Time Travel:
A net search reveals that Naam was completed in 2004. It was titled Benaam then and remained unreleased, possibly because of the demise of the producer Dinesh Patel, or maybe some other disclosed reason.
Twenty years in the life of a film is like another entering another era. Ajay was still Devgan not Devgn, Anees Bazmee was not yet the Bhool Bhulaiya hotshot. Now, leading ladies, Bhumika Chawla and Sameers Reddy are no longer in the running. Rahul Dev has graduated from henchman to main villain. At least two of the supporting actors have died. It was still possible to pick up an idea from Face/Off and The Long Kiss Goodnight, and Bollywoodize it, without anyone shouting plagiarism.
It takes both courage and optimism to release a film when its bones are creaking. Had the film been out 20 years ago, it might have been an average grosser with the action, emotions and Ajay Devgn’s performance—his face is far less smooth, but his talent has not blunted. It is nostalgia-evoking to see how our films used to be in the past – unashamedly massy, with lip-sync songs, awful comedy tracks, ghastly off-the-rack costumes, loud generic background music, unsophisticated fight sequences without the use of wire work or CGI, and to hell with continuity!
A man (Ajay Devgn) is found unconscious on a beach, with bullet wounds and when he recovers, he cannot remember anything. He marries Pooja (Bhumika Chawla), the doctor who treated him and gave him the name Shekhar—that immediately dates the film if the actors’ unlined skins don’t—the name has fallen out of vogue in films at least. They live in an isolated mansion in Manali, have a daughter (Shriya Sharma) whom Shekhar dotes on, and there’s that family song, which has been mercifully dropped from today’s films. Himesh Reshammiya was the music director and he is not the craze he used to be,
A glimpse of his face on television, brings murderous goons to his house, and with muscle memory kicking in, Shekhar kills them all. There must have been a part of his past that involved violence, so to protect his family from another attack, he goes to Mumbai to find out who he was and why are people out to kill him.
It can happen only in films that a female sidekick, a hooker named Lovely (Sameera Reddy) attaches herself to him. As soon as he is seen, word goes out that Amar Kumar is alive, and hordes of armed men and as well as cops go after him. Lovely, of course, falls in love with Shekhar/Amar, and is willing to risk her life to help him solve the mystery of his identity. There were no smartphones and info-spewing computers then, so it takes driving around and being shot at regularly to get closer to the truth. Miraculously traffic free Mumbai roads are found for shootouts, and the hoodlums go running about having shooting sprees in hotels, clubs, and a cop station—the only one calling for the police is a cop! It eventually gets to the old go-to plot device, if there is a wife and a daughter in the picture, they are meant to get kidnapped.
Today’s action films are slick and far more violent, and often even a high level of crowd-pandering does not work at the box-office. If Naam was actually made today, there wouldn’t even have been enough audiences to boo it out of the halls. It is the kind of film that slips out of the mind in the time it takes to get home from the theatre. But Naam has time travelled from 2004, when films could have a slap-dash look and audiences were far less demanding and far more forgiving.
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)
