Spoilers Ahead by Rajeev Masand: Taking in the sites
Half the fun of watching a movie is checking out the locations and hoping to visit them one day. Here are some favourites
There’s a lot to admire about the IIM Ahmedabad campus, not least its elegant, sprawling design; the seamless marriage between the newer concrete buildings and the older blocks. The charming red-brick library, the classroom complexes, the dormitories, and administrative offices that somehow don’t feel archaic even after six decades.
Touring the premises last weekend, I gaped in awe at the Vikram Sarabhai Library building, then at the cobblestone plaza, only for amused students to point out that surely I’d seen the campus before, on screen in 2 States (2014). It was at the plaza where Arjun Kapoor’s nerdy Krish and Alia Bhatt’s cute-as-a-button Ananya hung out between classes. It was in one of these student residential blocks that the Punjabi boy and his Tam-Brahm girlfriend shacked up for the term.
Movies can often take us to places we’ve never been. And there’s an undeniable thrill in visiting places you can identify from the movies. On a trip to Kolkata some years ago, a bunch of us decided to make a stop at a corner on Sarat Bose Road one morning to check out the Mona Lisa Guest House, made famous in Kahaani (2012). The modest establishment, tucked away on a not-especially-busy street, was wearing a new coat of paint, but little else appeared to have changed. The gaudy fish tank at the tiny reception area, the lift that went up with a thud, and the rusty iron door to Room No 15 immediately took us back to Kahaani, and to the memory of Bidya Bagchi’s relentless pursuit of her missing husband in the byzantine underbelly of the city.
But it was years ago, on my first visit to Tokyo, that I knew I had to stop by the site of some of my favourite moments from a very special film. Taking the elevator up to the 52nd floor of the Park Hyatt one late evening, I had butterflies. Lost in Translation (2003) meant so much to me, and now here I was at the rooftop New York Bar, where a jetlagged Bob and a bored Charlotte made an unlikely connection. The twinkling Tokyo skyline illuminates the dimly-lit bar, as a jazz pianist clinks on ivory keys in the centre of the room. The images are so evocative, the memory of the film so overwhelming, you half expect to run into Bill Murray and a young Scarlett Johansson at a corner table.
Photography was prohibited at the time. Luckily the rules are lax in Berlin, where every Indian tourist is encouraged to take a bus to the base of the Park Inn Hotel at the Alexanderplatz, and train their cameras to the rooftop from which Shah Rukh Khan did that daring 300-feet dive in Don 2 (2011). Our guide revealed that director Farhan Akhtar had attempted the jump too, on a location recce a few months prior to the shoot. It’s the jaw-dropping centrepiece action sequence in the film (and there are multiple videos on YouTube that show you how they did it). But staring up at the spot where it was staged, you wouldn’t guess that at least two men put their lives at risk right there.
For film nuts who enjoy travelling, there are few greater pleasures than visiting the spots where some of one’s favourite cinematic moments were captured. I remember being giddy with excitement (also nauseous from navigating the multiple hairpin bends) driving down San Francisco’s famed zigzag Lombard Street, where Steve McQueen’s iconic car chase from Bullitt (1968) was shot. We couldn’t go to Goa and not recreate that shot of the three friends hanging out at Chapora Fort in Dil Chahta Hai.
It’s interesting how some of our most enduring memories are linked to our favourite films. As if one needed any further evidence of the special place that the movies occupy in our hearts.
