What about Anees? Well, buzz me!

Director and writer Anees Bazmee. PIC/ASHISH RAJE

Trust you me: I've been among film buffs at film festivals for long enough to be this gobsmacked, hosting a conversation with Anees Bazmee, 63, before a live audience, at the Jagran Film Festival in Mumbai - surrounded by such die-hard fans, in a para-social relationship with a particular movie by the director, Welcome (2007), listing out favourite characters, lines, scenes…

The claps don't stop.

A woman in the hall reminisces how she had a broken leg with "Ek taang nakli hai" (actor Mushtaq Khan's monologue) scribbled on her plaster. Watching Welcome helped her recuperate.

Another girl declaims at length about how the film, for her, was "treatment for mental health," recalling the climax sequence, with the entire cast inside a tree-house type structure, balancing on a bamboo stick.

Bazmee tells us a friend insisted on having him over for dinner with his dad. It's when he made it there, he realised, the father had once been muted, paralysed for two years.

Stills from the absurdist comedies No Entry (2005)

The dad had been meaning to play Welcome on TV. It took his son a month to figure this. For a year after, Bazmee says, the father watched the movie in continuous loop, before he got okay.

Ah; what? The audience in the hall, I count from a show of hands, is still equally split between their love for Welcome and Bazmee's No Entry (2005).

"Oh, 50-50," Bazmee exults. The number one No Entry fan tells us he was six, when he watched it in the theatre, and decided to become a filmmaker.

Which is rather early, for picking a career - if not for a picture, about philandering married men that, at its core, is a sex comedy; right?

Must be a generation thing, I reason in my head, when another 20-something, this time onstage, similarly goes berserk reciting "Aloo le lo" vegetable-cart scene, from a film being shot, within Welcome, that's also titled Welcome.

Welcome (2007)

Whichever way you look at it, Welcome - about literally getting married to the mob, inspired by the Hugh Grant romcom, Mickey Blue Eyes (1999), but altogether a leap of faith so over the top of anything to do with general intellect - is, essentially, a children's picture.

Bazmee says, "If you skip 30 minutes of any movie, you might feel lost. You can watch Welcome, from any point to another, or simply follow the characters, Majnu Bhai (Anil Kapoor), Uday Shetty (Nana Patekar), RDX (Feroz Khan), Dr Ghungroo (Paresh Rawal)…."

That's how sketch/situational comedies work, I guess. Also, a reason why so many survive generations - whether Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983) for one, Andaz Apna Apna (1994) for another; indeed, Charlie Chaplin (1914-1961), forever, while dramas, other emo genres, from the same eras, remain largely forgotten.

I once asked actor-producer Aamir Khan what he thought was a good script. He said one where you can't help but wonder, throughout, "What happens next?" I asked him for its best example. He said?

"Sandwich (2006)!"

Singh Is Kinng (2008)

It's the absurdist comedy, with Govinda, that Bazmee directed, sandwiched between No Entry and Welcome.

Hear Bazmee briefly narrate its plot, "There's Govinda, in double role, married to two women - one in village, other in the city. The former wife moves to the city, too.

"Both wives have a child, who look exactly like each other. Village kid gets admitted to the same school as the city kid. One look at each other, the kids know, there's something amiss…" And then?

Few have seen Sandwich. "The film couldn't release as per plan," Bazmee sighs.

Everybody knows Welcome, I suspect, because its release coincided with the explosion of social media, wherein its scenes/dialogues, especially starring Nana Patekar, got immortalised as reels, memes; continuing to be shared online. Perhaps, this was Patekar's first comedy.

On his part, Patekar was clear he wanted his scenes in hand, at least the night before shoot. Bazmee works on his own timeline.

He says, "I'd write them overnight, but slip the script through Nana Ji's door at 4 am, and tell him the next day, ‘But you were sleeping'!"

Somewhere in that spontaneous combustion, sometimes, resides the magic of the madcap mainstream.

Bazmee tells me he wrote David Dhawan's blockbuster, Aankhen (1993), over 15 days, while the shoot was already booked for Hyderabad, with nothing in place, besides the leads, Chunky Panday and Govinda.

To be fair to Bazmee, he had patiently narrated Welcome's script to Patekar over three hours - offering him the three minutes' and thirty minutes' options as well.

He spelt out the script of Singh Is Kinng (2008) to Akshay Kumar "over the phone, in five minutes flat", the morning after he came up with it. That was enough. Kumar was on.

In hindsight, Singh Is Kinng feels like the culmination of Bazmee's absurdist comic trilogy (No Entry, Welcome) that's rapidly expanded its fandom from that decade.

It's also my favourite of the three. This is for a larger reason, besides that it's just funnier, more sorted, as an overall movie.

And that's do with the film this Sikh/Punjabi madness, about a simpleton stuck among mafia, is evidently inspired from: Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai (1960), completely dark, social, dacoit drama, produced, enacted by Raj Kapoor.

Who would've thunk that! Bazmee began his directing career assisting Raj Kapoor.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.