The New Bollywood: - silversalt pr

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Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Rang de Basanti
The New Bollywood:
No Heroines, No Villains
Mentioning the word ‘Bollywood’
usually elicits eager claims of
familiarity. After all, Monsoon
Wedding and Bride and Prejudice were international
hits. But even though the directors,
Mira Nair and Gurinder
Chadha, respectively, pay
tribute to the celluloid phenomenon
they grew up with,
their works are essentially
Western crossover films. One
character in Bride and Prejudice
characterizes Bollywood
dancing as “petting a dog
with one hand and screwing in a light bulb
with the other.”
Most people might be familiar with snippets
of Bollywood via Western musicals,
video clips or DJ remixes. But Bollywood is
much more than movie characters breaking
out in a funny dance. A typical film is two-
30 CINEASTE, Summer 2006
by Thessa Mooij
and-a-half hours long, taking its time to
unroll storylines of epic proportions, often
involving the breakup and make-up of
extended families. Some six to eight songs
and intricate choreography, in which the
As films that tackle social and political issues
make inroads, traditional Bollywood songand-dance
epics are just part of an Indian
cinema that resists easy stereotyping.
actors themselves participate, are used to
emphasize the story’s emotional high points.
That Bollywood formula is sometimes
described as masala, which actually means a
mixture of food spices. In this case, it means
a celluloid combination of nineteenth-century
Parsi plays with their song and dance num-
bers, Urdu poetry, Victorian melodrama, and
folk theater with its stock cast of baddies, damsels
in distress, strict fathers and enduring mothers.
Most of all, masala films are firmly rooted
in Hindu epics such as the Mahabharata
and the Ramayana. Their
narratives easily play out over
several centuries or even millennia,
featuring the family
lives of dynasties both divine
and mortal. In Southern
India and parts of Southeast
Asia, actors are revered like
gods, with film stills or
posters serving as altarpieces. Some traditional
Indian dance performances can take
all night retelling these stories, with villagers
and performers enraptured until sunrise
announces another day. They all know how
the story is going to end, but they come for
the artistry with which it is told.

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This makes masala films an acquired
taste for Westerners, who are used to seeing
a ninety-minute feature about one protagonist
chasing after his or her goal. Indian
audiences would want to know what their
parents are like, to whom they are married,
and where their kids are. Seeing the protagonist
deal with an overbearing bari ma
(grandmother) or a corrupt cousin gives
them crucial information about the protagonist’s
morals.
The film industry in Bombay is not fond
of the moniker ‘Bollywood,’ even though
they invented the word in the Eighties. In
the nationalist Nineties it became a sign of
weakness to suggest a connection with
American blockbusters. Even the city itself
was renamed Mumbai in a nationalist campaign,
although many filmi people continue
to call it by its old name. One politically correct
alternative is ‘Indian cinema.’ That
would leave no distinction between the
musical blockbusters coming out of Bombay,
films shot in any of India’s twenty-one
languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Tamil or
Telugu, and documentaries about social
issues. The Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray,
whose world film classics
spawned what Indians call
‘parallel’ (the equivalent of
art-house) cinema, would
fall in the same category as
Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s
Hindi blockbuster Devdas.
The other suggested
moniker, ‘Hindi cinema,’ is
also a bit of misnomer,
since that would suggest,
for instance, that Parineeta—a
film made by a
Bengali director and based
on a Bengali novel, but
financed out of Mumbai—
is basically Hindi. And
strictly speaking Mumbai
culture is Marathi, not
Hindi. Some Tamil films
are based on the masala
formula, but would that
make them Hindi, too? To
confuse things further,
non-Hindi cities like Kolkata
(the modern spelling
of Calcutta) and Lahore in
Pakistan have already been
dubbed Kollywood and
Lollywood respectively.
Politically correct film people
call it ‘Hindi cinema,’
but the rest of the world
calls it ‘Bollywood.’ The
film business is one of the
country’s few industries
where caste, religion or
tribe truly does not matter,
as long as you bring money
or desired skills. In view of
that mix, ‘masala film’ seems
like a good compromise.
Reflections from within the Industry
Last June, the Mumbai industry descended
upon the Dutch capital of Amsterdam.
The International Indian Film Academy
(IIFA) organizes its annual awards ceremonies
abroad to promote Indian cinema
on an international stage. Actors and
actresses revered by billions in Asia, Africa,
and Arab countries walked around amidst
the clueless locals, chased only by their
arduous Dutch fans of South Asian descent.
