Recommended Books, Films & Music

Bollywood & Beyond: India on the Big Screen

by Jerry Pinto & Keith Bain

Mumbai's Hindi film industry, popularly known as Bollywood, is the biggest producer of films in the world, churning out hundreds of movies annually, all of which feature super-kitschy images of buxom, bee-stung-lipped heroines gyrating to high-pitched melodies while strapping studs thrust their groins in time to lip-synched banal-and-breezy lyrics. These are wonderful, predictable melodramas in which the hero is always valiant and virile, the woman always voluptuous and virtuous. The battle between good and evil (a bankable hero and a recognizably nasty villain) must be intense, long-winded, and ultimately unsurprising -- audiences do not pay good money to be challenged, but to be entertained.

Before you choose to spend a hot subtropical afternoon watching a Hindi film, know that these films are long, averaging about 3 hours. This is because they are constructed more like Elizabethan plays or old operas. Their audiences do not come for tragedies or for comedies but for full-scale performances that give them everything: the chance to laugh and cry, to bemoan the violence done unto the hero, and the opportunity to cheer as justice is done. These films are also made in defiance of the Aristotelian requirements of unity in time and space, and require from you a willing suspension of disbelief. And though the genre film has just begun -- a few historicals such as Devdas and Parineeta (The Espoused) (2005); some horror films like Kaal (Time) (2005) and Darna Mana Hai (Fear is Forbidden) (2003); and some war films, including Lakshya (Goal) (2004) and Mission Kashmir (2000) -- most Hindi films still work on this principle.

The top-bracket Bollywood stars, including Amitabh Bachchan (who is nearing 70), the 40-something Shah Rukh Khan, and heartthrob Aamir Khan, are paid incredible sums by Indian standards, earning close to a million dollars for a film simply because they are the names that will bring in the audiences and the "repeat audiences." As it is all over the world, women get paid much less, often half of what the male stars are paid, but stars like Rani Mukherjee and Preity Zinta have their devoted followings.

Increasingly, the influence of Hollywood production values and obsession with consumer culture is becoming evident in major Bollywood releases; in an effort to keep the MTV generation (and yes, India has its very own MTV) interested, you can expect to see younger stars with an ever more visible sex appeal engaged in plots that echo some of the preoccupations of the Western silver screen. Bigger bangs, more powerful explosions, and longer chase scenes combine with racier moments, tighter outfits, and about enough attitude to put even the most self-indulgent posers to shame. But it's not all bad. In fact, some wonderful experiments in storytelling have produced screenplays that pack a punch and wow with the twists and turns invented to keep more world-wise audiences on their toes. Also, collaborative efforts between Bollywood studios and the West are making for enterprising transnational storylines; perhaps the most interesting of these is the intricately crafted Salaam-E-Ishq, which travels between continents and across genres and generations to provide a fantasy romance that innovatively blends narrative techniques borrowed from a broad pedigree. It's the type of cinema that cannot fail to steal your heart.

To view Bollywood movies as the be-all and end-all of India's film industry would be akin to thinking that big-budget blockbusters are the only movies made by the U.S. film industry; in fact, Bollywood is only responsible for a small part of the huge number of films produced by India in several languages. The first Indian director to make international art audiences sit up and take notice was Kolkata-based Satyajit Ray. Although he made his films in the 1950s, he received a Lifetime Achievement Oscar for his prolific body of work in 1992. Operating out of West Bengal's "Tollywood," Ray made movies that were the antithesis of Bollywood's; he was the director who stated that "the man in the street is a more challenging subject for exploration than people in the heroic mold" and that he found "muted emotions more interesting and challenging." Ray directed some 40 feature films, documentaries, and short subjects, of which Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) in 1955, Aparajito (The Unvanquished) in 1956, Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) in 1959, and Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha) in 1968 were the most internationally acclaimed. There are, of course, other exceptions, like Guru Dutt, one of Bollywood's most successful directors of the 1950s, whose film Pyaasa (1957) has been nominated one of the world's 100 best films by Time magazine.

Because India produces more than 700 films a year, it is in fact impossible to be monolithic about all products and speak of only a certain kind of film. Until recently, the government financed art-house cinema, and there are signs of a growing "indie" movement in which young directors scrape together the finances and make the kind of films they want as opposed to the formulaic catch-all colorful song-and-dance extravaganzas that financiers are comfortable backing.

These are probably more likely to be the types of films that provide insight into what India looks and feels like. If you want a deep, hard look at the social consciousness of the country, look to the wonderful works of Mira Nair, who has crafted fantastic entertainments that tug at the heartstrings and probe many issues without stooping to cheap preachy politicking (the notable exception being her recent work, The Namesake). You would be amiss not to see her Salaam Bombay!, about the life of a group of Mumbai street urchins, and Monsoon Wedding, a beautiful and poignant romantic comedy about a well-to-do Delhiite family dealing with generational conflicts that complicate traditional marriage arrangements. In 2008 look for the much-vaunted Shantaram, which Nair is directing; based on the riveting best-selling novel , the Johnny Depp-headliner is destined to take the world by storm.

Another top-rated woman director to look for is Deepa Mehta, whose trilogy Fire (1996), Earth (1998), and Water (2005) are superbly moving works of high-grade cinema -- and certainly preferable to her slightly irritating and kitschy Bollywood/Hollywood (2002), set in Canada.

Art listings aside, playing in a theater near you in any city in India will be a film in which the rich hero meets the poor heroine and falls almost instantly in love. He will declare this in song, and the scene will change to New Zealand, Switzerland, or Southeast Asia, depending on which country is most eager to attract the new beneficiaries of India's globalization. The couple will find obstacles put in their path, some by their parents and others by the villain, who will at some point have cast his lecherous eyes on the heroine. Fairly standardized violence will follow -- after this comes a misunderstanding that paves the way for another song expressing the grief of betrayal or the pain of parting or that sets up what the industry calls an "item number" (which may have derived from Mumbai slang for a pretty young thing, or an "item") in which a young dancer performs the equivalent of a pole dance for the audience. When the air is cleared, justice and peace have returned to the world, the good have been rewarded, and the villains are dead or rounded up. At the film's end, you will either be floored by the extravagant color, ravished by floods of emotion, and converted to another way of telling stories; or you will be repulsed by excess and sickened by melodrama and the way in which Caucasian extras are used to represent the decadent sexualized Other. But you will not be unmoved.