Brigits_Flame February Entry 04 - Once More, With Feeling!
“And… cut!” Amitabh Filmiwalla shakes his head. It was a bad take. “No, no, yaar. Up on your feet again, Javed.”
The mantrik lays his hands on Javed’s corpse and says, “Live! Live, Javed, live!” There is a faint humming in the air as he says this. The one bullet that didn’t form an exit wound pops out of his gut like a champagne cork, and the hot trickle of blood from his stomach slows, halts, and then reverses entirely. The wounds close.
“We’re doing it again, Javed,” says the mantrik.
Javed’s eyes flutter open, and he says, with a note of profound irritation, “Again? How many times do I have to die today?” A nearby chorus girl, naïve to the processes of filmmaking, sighs happily to know that the mantrik has done him up properly, as though he could do it otherwise.
Filmiwalla slaps his meaty hand into his other meaty hand. “Until you get it right, pretty-boy.”
“I liked it better when we used squibs.”
“Watch it, or you won’t come back after the next take.”
Javed scoffs, kneading his perfect hair into place. “You can’t do that, man. I’ve read my contract.”
Filmiwalla chuckles. “I would never do such a thing to rob the world of your talent, Javed-my-dear. Please. Wardrobe!” this last, not addressed to Javed at all; his blood-soaked clothes are replaced with new, fresh ones.
“So what did I do wrong this time?” says Javed, scratching his stomach, from which blood flowed so, so recently.
Filmiwalla knows what was wrong. A line of ancestors stretching back as far as Independence knows what was wrong with that take - that is why his name is Filmiwalla. He explains.
“You must feel the death.”
“…But I am actually dying. How much more method-acting can you get?”
Filmiwalla has heard this excuse before. “If people wanted to see real death, yaar, they would go to a warzone, not a movie-theater. Don’t you give me that lip-lip-lip!” He squints. He squints when he is displeased.
“Sorry, sir.”
“Bollywood, Javed, is a cinema of melodrama. When you die you must not die as a peasant dies. When you are struck by bullets, it must be poetry: the arc of your blood describing a perfect parabola in the air as your final moments are captured in HD. You get me, bhai?”
“Yeah. If I do this right today, are we done?”
Filmiwalla rubs his beard. “Well, we’re not done with principal photography. And don’t forget, there’s that motion-capture session for your ghost scene next Thursday.”
“Oh! I had forgotten.”
“Do you think you’ve got it, now?”
“Yes. I think I’ve got it, sir.”
“Good,” says Filmiwalla, the greatest director in Lucknow. “Places, everyone! From the top of the number.”
Javed Khan, the handsomest man in Uttar Pradesh, if not all of India, takes his place at the top of the stairs of the temple set. His black hair is a crown of product atop his smooth tan-but-not-too-tan features. His new kurta-pajama are the color of fresh milk.
A passel of chorus girls clad only in the feathers of peacocks and ostriches strut by, taking their places. An elephant, off-stage, makes an excited noise. It loves the movies.
The villain, a dashing fellow in Western dress, prepares to hold the heroine much closer than he ought to at the base of the stairs. She prepares to wail.
Filmiwalla: “And… Action!”
And the chorus girls burst, as they must always burst, into song:
“Oh, how the people of the mountain sing/
The wicked raptor and his tiny mouse/
There he stands at the base of the holy place/
Wrapping the crystal of your love in cloth!”
Javed holds up his hand, and sings:
“You cannot have her, mongrel animal/
Yours is the destiny of sinfulness/
I will rid the world of your villainy - ”
But the villain draws his revolver, hugging the woman close:
“That seems unlikely, Mister - goodbye, schmuck.”
Blam. Blam. The crane shot catches a beautiful spray that arcs like a ray of betel-nut juice, splattering gently on the white marble steps of the temple set. The song concludes with the heroine’s shriek.
Amitabh Filmiwalla jumps to his feet and applauds.
A perfect take.