One of Bollywood’s most prominent
lyricists, Javed Akhtar, explained the difference
between his films and those of the
Dutch film professionals filling the room:
“European films tend to deal with one emotion,
or one problem. You can see them as
short stories; whereas, an Indian film is
more like a novel. If you would make a film
in India called It Happened One Night, people
would feel cheated! They want largerthan-life
stories. Indian sagas have to have
every emotion in the book. In our first talkie
from 1933 there were fifty songs! There was
never any doubt that we wouldn’t use songs.
As a lyricist, I write to an existing tune and I
try to solve a narrative problem in the con-
Onir’s My Brother Nikhil is the first Bollywood film to deal with AIDS.
tent of the lyrics. But I’m always dependent
on whether a story is conducive to writing a
song, whether it has certain sensibilities.”
Perhaps even more so than other cinemas,
masala films reflect changes in India’s
society and politics. “You can analyze India
from the films,” said Akhtar. “Art records
hopes, fears, pride, and humiliation. Behind
the glamor and the dances you can see our
contemporary aspirations. In the Fifties,
there was idealism and hope in politics and
cinema. Prosperity seemed just around the
corner, but since there was a socialist climate,
rich people were the bad guys. In the Seventies
there was a breakdown of our institutions,
martial law, the rise of vigilantes and
the angry young man. The Eighties saw a dip
in politics, music, films, and art. The industrialization
of the Seventies had led to the
rise of a middle class that was different from
the landed gentry. They were the first generation
to get educated on a massive scale.”
During the rule of the Hindu BJP party
from 1994 to 2004, masala films reached high
levels of technical excellence, providing picture-perfect
visuals and soundtracks—but
with storylines and attitudes reflecting the
party’s conservative stance,
emphasizing family values
and religious patriotism.
That decade produced
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge
(1995), still shown in
the Maratha Mandir Theater
in Bombay, and recently
pronounced the
longest running film in
India. The film cemented
the career of actor Shah
Rukh Khan, now Bollywood’s
most powerful player.
He plays a London-based
student who meets a fellow
Indian Londoner on a train
in Switzerland. After dropping
his ladies’ man act,
they must overcome her
parents’ objections to the
pairing. Only by returning
to her native Punjab with
its yellow mustard fields,
and embracing the ways of
the old country, are they
fully accepted.
The film was an instant
hit because of its portrayal
of hip young NRI’s (nonresident
Indians), who also
flocked to see the film all
over the world. For the first
time, British and American
audiences of Indian descent
who saw their lifestyles
partly reflected in the
film, turned out to be a
force to be reckoned with.
Actor Shah Rukh Khan,
who previously played psychotic
bad guys, broke
CINEASTE, Summer 2006 31

30/BollyThessa 5/6/06 7:56 PM Page 32
Devdas
through with his first role as a romantic hero
with a naughty college-boy persona. The
packaging was slick, the production values
high, but the message was retrogressive:
return to the motherland and its family values.
“Here’s what turns my stomach,” writes
Indian journalist Jerry Pinto in Outlook India, a
current-affairs weekly. “In all mainstream
cinema…the hero must stand for us, so that
we can vicariously live out our fantasies,
winning the pretty lady, beating up the
goons, spritzing politicians with a machinegun.
Now what fantasy is it where the hero
says he won’t whisk off his heroine and marry
her without his father-in-law’s permission?
Where is the anarchic potential of love that
was always celebrated in Hindi films?”
The films Pinto refers to (Sujata, Bandhini,
Pakeezah) were made in the Sixties, when
violence started flaring up, and the early
Seventies, when that violence led to martial
law, and with it a subsequent loss of faith in
institutions. Anarchy is a luxury few people
can afford in real life. It is an ingredient of
the dream factory. Viewers can revel in their
heroes’ rejection of rejection.
Indian Cinema Today
Today’s India is experiencing a significant
growth in the computer and services
industries. With increasing numbers of city
dwellers aspiring and reaching middle-class
security, they are less interested in anarchy
and more in stability. Women are joining
the work force in ever-greater numbers.
