Malayalam cinema may be hot in the must-watch list of film buffs across the world today, courtesy the OTT wave which introduced the movies of backwater Kerala into their viewing preferences. Much of the credit however goes to the talented lot of filmmakers for whom themes and trends are constantly popping up, it looks, to be exploited and shaped up into a decent, watchable entertainers.
One such 2011 release ‘Traffic’ which was remade in Hindi with the same name is a road thriller film, a new genre in itself. Of course, there are travel films which keep getting made in Bollywood now and then, where the action is shown on the roads with the hero and heroine part of an action social genre. This again were the outputs of rebel type of directors like Ram Gopal Varma for whom staying within the commercial format and presenting watchable films was constantly a challenge to be conquered.
The film under discussion here was made in a hyperlink format which film critic Baradwaj Rangan described ‘the back-and-forth-in-time narrative structure’ was remade in Hindi in 2016. The star cast was impressive beginning with Manoj Bajpayee, Jimmy Shergill and Bengali superstar Prosenjit Chatterjee etc. Sachin Khedekar and Divya Dutta, who has been seen in many middle-of-the-road ventures were also present.
Like in other languages, the film in Hindi was also noticed and appreciated. It managed to cover its costs, as per box-office data, which was unsure of its overall status. On an investment of Rs 9 crore, it ended up making Rs. 12 crore approximately. The tragedy however was that the director of the film, Rajesh Pillai, who was hailed for his path-breaking work in his native language did not live to see the film’s release. This is especially striking as he had prioritized the Hindi version over the Tamil one, in which Kamal Haasan had shown interest in remaking it. He had to leave it to his assistant to shape it up in Tamil which was well received as the film was based on an incident in Chennai.