It is inherently difficult to adapt anything to anything. In fact, it’s startling that Bollywood still does that. Out of all the adaptations ever made, the one that really made sense was “Agga Bai Arricha”, the Marathi film inspired by Mel Gibson’s “What Women Want”. “Agga Bai Arricha” is a jaw-droppingly incredible piece of film-making. That film is at the forefront of what continues to be the evolution of the Marathi Film Industry. But this article is about another Marathi film that’s now going to see an official Indian adaptation.
You know this one – “Sairat” – whose Hindi remake is named “Dhadak”. I will be amiss to tell you that while Dhadak is a remake of Sairat, the entire DNA of “Dhadak” is much different than “Sairat”. And the audience doesn’t need to be too nuanced to see that. In fact, there’s been an announcement that “Dhadak” will be a lighter take on the raw, brutal story that “Sairat” was. Industry insiders are dubbing this as that the protagonists won’t die in “Dhadak”. As a budding scriptwriter, I see only three outcomes for this:
They have a ‘they are in heaven’ sequence that is at par with Russel Crowe’s “Gladiator” one, directed by Ron Howard.
They kill them, but they actually do justice to the ‘why’, because they’d be dying only to be away from the judgmental world, right?
The couple go through so much that death is sweet justice – kinda like Frederick Forsyth’s The Afghan, where the protagonist loses a hand by the end but the reader still thinks that’s a positive outcome.,
But who are we kidding? The Karan Johar camp has it in them, but even they will find it difficult to find a fourth example in the list I gave up there. When Dharma announced they’d be remaking “Agneepath” and not having Mithun’s character, the 90s kid in me bawled my eyes out. But even I grudgingly accepted that their Rauf Lala was a much better character. Now, I tremble seeing the trailer and songs of “Dhadak” and comparing it to “Sairat”. Today, we got the first screenplay level comparison of the two films – and it doesn’t look good.
The original Zingaat Song is the song of an unsung, unheard India. There’s people driving triples, there’s alcohol being served along, there’s people who weren’t supposed to dance, dancing to the beat, there’s Mumbai, there’s Konkan, there’s India.
In the Dhadak Zingaat, they dab.
They synchronise and dab.
They do some disco dandiya step and dab.
It’s not just that – it’s the art direction of Dhadak that gets to you. That makes you shout out to Karan Johar that this isn’t the essence of “Sairat”. The entire trailer, every sequence, every image reeks of a Disney-ed version of a film – hell, even Disney is killing off characters now. While the “Sairat” art direction made you lick your lips to check whether some speck of dust from the village sand has settled on your upper lip, “Dhadak” seems to have been made squeaky clean with some expensive cleaning mixture by an overpaid worker.
This is not the Dhadak we wanted out of Sairat.