Thanks to cable TV and a newfound prosperity,
Indian tastes are changing. The classic
masala flick tried to cater to an all-Indian
audience. By casting a broad narrative net of
32 CINEASTE, Summer 2006
humor, melodrama, tears, and laughter—all
sprinkled with multicolored confetti—producers
wanted to catch both the older farmhand
who saves up all week for a movie ticket
and the young, wealthy urbanite.
Multiplexes charging high ticket prices
have sprung up in cities and towns, accessible
only to the upper-middle classes. Less well-off
viewers make do with soap operas that are
challenging taboos even more than feature films
are. In response to the changing sensibilities
of urban, middle-class audiences, the more
adventurous producers are searching for
something different. More film-school
graduates are getting their first break in an
industry where the big stars have typically
passed on the baton to their children,
regardless of their talent. These educated
first-time directors are bringing new stories
to Bombay, or new ways of telling old stories.
Some producers are placing their bets on
new talent outside the usual recruiting pool
of acting dynasties such as the Bachchans
and Kapoors. As a result, there have been a few
films that seem to be breaking away from
the formula, whether it’s in style, content, or
production methods. Most of them—Black, My
Brother Nikhil, Rang de Basanti, and Being
Cyrus—have been shown in the U.S. through
NRI-targeted distributors or art-house theaters
like the ImaginAsian in New York.
“A lot of the young generation directors
are students from film schools,” explains
Onir, director of My Brother Nikhil, who
presented his film at the Asia Society in New
York last June. Born in Nepal, he is a graduate
of comparative literature at Kolkata
Jadavpur University and trained as a filmmaker
in Berlin. After the New York screen-
ing, he took his film to Germany, where he
showed it at the annual ‘Bollywood &
Beyond’ festival in Stuttgart. “They do not
belong to the ‘Bollywood dynasty,’” and
hence the films are much more experimental.
Since audiences are rejecting ninety percent
of formula Bollywood films, filmmakers
are looking at how to get audiences into
the theaters with new ideas and treatments.
British filmmaker and writer Nasreen
Munni Kabir has played a major role in
popularizing the genre through U.K.’s
Channel Four documentaries and through
several books. She has just completed two
documentaries about the actor Shah Rukh
Khan, The Inner/Outer World of Shah Rukh
Khan, released on DVD by Eros Entertainment
last September. According to Kabir,
audiences in India are ready for a change. It
seems that the days of anarchic love are
numbered. “The characters are allowed to
be more human today in films,” she says.
“In the Fifties, which to me was Bollywood’s
best period, they were more human too, but
they had a different kind of morality. Now
they have to do with the complexities of living in
a modern India. Audiences are less bound to
social rules. They understand through their
own living that life is a struggle. There is scope for
more complexity. I think that comes from
watching Indian TV soaps; some of them
talk about the difficulties of living with a
mother-in-law, and so on. All these taboo
areas of family relations are now examined.”
In 1996, Canadian director Deepa
Mehta’s Fire sparked riots in India because
of the taboo subject matter of her film: the
love between two women. Theaters were
stormed in protest against the film’s portrait
of two lonely women finding solace in each
other’s arms. The producers of My Brother
Nikhil, director Onir and main actor Sanjay
Suri, weren’t going to take the same risk.
Their film deals with the reaction of a young
man’s family when they find out he has been
infected with HIV.
Their main concern was not to focus on
Nikhil’s sexuality or even how he contracted
the virus in the first place. Instead they
focused on Nikhil’s environment—his partner,
family, friends, colleagues, and authorities.
The subject matter might suggest arthouse
drama, but My Brother Nikhil aims at
Bollywood audiences, with a mainstream
cast (top actress Juhi Chawla and veteran
Victor Bannerjee), a successful soundtrack,
and an innovative marketing campaign by
major distributor Yash Raj Films, in which
young Bollywood stars ask the public: “I
care for Nikhil—do you?” The film is one of
the few commercial productions to be
financed independently.
“The film starts with a message saying it’s
not based on a true story,” explains Suri.
“We had to put it there to pass the censor;
they wanted us to avoid any kind of controversy
coming from anywhere. The law we
mention in the film [isolating HIV positive
citizens] is really true, and the story did hap-

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pen. We put all our money in this—friends’
money, insurance money, and savings. We
could not afford any kind of controversy.
We wanted the film to be released. We could
have argued with the censor, but we
couldn’t afford any kind of delay.”
