Sangharsh's young, female director with excellent pedigree (father, mother, brother, sister are all somebody in Bombay), Tanuja Chandra says in a TV interview that she would like to make films that appeal to the lowest common denominator in the audience. She doesn't care about the critic and the connoisseur. The beaming interviewer responds that it is very healthy attitude towards film-making. The lowest common denominator in any audience is likely to be a complete moron. Why make a film for him? Why do we always hide behind this unintelligent audience and justify our rotten products? Why do we take recourse to this rickshaw-puller who after a hard day's work wants to be just entertained? How do we know?
There is a sequence in the film where the hero goes berserk in a chemist shop, breaking shelf after shelf because the shopkeeper has marked up the prices. What if the producers of the Hollywood thriller, Silence of the Lambs, also go berserk for marking down their concoction. Look, it's perfectly alright to copy and rehash and sell if you can make money and avoid the law. There are hundreds of industries which thrive this way. But the film's firebrand scriptwriter, Mahesh Bhatt, has always been angered by our depraved society. Strangely, the champion of original thought has a repertoire that would seem like the insides of a Xerox machine. But Bhatt copies only the best. Silence of the Lambs is only one of the three Hollywood films to get the grand slam in Oscars - best film, director, actor, actress and screenplay. The first, the 1934 Clark Gable caper, It Happened One Night, has already been rehashed as the highly successful Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin by him. One shudders to think what will become of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest!

According to Chandra, Sangharsh is also a "woman-power" film. Because she is a woman and in her own words "she sees the world from a woman's perspective". Well, her stolen perspective is that of Thomas Harris, author of Silence of the Lambs and Jonathan Demme, the director of the film, who are both fairly burly men. The character of Clarice (Jodie Foster) is far more powerful than our bumbling CBI trainee Reet Oberoi (Priety Zinta). If dressing up in a business suit is an assertion of woman power then air-hostesses are the greatest feminists. The point is, why harp on something that a film is not.
Sangharsh should, at best, have been marketed as a spoof on the original. Casting Akshay Kumar in place of Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter is a stroke of genius for a madcap comedy. Sadly, the film misses the point. Our professor (one wonders what he taught, and where) is a victim of the system, a typical Mahesh Bhatt line, and is rotting in jail. But only he can help catch the psychopathic killer, Lajja Shankar, who believes that sacrificing young children to Goddess Durga will make him immortal. Shankar only kills kids on solar eclipse. He must have the singular distinction of being the only man to have seen 40 eclipses. Somehow, Lajja Shankar has constructed this maze of tunnels that leads to a huge chamber where he sacrifices. It's a miracle how he can view the sun getting covered by the shadow of the moon through a little hole. All the scientists who made elaborate plans to reach Bhuj in Gujarat to get a glimpse of the recent eclipse and came back with clouded visions must have got it wrong. The climax is so unending that even a Pamela Anderson would have been exhausted.

Why can't we at least steal well? The chilling interludes between Foster and Hopkins in the original are reduced to the kind of conversation just-met boy and girl have over coffee. So, which school did you go to? Did you like your mom or dad better? There the two develop a relationship that of a tutor and the taught. Dr Lecter is hungry for intellectual stimulation. He trades information he has on Buffalo Bill, the psychopath, for bits of personal detail from Foster. After a long time he has found an interesting subject to psychoanalyse. Here the two dream of frolicking in the snow.
And why can't we make a straight thriller? Sangharsh touches upon terrorism in Punjab, politics in the police force, sexual harassment, the opportunistic politician, greedy businessmen, the minority issue, religious bigotry and of course gender equality. Phew!
The most frightening thing about Sangharsh is that it is from a team of young, literate and urbane film-makers. It's okay if it was some C-grade film. But this is top of the line. The best you can get from a thinking team. People who appear for interviews on TV's more "thought-provoking" shows. At the least, you expect mediocre stuff.