executed with as much passionate exuberance as molar surgery.
The camera, forever peering into cavities that generate no brio, pries into the pair's facial profile with the reverent aloofness of a priest tiptoeing through a temple. Vikander and McAvoy's separation moves us in no special way. By the time the question of whether they will finally be united pops into the head, we are way beyond caring.
The bizarre ending suggesting a profound connection between the heroine's oceanic explorations and the hero's doomed destiny only adds to the tiresome affectations of a film that forfeits real emotions for a pantomime of passion.
Not that the narrative, so in awe of its exotic locations and esoteric camera movements, ever allows us to get anywhere near the central romance. How can we care for the lovers when they don't seem to care for each other in any real sense?
Unless you like films where locations are used as characters to heighten the distance between the audience and the plot, "Submergence" is best left buried deep under the ocean, which the heroine is seen to explore constantly.
I hope she finds the script some day.
Because Wim Wenders, who once gave us a rousing interpretation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's literary classic "The Scarlett Letter", here makes a complete hash of J.M. Ledgard's novel.
Making a hash of literature is not new to cinema. We all know what happened to Ruskin Bond when he came to Bollywood with "7 Khoon Maaf"?
An eighth murder was committed.
(Subhash K Jha can be contacted at jhasubh@gmail.com)