The film is a modest success in India—
having been received positively by the mainstream
media. It continues to be screened,
and is also shown at AIDS awareness events
in smaller towns or remote regions. Director
Onir says some people bring their families
to see the film in order to out themselves.
But so far, the film has not been picked
up by any of the Bollywood distributors in
either the U.S. or the U.K., as NRI audiences
are thought to be interested in nostalgic
romances that reinforce their idea of the
motherland they left behind—rather than in
bold new productions that highlight changes
in that same motherland. “It’s a big problem
for us,” says Onir. “Mainstream Bollywood
distributors in the U.S. or U.K. are not willing
to take risks and invest in advertising
and promoting this kind of film. Because
overseas audiences supposedly don’t want to
see films like My Brother Nikhil, they don’t
want to fund them. I think the second-generation
NRI audiences would be interested
in seeing a film like ours, but they don’t get
an opportunity to do so. We need a little bit
more support for changing India and changing
Indian cinema from the usual singing
and dancing around trees.”
Some literary adaptations highlight the
differences between classic Bollywood and
filmmakers who are pushing against the
boundaries. The blockbuster Devdas (2002)
is based on a novel by the Calcutta author
Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, whose literary
classics from the early twentieth century
inspired no less than forty screen adaptations.
Devdas and his other works deal with
weak Brahmin men whose upper caste
stands in the way of happy marriages with
their lower-caste childhood sweethearts.
With a budget of $10 million, Devdas is the
most expensive film ever made in India. A
baroque fable with a distinctly unhappy
ending, it features the world’s best-known
Bollywood actors, Shah Rukh Khan and
Aishwarya Ray (Bride and Prejudice).
Devdas is masala at its most glorious. It
takes visual vibrancy and sweeping emotions
to the max, not an easy accomplishment in a
genre that is already ruled by the motto
‘more is more.’ The film has a highly polished
look with sensually saturated colors,
spellbinding choreography, and a memorable
soundtrack. Partly cofinanced by French
producers, it premiered at Cannes and made
$5 million in North America alone.
Parineeta is another screen adaptation
from a Chattopadhyay novel, but it is almost
the polar opposite of Devdas. Its world première
took place in Amsterdam during the
2005 IIFA Awards. Compared to Devdas,
Parineeta is a study in restraint, apart from a
hammed-up finale that feels tacked on.
Overall, Parineeta is a refined piece of work
by producer Vidhu Vinodh Chopra, who
has built his career making high quality features
(Mission Kashmir, Munnabhai MBBS).
Parineeta went on to screen in the highly
selective Forum section of the International
Berlin Film Festival. First-time feature director
Pradeep Sarkar, a Kolkata native who
has worked in advertising, shifted the story
to 1962, a time of social unrest. Sarkar focuses on
the family’s faded Bengali gentility, giving
the women a mid-Sixties glamor similar to
Wong Kar-wai’s vamps from In the Mood for
Love and 2046—reminders that during that
decade, Asia embraced pop culture, just like
the rest of the world.
After the premiere, Parineeta’s main
actor Saif Ali Khan spoke about making the
film: “My mother [actress Sharmila Tagore
and great-granddaughter of Nobel-winning
poet Rabindranath Tagore] sent me a text
message to say she is really proud of this
film. She’s never done that before. She’s
Bengali and they’re quite touchy about their
art. It’s the first time I’ve worked with a
lighting person who created so many shadows,
as opposed to light.”
Comedy actor Khan was an unusual casting
choice for the tortured soul of Shekhar,
who gets stuck running the family business
instead of following his heart. He yearns for
a music career and the orphan girl he grew
up with, but social mores stand in his way.
Although mainly a love story, the film shows
a family holding on to better days while
Kolkata is burning. The film’s restraint
makes it stand out from the usual masala
fare. Producer Chopra’s risk in casting Khan
has paid off. “In Hindi cinema we are very
melodramatic. It’s all over the top. It’s very
A scene from Homi Adajania’s black comedy, Being Cyrus.
rare to see an actor who holds his own in a
classic story. In the climactic moment he
looks at his father and just walks away; I
really don’t recall a Hindi actor who underplayed
a role like that.”
Underplaying has paid off for Saif Ali
Khan, who is playing the role of Iago in an
upcoming Indian screen version of Othello.
