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Is history on Bollywood?s side?
Is Hindi cinema about to jump to next level, asks Saibal Chatterjee.
The last six months have been an unusually happy phase for Bollywood with a wide variety of unconventional films managing to attract both crowds and critical accolades. The great showing began with Madhur Bhandarkar’s sleeper hit, Page 3. It has continued with films like Black, My Brother Nikhil, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, Bunty Aur Babli, Parineeta and Paheli.
Neither of the above mentioned releases are conventional Bollywood flicks. The fact that they have held their own in the marketplace is clear proof that the Hindi moviegoer is indeed beginning to change. Ruin-of-the-mill potboilers no longer hold him in thrall. His demands have metamorphosed.
But has Hindi cinema reached a point from where it can make the long-waited leap to the next level?
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| A still from Parineeta |
Quite a few Indians are doing rather well on the international circuit. Gurinder Chadha has injected a new energy into British cinema.The peripatetic Shekhar Kapur is poised to begin work on a sequel to
Elizabeth
.The versatile Mira Nair has brought a Hollywood entity, Fox Searchlight, and a Bollywood company, UTV Motion Pictures, together on the production of
The Namesake
. And our very own Aishwarya Rai seems to be finally making all the right moves on the global stage.
But where, pray, is the promised indigenous film that can wrest a place alongside the best, biggest, and most successful international films?
Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black, inspired by the life and triumphs of that legendary deaf-blind role model, Helen Keller, did raise hopes of a dramatic breakthrough earlier in the year. But despite its stupendous box office performance in India, the film hasn’t travelled around the world quite to the extent that one initially expected it to.
A remarkable film all right in the Bollywood context, Black did its own cause no good by employing derivative methods and second-hand sources to get its point across. Its narrative style, with its dominantly grey shades, elliptical editing and frenetic camerawork, was predominantly East European, while one half of the film’s storyline was borrowed from Arthur Penn’s The Miracle Worker, which in turn was based on a Broadway play.
Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan had worked globally because it was an Indian film all the way – and it was remarkably original in conception and treatment. Black is probably just as great a film as Lagaan, but for the world at large, it isn’t novel enough as a piece of cinema.
So that brings us back to the old question: is Indian cinema losing its way once again? Was Monsoon Wedding a flash in the pan?
Considering the kind of films that are lined up for release in the coming weeks, Bollywood hasn’t given up the fight. Next Friday will see the opening of Ram Gopal Varma’s Godfather-inspired Sarkar. Even if it clicks at the domestic box office, it is not the sort of film that is likely to work with global audiences. The reason is obvious: it is generically rooted in an alien filmmaking culture.
The films to look forward to are Ketan Mehta’s The Rising and Akbar Khan’s Taj Mahal, both of which deal with a point in Indian history. Though they might not really be of the same artistic quality, what the two films share is their global ambition.
Producer Bobby Bedi has returned enthused by the response The Rising elicited in the Cannes Film Market. “When I asked people whether I should delete the songs, they reacted violently. They insisted that the songs shouldn’t be touched,” says Bedi, who is confident that The Rising will find takers in different parts of the world.
And that is exactly what Akbar Khan feels about Taj Mahal. “Enquiries are pouring in from all corners of the world,” he says. “Taj Mahal has been scripted carefully in order to weed out the melodrama without sacrificing the spirit of a Bollywood film.”
If The Rising has been written by the UK-based Farrukh Dhondy, Taj Mahal has incidentally been co-scripted by South African writer Fatima Meer. “She has brought in her perspective and lent historical authenticity to the tale,” says Khan.
The realisation that films have to be written and packaged differently if they are to traverse beyond India’s geographical boundaries is slowly but surely seeping into the once-insular mindset of Bollywood producers and directors. And that obviously is the way to go. An open-minded filmmaker aware of his own cultural ethos and cinematic roots, as has repeatedly been proved, can go much further than a profit-driven fluff-peddler who pretends that the world doesn’t really matter.
