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Siddharth Anand, director of Bachna, denies that it was the concept that appealed to him. “It all depends on the story. It isn’t as if we wake up one day and say we’ll make a film with one hero and three heroines.” Dev Anand’s Teen Devian was one of the first films to explore this concept, as early as in 1965. It was given a twist by Ananth Mahadevan in Dil Maange More in 2004. Mahadevan, who had Shahid Kapur being attracted to three women one after the other in the film, states that the idea helps to depict a hero who “confronts all the colours of love”. Mahadevan asserts, “It never happens in real life the way it does in the movies. You never marry your first love. In DMM, we stuck to reality within the realms of comedy and romance.”
Dev Anand agrees, “You meet a variety of human beings. There are beautiful girls who cannot speak and ugly girls who get more beautiful when they speak. You can never tell what incites a man’s fantasies.” In fact, Dev Anand believes that why just three, a film can have 10 women opposite a hero too.
Surely, when an actor plays a role where more than one heroine is attracted to him, it affects his image. Mahadevan believes that it does give the actor a romantic image. Dev Anand was always the ultimate romantic hero and Teen Devian helped him cement his image. Komal Nahata, trade analyst, and Shahid Kapoor disagree, however.
According to Kapoor, “The audience is intelligent enough to know that you are not like the character you portray.”
Nahata does accept that a film is traditionally expected to be more marketable if it has more heroes than heroines. “The strength of the heroes is what usually sells a movie,” he says. But he also states that, “In the end, it is the story that works.” That is what Dev Anand, Mahadevan and Siddharth believe too. That is why, though Hindi cinema is known for falling back on tried-and-tested-formulae, the fact that this concept was not one did not worry either Dev Anand or Mahadevan and nor does it worry Siddharth. Dev Anand justifies the choice of subject saying, “Why not? It did well. If it is something that excites the world, then why not?” Mahadevan states firmly, “I wanted to make it because it hadn’t been done before. I never felt it was a risk.” Siddharth says, “You can’t go by history. If the story is good, it works.” Anand opines, “Anything can work, if it has a good script and a good screenplay.”
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