Director Vikas Bahl & Kangna Ranuat won every heart with their QUEEN released in March 2014. The film received a rare unanimous acceptance and was widely appreciated by the critics as well the masses becoming one of the major hits of the year like a pleasant surprise.
However a sheer disappointment was felt by every sincere Hindi film lover when writer Abhigyan Jha accused the makers of copying the idea from his unreleased film called PHIR ZINDAGI which as per Jha, was shown to Vikas Bahl when he was heading the UTV Spotboy unit a couple of years back.
According to writer Abhigyan, PHIR ZINDAGI written by him and directed by Parvati Balagopalan, starring Milind Soman and Gul Panag in the lead roles, also revolves around a woman who decides to go on her honeymoon alone and starts re-discovering herself in the new journey. Further he also claims certain sequences in QUEEN as exactly similar to his film, wherein the couple meets again after the initial split.
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Now though the acquisitions have been made quite strongly but nothing can be said with certainty since PHIR ZINDAGI remains an unreleased project till date and no one has seen it to judge the similarities as claimed.
But interestingly what can be said is that QUEEN does have some acute resemblances with another American film THE ART OF TRAVEL (2008), directed by Thomas Whelan with only the genders reversed. And having seen this English flick, the following brief description will give you an exact idea of the plagiarism case brought forward recently.
THE ART OF TRAVEL begins when a family is looking forward to the wedding of their young son Conner. There are few scenes showing the family preparations introducing the parents and then we have a sequence where the couple decides the place they would be going for their honeymoon. Next we are straight away taken into the church where the couple is standing in front of the father, who is about to declare them husband and wife. But just before the decisive moment, Conner stops him and turns towards the guests requesting to please open a surprise envelope lying below everybody’s seat. Opening the envelope everyone is shocked to see a picture in it having Conner’s fiancé and another boy lying naked in the bed.
Saying sorry to all guests & insulting the girl right there, Conner announces the wedding cancelled and says that I am now off to my Honeymoon all alone. So from here on his journey of self discovery begins reaching Nicaragua (not the place they had decided for the Honeymoon, chosen randomly) wherein he finds hard to understand the local language i.e. Spanish. Checking into a strange local hotel, at night he hears the sound of a couple next door fighting loudly in Spanish. And then next day during the city tour he also gets robbed in a lonely street by a local crook.
Interestingly the similarities actually end here as next Conner meets an adventurous couple and he joins their group for a jungle expedition where they all go on to break a world record successfully.
So THE ART OF TRAVEL walks on to a completely different path altogether after the initial 30 minutes. Yet the fact remains that it does have a pretty similar story progression like QUEEN in its initial reels evidently. Therefore the plagiarism charge earns some weightage only partially and QUEEN still gets all the deserving marks for its entertaining execution of an inspired plot unarguably.
But then, the new question arises that whether Abhigyan Jha also got his inspiration from the same American film or its just another strange coincidence of two different minds coming up with a similar plotliine?
Cheers!
Tags :
QUEEN (2014) and its possible inspirations, An overview by Bobby Sing, Inspired Copied Hindi Movies from World Cinema, List of Inspired Movies, Queen and The Art Of Travel, Bollywood Inspired Movies List by Bobby Sing
