There is a lot happening in Anurag Basu’s life. His Barfi! is earning huge moolah (at last count it has collected over 100 crores worldwide) and also benefited from critical acclaim, hence turning out to be India’s official nomination for Oscars. Meanwhile the wounds of Kites have been well taken care of as well. While Anurag has certainly fulfilled all the promises made with Barfi!, that was not quite the case with his big ticket film Kites. What was designed as a cross over international project ended up leaving a lukewarm impression amongst audiences.
In retrospect, what does Anurag think really went wrong with the Hrithik starrer?
Says Anurag after a pause, “See, you can’t pin point on things. We all gave 100% to the film, whether it is Hrithik Roshan, Rakeshji or myself. So whatever we did, it required discussions and approvals from all involved. Decisions had to be unanimous as well. That’s okay, at that time I didn’t complain about the process.”
Guess it was nothing less than poetic justice with ‘Barfi!’. While the film has got unanimously good reviews, when it came to ‘Kites’, a lot of reviews called it many names.
“Frankly, I didn’t even read many reviews of ‘Kites’. I chose to look at only those international reviews that talked positively about the film”, laughs Anurag, “The negative reviews were the ones that I totally ignored. In any case, I still had something to gain. For my earlier films and now ‘Barfi!’ I had got a lot of critical acclaim in Bollywood. Now for ‘Kites’, I found good reviews in USA as well. In fact the film did well internationally.”
He goes on to through some facts and figures.
“If you go to ‘Rotten Tomatoes’, the average rating of ‘Kites’ is over 80%. Now on IMDB, ‘Barfi!’ is standing at a rating of 9.1. Chalo, kuch toh faayada hua”, smiles Anurag before signing off.
