OTT: The high season of remakes in India

Indian actor Vinay Pathak remembers discovering Call My Agent, the French hit, during the raging Covid-19 pandemic, like much of the rest of the world.
He called his close collaborator, actor and director Rajat Kapoor, and told him it was something they could adapt.
 The two had, after all, successfully collaborated on another French hit, Le Diner De Cons, to make the sleeper hit Bheja Fry in 2007.

Pathak was told by Kapoor that he had just shot for its Hindi version, where he plays the somewhat sly, always manipulative Mathias Barneville, super-agent at the talent firm ASK, which handles half of the French film industry in fiction, with cameos by stars — ranging from Jean Reno to Jean Dujardin, Isabelle Hupert to Monica Bellucci.

The Indian version has much the same storyline, with stars such as Farah Khan and Richa Chadha walking in and out of the scenes. Will it retain its clever lines, its reflections on celebrity culture, and its insider gossip?
 We will know soon when it premieres on Netflix even as the original's global success has ensured that a film and another season are on the way.

For a long time, Bollywood got by ripping off Western entertainment, confident that its thievery would not be recognised. The Sarvodyaya video library log in Bandra, Mumbai, gave an indication as to which filmmaker was watching which kind of movie to copy from. 
However, in the age of the Internet, it is impossible to pass off imitation as the highest form of flattery. 
Inspirations have to be acknowledged and originals have to be secured from the makers.
 And adaptations have to be done faithfully but not to the point that local sensibilities are ignored.

Take Fauda, for instance, the Israeli TV show that tells stories from the Israel-Palestine conflict and manages to maintain a fine balance — its tagline is two sides of the same story.

Fauda is being adapted for India by director Sudhir Mishra and is set in Kashmir, where human tales will be told from both sides of the divide, the local population as well as the security forces. Applause Entertainment, run by Sameer Nair, has bought the copyright for both Call My Agent and Fauda, as well as Luther, BBC's star vehicle for Idris Elba.

Says Nair: "Whenever we select stories for adaptation, we seek to reimagine the soul of the original idea, not necessarily remake the series verbatim. The advantage of an adaptation is that the original story and plot are universal – that’s why we picked it in the first place – and the challenge is to reimagine what are often alien societal behaviours and norms to an Indian context, culture and milieu. This is done by adding/combining characters, localising storylines to fit our reality, and of course great dialogue," he says.

Ajay Devgn in 'Rudra'. (Photo/Supplied)

Does it get easier to cast stars? 
Nair is not so sure.
 "Stars, like all other talent, also seek material that calls out to them. Rudra (Luther) is a case in point. Ajay Devgn makes the perfect Luther and that’s what drew him to the material and us to him. In the case of Fauda, we've assembled a delectable ensemble cast much like the original,” he says.

The author is a senior journalist and author, most recently of The Three Khans and the Emergence of New India.