All amplified and villified by an evil media which revels in the misfortune of others and passes instant judgments in matters on which the court gives its considered albeit delayed opinion. And the film forgives the cinematic Sanju too – casting his criminal activities as the cries of a lost soul and his smaller indiscretions as the acts of a naughty little boy. Again and again, he disappoints his family, his friends, his women.Īgain and again, the real Sanjay Dutt was forgiven. Then again we meet the rich actor quaking in his shoes because of one phone call which threatens to rape his sisters and kill his father during the Mumbai riots of 1993, causing him to ask for and then store guns for his family's protection. Then we meet the little starboy getting his first break in a big budget launch directed by his father, being humiliated on set, and using his first drugs. He misses his mother and feels abandoned. So we meet the poor lonely child who is sent off at six to a boarding school because his father catches him smoking. In the well-worn theory that everything is nurture and nothing is nature, Sanjay Dutt's addictions and accidents are all given external rationalisations. It can, however, be extremely detrimental to one's creative process. We have all had times when we have fallen in love with our subjects. Having spent some time reinventing the cinematic Sanjay Dutt with Munnabhai MBBS (2003) and Lage Raho Munnabhai (2006), for some reason they chose to remake the real version of the controversial actor.
Something similar seems to have happened to the makers of Sanju. This term became widely known as the Stockholm Syndrome. In 1973, Nils Bejerot, a Swedish criminologist came up with the term Normalmstorg Syndrome to describe the refusal of four hostages to testify against their captors after being held in a bank against their will for six days.