Angry Young Men - A Review.

 

"Main aaj bhi feke hue paise nahi uthata"- Deewar

 "Jab tak baithne ko na kaha jaaye sharafat se khade raho. Yeh police station hai tumhare baap ka ghar nahi."-Zanjeer

 "Don ka intezar toh gyarah mulkon ki police kar rahi hai.Lekin….. ek baat samajh lo Don ko pakadna mushkil hi nahi, namumkin hai"- Don

 "Aaj mere paas paisa hai, bangla hai, gaadi hai, naukar hai, bank balance hai, aur tumhare paas kya hai?"-Deewar

These iconic dialogues with new storylines reinvented the Bollywood formula, which was romance-centric with a new kind of anti-hero, introducing the "Angry Young Man" in 70's Bollywood, revolutionizing Indian Cinema.

The legendary duo writers Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar single-handedly created this creative shift of popularizing the action-drama genre when they kickstarted the dawn of the "Angry Young Man" with Zanjeer.

Hence, appropriately, a documentary about these two writers and creators, Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, is called "Angry Young Men." I guess Amitabh Bachchan, who was the face of the "Angry Young Man" and immortalized it, will have to title his life series differently one day ;)

This three-part documentary series produced by the duo's kids, Bollywood actors Salman Khan, Farhan Akhtar, director Zoya Akhtar and others, is on Amazon Prime. Directed by Namrata Rao, it walks through the personal and professional journeys of screenplay writer Salim Khan and dialog writer Javed Akhtar while exploring their partnership as "Salim-Javed," who wrote 24 films together, 22 of which were blockbusters!

The series captures nostalgic memories of their early lives, their coming together as a team, their movies, and their iconic dialogues, which were engraved in the minds of Indian audiences and became common parlance. We hear them talking about their philosophies, vulnerabilities, and personal lives reflected in some of their characters; their angry angst mirrored in the "Angry Young Man" and such. Special mention is the amazing story of their confidence in themselves and the need to get screenplay writers deserving recognition and credits on movie posters with cast and crew; they graffitied their names on film posters of Zanjeer across town. Despite sharing some movie trivia and details, the series keeps the curious cine fan skeptical about what caused their split and why the duo stopped working together.

But in retrospect, while seeing the series, when we think of the "Angry Young Man" in Bollywood cinema, we see the rise in the pattern of male-centric movies with no turning back!  In a conversation snippet, Jaya Bhaduri mentions she was initially uncomfortable and unsure of acting in a male-centric movie like Zanjeer but did it for Amitabh's sake.

But unknowingly, did the writers change Bollywood cinema, the audiences, and the culture towards male chauvinism and a patriarchal society? Though the conversation in the series talks about their screenplays having created strong female characters and not namby-pamby women, as Javed says, the persona-building process of the "Angry Young Man" left no space for women to have an equal share of space.

When you see the present-day ripple of the "Angry Young Man" characters in today's Indian film industry, they have left behind Salim- Javed's "little good and little bad anti-hero" to full-blown immoral misogynist heroes!   By creating the "Angry Young Man" action genre, they may be uncomfortable for being partially responsible Frankenstein creators of today's monster heroes in Arjun Reddy/Kabir Singh and Animal!

Check out the series on Amazon Prime.