KHOSLA KA GHOSLA :: Creative Character Exposition

NO SPOILERS

In order to have your audience root for your characters, you need to sometimes provide their backstories. Backstories are the incidents that have happened in the characters’ lives before the time frame of the story that is playing during the movie. The simplest way a screenwriter can tell you about a person’s history is by dialogue, which is the most frequently used tool, especially in the Indian cinema.

The Jazz Singer (1927) is the first film which had a synchronized audio and therefore dialogue. As you may have thought, it was the technological marvel of those times and people lost their minds over it, like we do today at 4DX and Dolby Atmos perhaps! Now whenever a new thing is brought into play, filmmakers tend to use it to extreme limits in order to tell their stories better. This led to a belief that using dialogue is lazy and, bad! But, I am not saying that all dialogue is bad, look at how wonderfully Sidney Lumet told the story of 12 Angry Men (1957) relying heavily on dialogue! The dialogue is considered ‘bad’ only when it is quirky. When two people who were present during the accident start discussing with each other how it happened, it feels weird! Anything that doesn’t happen the way it happens in real life, feels weird on screen! So then, how would you convey a character’s biography visually? Or coupling it with dialogue that doesn’t feel weird? Let us have a look at how Jaideep Sahni, the screenwriter, and Dibakar Banerjee, the director, tackle this problem in the case of Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006).

Khosla Ka Ghosla is a dual or a double protagonist film. A protagonist is a person about whom the story is told or through his eyes. Narrators use either inter-cuts or give each protagonist one half of the film to give justification to both the characters’ perspective. To have the story remain interesting and move forward we need antagonists or the villains of the story. Now it is entirely possible that one of the protagonist acts as an antagonist to another, like in Michael Mann’s top notch Collateral (2004), which Bollywood shamelessly copied as The Killer (2006), but that is a discussion for another day! Now it sure forms an interesting narrative, but such is not the case in the film we are here for. The two protagonists, who are on the same side are: Kamal Kishore ‘K.K.’ Khosla, the father and Chiraunjilal ‘Cherry’ Khosla, the middle child in the Khosla family. As an obstruction to the protagonists we have a very strong antagonist: Kishen Khurana, a cunning property businessman and his two sidekicks: Munjal and Vijendar, the property broker. We have strong supporting characters in the form of Bunty Khosla(the eldest child), Asif Iqbal and Bapu. All these characters whose names I’ve mentioned are the playing eleven of the team. There are other characters too, like Cherry’s love interest, his mother, his sister, but sadly they only act as background music in the story. You may have noticed that all the main players are males, a criticism which this film should receive. The director of the film has himself confessed of the mistake of portraying the story as patriarchal and that is, I think, a very good thing to do on his part. [a] Let us now start looking at how this film creatively tells us, about each of these characters one by one.

This film starts telling you about the Khosla family directly through the title credits, it doesn’t wait for the narrative to begin. Have a look at some of the title cards below, hover over for captions:

K.K. Khosla and Sudha Khosla marry

First child Bunty and second child Cherry

Third child, late born

Entire famliy

Through the title cards, now you know who is who and of whom and what/who the film is about: the Khosla family. Now what the story should tell you is what the protagonist(s) think about each of these characters, because that is what will present their perspective and help the ball rolling. The writer achieves this through a dream sequence, which is also the establishing shot of the film. It is a one-shot where one of our protagonist imagines that he is dead and how the characters around him react to it mainly his two sons and that is our first impression of both of them. It is a well-composed scene where the dead body is lying on the floor wrapped around in a white cloth while the drama takes place around it. Bunty discusses cricket and enquires about his neighbor’s expensive watch. This tells us two things about Bunty, he is aimless in life and yet wants to become rich and is attracted towards the expensive things. Cherry is in a hurry and is searching for the car keys, he even checks the dead body’s pockets before he finds them and begins to leave. Cherry is definitely not like Bunty, he is busy and is dedicated, perhaps stuck in the web of the corporate sector, he doesn’t have free time like Bunty to talk to the neighbors. All seems absurd until the body is revealed to be of K.K. Khosla’s and he wakes up in his bed with a match-cut.

Bunty and Cherry, brothers, but so opposite in nature. The director then emphasizes on their differences by showing us how they sleep. Because sleeping postures are known to reveal characters and it can be an effective and creative tool to reveal the character traits. [b] Analyze the two images of Bunty and Cherry sleeping, no description, judge yourself! Pay attention to the book lying next to Bunty, it will help make our initial judgement formidable.

Bunty

Cherry

Now, let us see how the filmmakers establish the evil guys in the story. One of the side-kicks of Khurana, the main villain, is Vijendar. He has an interesting character, he doesn’t seem bad at first but shows signs of being bad. How do you show something that is untrustworthy and can go awry? Well there are ten million things out there, but here they use the colour RED! This colour is seen by us mostly in danger signs and when we see it, our mind becomes a bit more alert. [c] But, how can you use it? You can put objects red in colour all around Vijendar, including the wall behind him. You see red and you feel something fishy behind Vijendar’s smile.

Red colour helps in creating doubt. But when it is confirmed that Vijendar is bad, how do you show that transformation? The most common technique to show that, is a camera angle called ‘low-angle’. It is used to show dominance of a character and is mostly used for bad guys, at least initially. The director here couples it by showing the character eat. Eating also helps convey a sense of power, it was very nicely used in Jolly LLB (2013) for Judge Tripathi, which became very famous.

One thing I found very interesting is how the paintings were used to convey the qualities of the characters. Khurana usurps the land of Khoslas and is shown as a predator who preys on innocent souls like K.K. Khurana. Also present is the under-light, a lighting technique which conveys the mystery or evil characteristics of a person. This light is present under the character’s face and forms uncomfortable shadows.

One more character: Bapu, who is supposed to have a royal characteristic and is supposed to behave royally, is shown to be looking at a painting. I cannot go into more details because then it will spoil the movie for you.

Now there is one more important technique, and this is my favourite, so I’ve saved the best for the last. The other protagonist of the story is Cherry or Chiraunjilal Khosla. Now in the 2-hour time span of the film one cannot tell you everything about the character, for example, where he studied, what he does, where he works etc. This is done very nicely in this film. Cherry is a computer engineer from an IIT who works in a multinational company. This is how the film chooses to show that.

IIT Delhi

MSN Search

All said and done, these creative character expositions wouldn’t have mattered a bit if the script would’ve been bad. The script is the foundation on which all of these secondary visual cues lie, to be noticed by someone. When someone notices them, they start to appreciate the detailing the film has gone through. If the good artists, like those involved with this film, start getting appreciation, they will get motivated to create more such content for us, thereby getting us out of the content crisis. It is the dire need of the hour that all of us take initiatives to promote VISUAL LITERACY. You can ignore my words, but not Martin Scorsese’s, can you?

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