Movie lists were dominated by films about virus outbreaks and pandemics when Coronavirus infections forced countries into lock down.
Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion has been trending at the top of the chart ever since Coronavirus outbreak started.
Movies ranging from Terry Gilliam’s sci-fi 12 Monkeys and the Bruce Willis-starrer dystopian thriller The Outbreak to Ashiq Abu’s Malayalam docu-fiction Virus saw a dramatic surge in viewership on streaming platforms as people were forced to shut inside their homes.
Virus has reportedly received a large number of pan-Indian and international audience unlike the other Malayalam films that are streaming right now.
All the films, barring a few in specific genres, record the realities of the time they are set in.
There were a good number of films set in the backdrop of partition (1947 Earth, Garam Hawa, Manto) and emergency (Kissa Kursi Ka, Hazaaron Khawahishein Aisi), the two big historic landmarks in India of the past century.
There were films set against terror attacks (Black Friday, Company), communal riots (Parzania, Firaaq) and assassination of important personalities (Madras Café, Hey Ram, Chauthi Koot). History is recorded in films in many ways.
Not many demonetisation films
Hollywood never blinks when it comes to cashing in on a catastrophe. Neither does Bollywood, if you check out some of the recent war and sports films.
A film is invariably announced on every major event that happened. Some of us waited for a big film on demonetisation because we were inundated by so many real stories about human suffering, economic crises, crimes and other issues that are directly related to the non-availability or the strict restrictions on cash withdrawals.
A few movies were indeed made (like Puthan Panam and Aadu-2 for example) but they failed to make a mark. The real horror of chocking all the cash flow in a second should have triggered multiple heart-wrenching tales.
Anurag Kashyap’s Netflix original Choked:Paisa Bolta Hai is perhaps the first Bollywood film that was made on the issue of demonetisation. Choked started streaming a couple of weeks ago to mixed reviews that did not quite agree on the efficacy of the critique against demonetisation but gave a thumbs up for the performances of the lead pair Saiyami Kher and Roshan Mathew.
Two possibilities
Two kinds of films may emerge from a situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
First, films that talk about how a catastrophe or pandemic strikes and devastates our cities and lives.
The other, films that talk about how the world changes and how lives, relationships and morals are altered by specific events.
People watch the first to be informed and to get a closer view of the impact than emotionally moved, but the second category is where the real fiction films across multiple genres originate.
Take Warm Bodies (2013) for example. The ‘paranormal romantic zombie comedy’ film narrates the romance between a young girl and a zombie, from the perspective of the zombie.
World over, tonnes of short films were made and released by individuals. There were couple of announcements and even releases as well.
The first COVID19 film must have been Corona, a one-shot thriller that is set inside an elevator. There is another B-grade spoof titled Corona Zombies, which shows people who hit by Coronavirus turning into zombies. Surely, imaginations are running wild around a virus that forced a mask on our faces and locked us down.
RGV in action
Director Ram Gopal Varma, or RGV, known for sensationalising every topic he lays his hands on, released the trailer of his new Telugu production Coronavirus, which was shot during the lockdown. The trailer depicts the panic in the family after a member of the family showing symptoms of infection. Varma, the director of cult classics such as Satya, Company, and Sarkar, had tweeted that the film is about the fear that ignorance and misinformation around the virus has generated in us. He shot the movie following social distancing norms and under the radar of the industry unions.
The director who believes that return to normalcy is still several months away, seems to have set a new standard for shooting smaller films.
A Tamil movie in the making
Corona Kumar is a Tamil film announced by Gokul who had directed the Vijay Sethupathi hit Idharkuthane Aasaipattai Balakumara. The title look of the video that the director had shared on YouTube has generated a lot of buzz in the media.
The trailer shows the director starting to write the film from the ‘signature’ shot that starts from a bottle of liquor that carries the same name and goes on to hope that a vaccine is invented soon enough and the theatres see house full shows again. The film will hit the floors after the director wraps up his remake of the Malayalam hit Helen which features actor Arun Pandian and his daughter. Corona Kumar is touted as a spin off from his earlier film Idharkuthane Aasaipattai Balakumara, with some of the characters from the film making a reappearance. The film is a satire on how the Tamil society dealt with the virus by panicking but falling short when it came to following rules.
Will the post lockdown stories feature quarantine rituals? Will social distancing alter the hero-heroine romance? We need to wait and watch how our films record this phase or how they smartly work around it to show us a world free of the virus on screen.
Legend has it that Shakespeare wrote King Lear when he was in quarantine. The play, written around 1606, had many references to plague that forced theatres to close down and actors to go into quarantine as the disease was feared to be airborne.
Sample this if you want to know how some of plague references got into the dialogues.
Lear’s aide Kent, shouts at the servant: “A plague upon your epileptic visage!” Lear also describes the “plagues that hang in this pendulous air”
In another scene, the King calls his daughter Goneril “a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood!”
Many actors had reportedly died due to the massive outbreak. As a playwright and a shareholder in at least two theatres, Shakespeare must have made the best use of his time in isolation to pen a play. As theatres open post isolation, he had more than one performance ready to go on the floors. And he did not miss to add a signature of the time at which it was conceived, as a reminder of the dark times.
(Dress Circle is a weekly column on films. The author is a communication professional and film enthusiast. Read his past works here.)
