Don’t call my agent

The only way I can explain having watched it all is that I was too aghast to move as the shambolic scenes unfolded

On the one hand, we get intriguing news items about Pooja Dadlani, Shah Rukh Khan’s manager, and complex negotiations. On the other, we get Call My Agent, Bollywood.

The Indian adaptation of the effervescent hit French show Call My Agent (Dix pour Cent) is so stunningly awful, that a new term should be created for watching it. The term hate-watch—a form of schadenfreude, where you watch a much touted show or movie for the grim satisfaction of knowing that someone may be more rich, famous and hot, but you’re better than them because you haven’t made that shit (or even better, not made anything at all) —is too passionate for this limp and dull series. The only way I can explain having watched it all is that I was too aghast to move as the shambolic scenes unfolded.

Adaptations can be buoyant, like umbrella-cut skirts, because they are cut on the cross of a story’s fabric, cleverly using the material to reveal something new about a different time or context. Call My Agent Bollywood is only unintentionally revelatory: about why Indian mainstream programming is so mediocre. The answer is obvious—privilege and how disconnected it makes people from the rest of the world.

The French show for those who have not seen it, is about an agency that manages movie people—mostly actors, and some directors and writers. It stars famous French actors playing themselves and bubbles with a tongue-in-cheek self-awareness and a jangly energy of fragile egos, competitiveness, opportunism, shallowness and humour. But it is also all about the marvelousness of stars, the electricity and charm their presence brings to something, a defense of creative passion and human foolishness. Watching the actors in this show puts the play back in player, like in an episode where Monica Belucci entertains the idea that she needs to date a ‘regular guy’ and utters the unforgettable dialogue, “I think I frighten phalluses, Gabriel”.

The Indian version is about a group of people who have nothing to tell us about Bollywood, cinema, life or people. The only thing they have to tell us is: we’re so cool, that we are making the Indian wala Call My Agent and that we speak English with a few janabs thrown in. That the show sets Bollywood in South Bombay, itself reveals how it has sanitised Bollywood out of the story to create some kind of weird English-speaking universe which mimics the French series and characters minus any sharp observations about the very film industry that the makers are part of. The queer romance is also re-purposed for self-congratulation rather than storytelling about the characters and the sexy auditor spends so much energy holding her body in the sexy tummy-in, bust-out, apsara pose that we become desperate for some air, some warmth, some desire, some greed, or just anyone not in a linen sari. At times Tigmanshu Dhulia, Ila Arun, Sarika, Richa Chadha and Ali Fazal, bring a sliver of style to the proceedings, but it takes two to make love.

And the love is entirely missing from this show—love of work, of understanding people, love for your own world, and love of your audience, which fuels the desire to resonate and entertain. That this heart-shaped emptiness in the media industry, needs mending, is what the show unwittingly helps us to see. 

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

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