Why Liger is the perfect cautionary tale for greedy Bollywood producers

There’s a perception that most film critics relish a film’s failure. It’s made to sound like each time a big-ticket film does badly at the box office, these self-anointed gatekeepers of ‘pure cinema’ descend from their pedestals and participate in a celebratory ritual, probably sipping a glass of wine imagining it to be Karan Johar or Aditya Chopra’s blood. Despite what the hashtags might try to convince you of, dear reader, I assure you it’s mostly exaggerated. After sharing our views on the fairly popular, expensive films – we go back to our (usually) miserable lives, only to be hit by snarky tweets about how we must be ‘fun’ at parties. But something I can also profess to you is, despite our preconceived notions about a film, each time the lights dim inside a theatre, most critics root for a film to surprise them. Even if the film is Puri Jagannadh’s Liger .

Marketed as another one of the ‘pan-India’ films, which seem to be the craze of the moment, Liger has opened to ‘mixed’ reviews – which is a kind, diplomatic way of saying it’s been trashed by nearly all reputed publications in the country. However, this is not the first time that a popular ‘mainstream’ film has gotten bad reviews — since that rarely seems to affect a film’s box office. What is even more surprising is the silence around the film’s box office numbers. Even producer Karan Johar, who wouldn’t usually miss out on an opportunity to brag about ‘decent’ box office figures (like in the case of Jugjugg Jeeyo ), seems to have moved on to his studio’s next release: Brahmastra , which will release on Sept 9. If a film does well, everyone usually shouts about it from the roof-tops and it’s not uncommon to see full-page ads in newspapers about the film’s massive collections. Therefore, it’s not very hard to decode the silence around Liger.

It’s not a matter of what one perceives to be Liger’s place in the pantheon of ‘art’ – but rather what a film like it represents (especially in 2022). Starring Vijay Deverakonda and Ananya Panday, Liger is such a blatant attack on good taste and ‘progressive’ values that one might even be forgiven for thinking of the film as a version of a social media troll.

It’s the kind of film so openly misogynist in its gaze that (believe it or not) the first line of the film is: “God created dolls called women, to make a man’s life hell.” Advocates of masala movies can rest easy – because there are at least dozens of examples over the years, which have been able to balance out their potboiler aesthetic with values that don’t cause seizures. Liger is the kind of film where the ‘doll’ in question – Tanya (Ananya Panday) is so spectacularly shallow and silly that she falls in love with a man after watching him fight. She then goes on to stalk him all the way to his residence, where she propositions him as the hero’s mum (played by Ramya Krishnan) compares all girls to ‘distractions’.

However, this is still not the lowest Liger will stoop to showcase how much it hates women. Tanya has an entire courtship with the protagonist without realising he stutters, despite multiple scenes that show her calling him under different pretexts. And when she does find out (around the Interval point) – she treats it with a kind of shame one would associate with a mainstream Bollywood film talking about AIDS in the 1990s. When she’s asked why she ‘led on’ our hero – who seems to be asking the question with a hockey stick in his hand – her response is, “I was drunk!” But wait, we’re not done yet. In the film’s final 15 mins, we find out that the girl was deliberately rude to the man – because she actually has a heart of gold, and that she didn’t want to become a distraction for our hero, and wanted to motivate him to take part in the MMA World Championships. There are so many twists and turns to this woman, she might have made the perfect villain in an Abbas-Mustan thriller. Despite what one might feel about her ‘ability’, one almost feels bad for Ananya Panday for being served with a character so severely underwritten.

However, while we reserve our sympathies for everyone involved in this atrocious film on a human-level, we must also note that such films also comprise very deliberate choices. For a production house like Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions – even while largely espousing patriarchal values over the years – the women in his films have still been bestowed with dignity and agency in some form. The character of Tanya takes Dharma Productions to a whole new dimension – putting it in the company of the scores of film production houses across the country that normalise showing one gender in an unfair light, for the purposes of ‘mass entertainment’. What’s worrying is if Bollywood royalty like Dharma Productions could resort to such “old school” methods of mass entertainment – something we thought we had left behind  – what should we expect from those lower in the pecking order?

It’s understandable that the Hindi film business is going through a dry spell, and no one wants to listen to sermons right now. But do we sincerely want to undo all the (relatively little) good work that Hindi cinema has done since the 2000s. From my conversations with trade analysts over the past few weeks, almost everyone has implied that Hindi cinema has become too ‘urban’ and ‘sophisticated’ – and has therefore lost out on the ‘mass’ connect. Films headlined by the likes of Vidya Balan, Taapsee Pannu, Bhumi Pednekar — that found a niche of their own during the 2010s – are now being relegated to release only on OTTs. Not just that, even if the grammar of a blockbuster film remains overwhelmingly ‘male’ – do we seriously have to resort to a Liger in order to save the filmmaking business? If films like Liger and characters like Tanya become the norm again in 2022, is the industry even worth saving?

Which is why Liger’s failure is the right moment to make people introspect. Do we want to dip our toes in ‘old school’ (read: morally abhorrent) cinema, only to make a few extra bucks? Can the values perpetuated by an industry be traded in our pursuit for a ‘pan-India’ success?

I can assure you, most critics aren’t rejoicing around Liger’s failure. They’re only heaving a sigh of relief around the fact that there’s a limit to how certain filmmakers can take the audience for granted. It’s established now that glitzy, shiny promotional material can’t make anything fly.

Tatsam Mukherjee has been working as a film journalist since 2016. He is based out of Delhi NCR.

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