In the past year, Khan has emerged as an
actor of substance. After portraying yet
another breezy playboy in Salaam Namaste
(2005), he is surpassing his Parineeta performance
in this year’s surprise hit, Being
Cyrus. Made by first-time director Homi
Adajania and a handful of first-time producers,
this drama, drenched in black humor,
was first screened in the U.S. to a sold-out
crowd at New York’s South Asian Film Festival
in December 2005. Three months later,
the film was released worldwide by Eros
International, a mainstream Bollywood distributor
with an office in New Jersey. This is
also India’s first ever English-language film.
Having middle-class Bombay characters
speak English doesn’t require a great stretch
of the imagination. At the Parineeta press
conference, Saif Ali Khan, who was educated
in England, became slightly uncomfortable
when Dutch journalists of Indian descent
started firing questions in Hindi at him.
Khan plays Cyrus, a rootless drifter who
ends up in a curious ménage à trois with a
sculptor, who has exchanged pottery for
industrial-strength pot, and his gaudy wife,
whose libido goes into overdrive the minute she
sees Cyrus standing on their doorstep. Cyrus
manages to survive the disastrous dynamics
in this particular household, but when he
travels to Bombay to deal with the rest of the
sculptor’s family, the plot takes a dark turn.
CINEASTE, Summer 2006 33

30/BollyThessa 5/6/06 7:56 PM Page 34
Diya Mirza (with umbrella) and Saif Ali Khan (with racing glasses)
star in Pradeep Sarkar’s remake of Parineeta (A Married Woman).
The sculptor’s older brother is abusing
their ancient father, hoping to speed up the
old man’s demise so he can inherit his Bombay
building. Cyrus takes pity on the man
and tries to help him, but ultimately, he
pursues a plot of his own. Having grown up
in foster homes and still bearing the visible
scars of that experience, Cyrus’s demons
come to chase him in this Bombay episode.
Director Adajania clearly enjoys visualizing
those demons in the form of flashbacks,
using sound effects and bold stylistic choices
that are unusual for Bollywood.
Comic relief is provided by veteran actor
Boman Irani, a friend of the filmmaker’s
father and undoubtedly one of the forces
that gave the young director his first chance.
His pomposity as the greedy older brother
comes with a great deal of cursing in Parsi
slang, which sent the audience in New
York’s ImaginAsian Theater howling with
laughter. Since the film is not subtitled,
non-Hindi speakers can only guess at the
colorful content of Irani’s curses.
By Western standards, this is a particularly
well-made indie drama. By Bombay standards,
however, it’s a watershed moment. India has
produced its fair share of world-class art-house
cinema, but this film is special because it has
been made in the Bollywood environment with
big commercial stars, and it has been marketed
through regular Bollywood channels. With a
running time of ninety minutes, the film has no
dance numbers or any other musical interludes,
and the emotions are toned down, apart from
the apparently hilarious Boman Irani. “If the
film had been released five years ago, I would
have said there’s no market for it in India,”
said trade journalist Komal Nahta on the BBC
radio show Film Café. “It’s not the usual
Hindi film. But now there are a growing number
of people who like to see such films, which is why
the film had a reasonable start in Bombay.”
34 CINEASTE, Summer 2006
Like Hollywood, Bollywood is fond of
hijacking material from successful films
from all over the world, whether Hollywood,
New York or Hong Kong. In Black
(2005) director Sanjay Leela Bhansali magnified
the painful suffering that was already
present in his previous blockbuster Devdas.
Black is a songless, danceless film that is
based on the play Aatam Vinjhe Paankh,
which was inspired by William Gibson’s
play about Helen Keller, The Miracle Worker.
One of Bhansali’s previous films,
Khamoshi, had dealt with the same problems
of deaf-mute people with no system to make
sense of the world around them. Sadly,
Khamoshi flopped as it may have been ahead
of its time in 1996.
New York’s ImaginAsian Theater presents
U.S. premieres of many Bollywood films.
In the last two years, revered veteran
actor Amitabh Bachchan has reinvented
himself from the angry young man to a
patriarch with Hindu family values. In Black
he plays against type as the drunk, washedup
teacher. He tries to bring light to the
deaf-blind-mute Michelle, who is a scared,
violent girl, lashing out at everything she
doesn’t know or understand. Actress Rani
Mukherjee, who like many Indian actresses
is often limited to playing the role of a girlfriend
or wife, does an excellent job in portraying
Michelle’s fear of the world around
her. With her teacher’s help, Michelle ends
up graduating from university and starts a
clinic of her own.
