Of Movie Certification, Dubbing and The Mess Around It

(pic:wikimedia.com)

Amidst a legacy of banning screening of movies with scripts that even tangentially deal with the delicate matter of religion and religious institutions, the State of Tamilnadu and cities of Hyderabad and Benglur have successfully upheld this trend and proceeded to either ban or stop screening of Viswaroopam (a Tamil movie made by Kamal Haasan).

If this episode made one crowd raise dust by alleging this move as cultural terrorism by the Tamilnadu State, another termed it as a murder of art in the cinema form, while yet another demanded the grounds on which a State government can ban screening of a movie that has been certified as appropriate for the Indian audience by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). While interpretations about this being akin to an act of terrorism or a murder of any form of art are open to subjective debate, the argument that a CBFC certification should be enough for a movie of any genre and topic to warrant screening anywhere in India - a country with as diverse movie tastes as its cultural footprint - is nothing but a belittling of the natural variety in the tastes of the movie-goers in this country. It is but a fantasy to assume that one single board, notwithstanding its size, can certify movies as appropriate or inappropriate for an entire country as diverse and populous as India.

If the certifying board, CBFC, found no objectionable content in Viswaroopam why is its maker finding himself in the midst of such a judicial stalemate in his home and neighboring States? Why are people from his own neighborhood not finding his movie appropriate while a certifying board far displaced from his people found it appropriate? If the Viswaroopam episode has anything to offer for the thinkers and legislators in this country, then it must be the fundamental question of the validity of a central body such as the CBFC itself.

In this age of technology that enables movies made in any language to be dubbed and simultaneously released in all other languages of the world in their respective markets, it is surprising that we are still living with a mechanism so obsolete as to certify movies for the entire subcontinent. Film markets such as Karnataka still practise an unwritten ban on entertainment dubbed in Kannada caring little for the same CBFC certification that these dubbed movies may carry with them. The reasons behind such banning could be several, but the CBFC is apparently blind to such concerns, neither is it empathetic of the audience's entertainment aspirations, thereby leading to unhealthy breaches of a free-market and avoidable litigation.

A certifying body much closer to the audience and finely savvy of its aspirations is the need of the hour. Film certification in India today carries little value in the local context and is therefore leading to all types of conflicts related to screening of entertainment content, leading only to the disappointment of the end consumer of such content. Ironically, the real decider of the quality of a movie and if it is certifiable or not - the end consumer - is being kept in darkness thanks to a deadly combination of an obsolete certification process and a delicate social equilibrium. This has to come to an end by drawing the curtains down on a national certification ideology and letting the markets take it bottoms-up.