After the debacle of Mistress of Spices Aishwarya Rai finally got a breather with "Provoked". Screened in the Cannes Film Market this year, ‘Provoked', the real life story of a battered Indian woman who went on to become a role model for all victims of domestic violence in Britain, has garnered positive reviews both for its controlled making and Aishwarya's finely etched performance.

While "Provoked" became the luck charm for Aishwarya, the trend of reel life imitating the real is nothing new though increasingly it is becoming a trend in both Indian and international cinema.

Some filmmakers are strongly motivated to make feature films based on the lives and adventures of real life men and women. These are not documentaries mind you, that are intended to move you through slices of real life placed on celluloid and projected on screen.

Nor are these 'docu-dramas', a rather smart epithet conveniently coined for the happy marriage of fact to fiction.

These are feature films, plain and simple and there are no two ways of telling the stories of real people except by making them appear so grandiose and larger than life that any similarity with the original person may turn out to be purely coincidental.

When The Bandit Queen was premiered at the IFFI in Delhi, the real Phoolan Devi was invited to grace the premiere. The sheer physical difference between the real Phoolan and the screen Phoolan portrayed by Seema Biswas was shocking.

The film's poster in Tampa, South Florida, reportedly carried the slogan "white hot action/adventure film" which drew the men into the theatres for all the wrong reasons.

Phoolan, therefore, is denied her subjectivity despite her central role in the film and it's titling after her symbolic name. The film was made 11 years after Phoolan Devi's surrender.

Though the film was produced by Bobby Bedi, and directed by Kapoor, both Indians, it has been funded by BBC's Channel Four allotted to minorities. The fact that Channel Four commissioned the film raises questions of ideology and ethics.

Indian cinema, with a strong Hollywood streak running right through its spine, has set an example. The first film that comes to mind is Yash Chopra's Deewar starring Amitabh Bachchan. The film was purportedly based on the life of Haji Mastaan, a notorious smuggler who had publicly given up smuggling for'political' reasons.

The similarities between Vijay of Deewar and Haji Mastaan were confined to Mastaan's reported history of having worked as a porter on the Mumbai docks to keep body and soul together. But the marketing strategy worked and the film is one of Chopra's biggest hits of the time.

Interestingly, fictionalized celluloid stories of positive personalities are termed'biographies' and are commercial failures.

The multiple versions of Bhagat Singh released some years ago offer an excellent example. But if the protagonist is a celluloid presentation of a negative character, or an oppressed and humiliated woman, it is either critically acclaimed, or commercially successful, or both.

The Bandit Queen was a commercial success right across Europe, the US and UK while back home, Phoolan took the producer to court for distorting facts.

Gulzar's Aandhi (1975) was suddenly withdrawn from theatres because the grapevine said that the central character in the film was based on Indira Gandhi, the then-PM of the country.

Gulzar vehemently opposed this notion. So did Kamleshwar, on whose original Hindi short story the film was based. Kamleshwar said that the character was inspired by Maharani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur and not on Indira Gandhi. Aandhi was critically acclaimed but it did not do good business.

Jagmohan Mundra is fond of making fantasy films centered on real life women. His Kamla (1984) was based on a controversial play of the same name penned by the hard-hitting Marathi playwright Vijay Tendulkar.

Tendulkar was inspired by a real life incident turned into an explosive news story in the Indian press - that of a Delhi reporter actually buying a Dalit woman from a Madhya Pradesh village to prove that the flesh trade is a blatant and regular feature of rural life, unquestioned, and unknown.

Kamla surrendered to a conventional closure much to the disappointment of critics. Commercially too, it was a flop. The real Kamla disappeared from a Delhi rescue home and no one has heard of her since. Newspaper mug shots of the real Kamla came nowhere near Deepti Naval with dark make-up and a blouse less sari.

Mundra made Bawandar based on the tragic case of Bhanwari Devi, the Rajasthani saathin who was gang-raped by high-caste Gujjar men for having stopped the child marriage of a Gujjar girl.

Nandita Das played Bhanwari, thereby glamorizing the character of a low-caste, impoverished, 38-year-old rustic woman enough to bag her international acclaim and awards for her'performance.'

Glamourizing the struggles of real women through cinema by filmmakers with pretensions to serious and committed cinema is a common reality.

Provoked, directed by Gurinder Chhedda on the famous Kishwar Ahluwalia case of killing a battering husband with Aishwarya Rai playing the lead is an illustrations in point. During television interviews of the shoot in London, Ahluwalia maintained a discreet distance from the small screen and has hardly featured in interviews, thus raising questions about the film's true intention. Is Provoked intended for the box office?

Or does it wish to pay a celluloid tribute to the courage of a gutsy woman?

Mahesh Manjrekar's Viruddh, is "inspired by a real life couple that lost their only son when he was 27." What will happen to Gudiya, based on Gudiya, the Muslim girl who died recently, being directed by Prabhakar Shukla with Divya Dutt in the title role, remains to be seen.

To play it safe with legal disputes and court cases in the future, filmmakers in Hollywood and their publicists harp on evasive, fence-sitting phrases like "inspired by," "based on," "inspired by real events," "certain basic facts are true," and "adapted from the life story of.." etc. No wonder then, that some of the iron off the fencing has entered their souls.