Like Devdas, the set designs are larger
than life—a theatrically empty mansion,
long shadows and dark-blue hues. Filled
with Christian imagery, the film’s look is
reminiscent of John Woo’s Hong Kong
films, Bullet in the Head (1990) and Hardboiled
(1992), in which Woo punctuates
gory violence with moodily lit churches and
white doves. Bhansali successfully externalizes
Michelle’s panic, which she conquers,
only to end up caring for her Alzheimer’safflicted
teacher. Director Bhansali has taken
Bollywood’s preference for hautes émotions,
but has swung the pendulum in the direction
of despair, away from the usual ecstatic
happiness displayed in typical masala films.
His portrayal of Michelle’s panic is not
merely psychological, the way it would be
portrayed in Western realism, but is utterly
cinematic—conveyed through set design,
costumes and lighting. The film was more
successful overseas than in India. Despite
rave reviews and numerous awards, some
rural audiences may have resisted this
departure from the Bollywood dream factory.
But Hollywood is paying attention.
Bhansali is the first Indian director to have
signed a production deal with a Hollywood
studio, Sony Pictures Entertainment, to
make a film in his own country and on his
own terms. His Saawariya is not meant to be
a potential crossover hit, but a full-blown
Hindi production.
As Bhansali’s work suggests, on a creative
front, things are definitely changing on and
off the soundstages of major studios. With
the social democratic Congress Party having
taken over the reign from the conservative
BJP party, staunchly patriotic and conservative
themes may be a thing of the past. All of
the aforementioned films are cowritten by
their directors and/or producers respectively,
so there seems to be room for directors’
developing their own voice. It may be too
early, however, to call it a New Wave, and
historically, there have always been innovative
directors within the industry.
“It’s new and it’s not new,” says Nasreen
Munni Kabir from her London office.
“Black and Parineeta are remakes. There is a
tendency to look back. But younger filmmakers
are looking for different subjects and
their treatment of them is new. They’re

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moving away from stereotypes,
which is the most unusual thing.
There is no villain, or a heroine; the
characterizations are changing.
Every generation has to find its
own language, and there’s a very
healthy atmosphere. I expect a lot
of movement in Bollywood. Every
new film is redefining the genre.
For me, the most interesting of
recent films is Munnabhai because
it continues the tradition of the
working-class hero. His encounters
with the middle classes are very
funny.” The films Kabir cites are
shorter (around two hours), contain
less song and dance (although
music remains a crucial component),
and tap into the rich veins of
psychological drama or social
themes—sometimes subtly and sometimes
not—than is usual for Bollywood productions.
Typically, length and form have prevented
Bollywood from making a big splash in
the West, as other Asian genres have done.
And, while Bollywood will never become
‘parallel’ cinema—whose main auteurs
Satyajit Ray, Mani Kaul, and Buddhadev
Dasgupta are already revered in the West by
festival programmers, critics, and scholars
alike—the question remains as to whether it
can open the door for new young filmmakers
and help them find new audiences, both
in India and abroad.
This would be possible only if the industry—production,
marketing, and distribution—is
able to see the potential. “Producers
need to find the guts to fund films that are
not ‘projects,’ a term used in Bollywood to
refer to mainstream films with big casts
composed of mainstream actors,” comments
Onir from Germany, where he is presenting
My Brother Nikhil in the country’s
‘Beyond Bollywood’ festival in Stuttgart. “It
has to come from a creative need to risk and
invest in something new.”
Gabriele Ammerman is a free-lance TV
producer from Germany who traveled to
Amsterdam for the IIFA awards, hoping to
make some Bollywood connections. After
two major German channels, ARTE and
RTL2, started showing Bollywood films last
year, she has seen a surging interest in the
genre, particularly among Germany’s Turkish
population and German teenagers who
consider Bollywood hip, thanks to the emergence
of bhangra music and Bollywood club
themes. Other Germans seem to appreciate
the dream world no longer offered by Hollywood
or the European cinema.
“Films like Veer-Zaara or Main Hoon Na
may have a modern message thrown in, like
a little feminism or the hope for peace
between India and Pakistan, but still the
masala recipe is the same as it was ten or
twenty years ago,” Ammerman points out.
