By: Amit kumaR Agarwal
The poster of I Want To Talk, new film from Hindi Film Industry, set the tongues wagging. In this age when you have CGI of stars and superstars flexing 6-pack abs and their not so chiseled bodies perfected with photoshop on the posters; comes a poster showing the paunch of a hero!
Ranbir Kapoor, very bravely, set the precursor with a fleeting look of his belly in Animal in 2023; but t was more than balanced by his - yes 6-pack body - in a major portion of the film.
In IWTT, the actor playing the lead is known to never possess such a physique, even during his peak days from 2003 to 2008; when each of the heroes was working out in the gym for 3 to 4 hours a day!
Going back to the golden era and beyond, till the late-80's, there was no fancy among the leading heroes to have a built-body - the biggest action hero, Amitabh Bachchan and the blokes with solid bodies - Dara Singh, Dharmendra and Vinod Khanna were never known for their 6-pack abs. In fact, when Dharmendra famously went shirtless in 1966 film, Phhol Aur Patthar - his body was a mix of built and fat!
Brings us to the all important question - do heroes really need to have six-packs. The answer is a big 'no' - films essentially tell stories and stories usually have regular people; 90% regular people in India do not have 6-pack abs. Do they?
This brings us to the escapist fare and the utopian dream ideologies - where a majority of film-makers believe that Indian audiences go for escapist fare.
Fine - but if that was really the case, why do 93% films flop?
Answer is, 99% of filmmakers don't know, how to tell a story. Reading almost one-script everyday for friends, I junk 90% of the scripts that I read - saving my friends money.
Point is, what was started off as a tool for the lead to look good onscreen, has taken precedence, at the cost of acting of lead actors.
This holds true not only for male leads but female leads as well. An actress that was very low for about a decade; suddenly found stardom just by showing her toned body in a special appearance in a film. Result - she is not only in the Top-10 lead heroines, but also, charging at par with the top actresses. Now that her latest film has come a cropper, it will impact her surely.
