E-Paper
Banking on the beauty of Black
Black may rewrite some ground rules of Hindi cinema, says Saibal Chatterjee.
When Ashutosh Gowariker's diligently crafted, superbly mounted Lagaan raised hopes of a dramatic global resurgence of mainstream Hindi cinema, it did indeed seem for a while that Bollywood was poised on the threshold of a new breakthrough. Three years on, we are still waiting for that dream to turn into reality.
Even as a band of remarkable storytellers and craftsmen from much smaller film producing nations like China, Taiwan, Thailand, Iran and South Korea have been steadily pushing their boundaries both among the cognoscenti and lay moviegoers in the West, Mumbai's myopic filmmakers are, for all intents and purposes, still stuck in an antiquated, ostrich-like approach to the art and business of moviemaking.
Bollywood's output in 2004 did nothing to dispel the despondency among genuine lovers of cinema in India. Self-styled trade experts, true to form, kept extolling the virtues of the ridiculously puerile fare churned out by Mumbai film industry heavyweights. But now that a particularly lacklustre 2004 is out of the way, could we dare to expect some real world-class quality from Bollywood in the New Year?
On paper at least, we have cause for hope. A section of the Mumbai dream factory seems all geared up to rise above Bollywood's inexplicable lack of artistic ambition and its understandable greed for pecuniary profit and unleash a clutch of releases that could send India's stocks soaring on the world stage.
It is a small but not insignificant list. Right at the top are two films whose makers have a lot to prove to themselves in particular and to the world in general - Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Black and Ketan Mehta's The Rising. While the former could end up rewriting some of the ground rules of commercial Hindi cinema with its stark, intense, songless drama, the latter could herald the return of one of Mumbai's most prodigious directorial talents to top form.