“Black and Parineeta show how Bollywood
filmmakers are experimenting with different
stories, settings and style. Right now they are
Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black, whose protagonist is blind,
is an offbeat Bollywood film that has neither songs nor dance.
not what Bollywood is known for here.
Thanks to RTL2, Bhansali is by far the most
popular Bollywood star in Germany. The
‘hardcore’ Bollywood lovers might be disappointed
by a different kind of Hindi films;
whereas, other people won’t watch the films
if they think they’ll be seeing the usual Bollywood
flick with just too much schmaltz
for their taste.”
A few adventurous producers and filmmakers
seem to be breathing new life into
Bollywood by making their own voices
heard rather than sticking to the rules. But
for real change to take effect, the industry
needs to support them in terms of distribution,
marketing, and exhibition. Making
Bollywood a success in the West would
require the London and New York-based
Indian distributors to market to non-NRIs.
“Unless international distributors pick up
films for a wider audience, it will always
remain for Indian audiences only,” says
Kabir. “I went to see Stephen Chow’s Kung
Fu Hustle, which is distributed by Columbia
Tri-Star, and I can see why. It’s brilliantly
made, very entertaining, and you don’t need
to know the whole of Cantonese culture to
follow the narrative. Indian films are definitely
more complex in that way.”
Gabriele Ammerman thinks classic Bollywood
stands a better chance in Germany
than the newer, more adventurous films.
“To get a wider German audience, the films
would need to get some PR first, then a good
translation or a dubbing. All this will cost
money, and I can’t see anyone risking 200,000
Euros to promote an unusual Hindi film here,
without any guarantee of getting the money
back. Only if the Indian film producers invest in
marketing and media relations, will their
films have a chance on the Western market.”
Lagaan proved that Western audiences
were ready for a dose of Indian history,
dance numbers and even an hour-long
cricket match. Producer/actor Aamir Khan
has recently followed this up with two other
historically inspired roles as a rebel against
British rule. He played a mutineer in last
year’s The Rising, which collapsed under the
weight of its historic pretensions, leaving lit-
tle room for character development
and emotional plausibility.
He played a similar role in this
year’s highly successful Rang de
Basanti, which shows that an audience
exists for edgy drama with a
political message. Khan plays an
über-slacker and the ringleader of a
group of fun-loving students who
prefer motor bikes and techno
raves to attending classes. When a
young British filmmaker wants
them to play some of India’s first
freedom fighters in her no-budget
indie film, they slowly conquer
their socio-political apathy. A personal
tragedy fans the flames of
their burgeoning indignation, and
they take matters in their own
hands. As this film and the Nineties
hit DDLJ attests, young people in India and
abroad wish to recognize themselves on
screen, in films that take their lifestyle and
concerns seriously.
Although it has a few highly infectious
and celebratory dance numbers, Rang de
Basanti is not about extended families and
big weddings. The marketing of this film has
revolved around blogs and message boards,
where star Aamir Khan chatted with fans,
while the traditional media had to sit back
and wait their turn for an interview slot.
Some eager film pundits have already proclaimed
Rang de Basanti ‘the Black of 2006,’
but this was before Being Cyrus came out.
“Rang de Basanti broke our attendance
records,” says ImaginAsian theater programmer
Dylan Marchetti. “We sold 4000
tickets in three weeks and after a couple of
screenings, there must have been some
word-of-mouth buzz, because we started to
see an increase in non-Indian visitors. It
crossed over because it had an original story,
not copied from Hollywood, plus a great
soundtrack and a good cast.”
It’s true that Rang de Basanti is closer to
Bollywood with its emotional overdrive and
colorful dance scenes. But any film about
social issues had better pay extra attention to
the emotional arc of its characters, and
Being Cyrus with its dysfunctional individuals
does a better job of keeping its viewers
engaged, both emotionally and visually.
India is a young country and is still
defining itself. Should it give in to the lure of
growing consumerism and other Western
aspirations? Should it hold on to its homegrown
values? But how to do that without
regressing into conservative sloganeering?
The Hindu conservatives may have retreated
temporarily, but pride in the country’s independence
is never far away.
Perhaps it’s better not to look for this year’s
Black, but to keep looking for the new talents
who are slowly fighting their way through
the Bollywood machine to get their vision
on the big screen. After all, their films reflect
a country that is expected to play a big role
on the world stage of the new century. ■
CINEASTE, Summer 2006 35