By Surendra Bhatia
The first look of a film is very important or not really important, depending on the creative forces behind the project. With some, the first-look launch is as lavish as the production of an item number while with others, it is understated, like a trial balloon floated up to figure out which path promotions should take. With Aamir, it always ends up being slightly unique, because his philosophy seems to be to stick to the need and mood of the project rather than just splash things around to garner public attention.
The first look of his latest — and much-awaited — Laal Singh Chaddha is nothing more than a simple poster, featuring Aamir as the Sardar he is playing in the film. The film is an official remake of the 1994 Oscar winner, Forrest Gump in which Tom Hanks played an extremely and obsessively innocent character (some might dub the character mentally challenged). So, what does Aamir’s poster have that is unique? Actually, a lot even though it is nothing more than a photograph… the innocence in his Sardar character’s eyes is mesmerising. Incredibly, Aamir, with that one photograph, has captured all the innocence epitomised by the Forrest Gump character. How he has managed it is difficult to answer except that he had more or less achieved a definite change of another look when he transformed himself into a college student in 3 Idiots!
With just that one poster, audiences know what they are going to get to see in Laal Singh Chaddha. That is the real triumph of Aamir’s first-look poster.
There are stars and stars. The norm among stars in Bollywood is the signature style. The first look of Salman Khan’s films can easily be interchanged among his projects. Almost all of them have blasts going off in the backdrop and a heavily muscled and topless star in the foreground… that apparently is enough for a Salman film. For Shah Rukh, not so much now as earlier, the first-look of his films had him stretching out his arms for the heroine (or the world or audiences?) with a romantic soft focus backdrop… and the pretty heroine’s face in some corner. The first-look of Salman and Shah Rukh films is more about the stars than their films. But nothing of the usual suits Aamir… The first-look of his films is always about the film, and not as much about him. Yes, it is a fact that it gets talked about because of Aamir but only because he stays in context of his film. No wonder, Salman and Shah Rukh are signature stars while Aamir has a signature that undergoes a change with every film. If he was a college student in 3 Idiots and a small-town teacher in Taare Zameen Par, a wrestler and a fat old man in Dangal, he was a mad-hatter music composer in Secret Superstar, and in each role, his look (and also the film narrative) was absolutely different. It helps, of course, that he grew real muscles for Ghajini, added huge and real kilos for Dangal and has grown a long wild beard for Laal Singh Chaddha, instead of using a fake daadhi. His search for authenticity starts with himself and adhesively glues itself to the film. This may be the reason why just a single poster of an Aamir film is enough to pique audiences’ curiosity and have them ready to flock to cinemas on the opening day.
