Friday, July 27, 2007

Maximum Bollywood

Suketu Mehta in his breathtakingly brilliant book ‘Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found’ describes Bollywood in one of the most beautiful and, I think, truthful ways I’ve read it being described. How ironic to realise that it probably would only take an outsider to consider Bollywood in this objective, analytical way! Another reason that this passage appeals to me is that I’m a great fan of gangster/crime/noir movies, and I always wondered where my taste in such subversive, transgressive characters and plots came from. Mehta says:

“Gangsters and whores all over the world have always been fascinated by the movies and vice versa; the movies are fundamentally transgressive. They are our eye into the forbidden. Most people will never see a human being murder another human being, except on the screen. Most people will never see a human being have sex with another human being, except on the screen. Cinema is an outlaw medium, our flashlight into the darkest part of ourselves. For the criminals and prostitutes who live these outlaw lives, the movies are close to realistic; they are for Monalisa (the bar girl) and the hitman Mohsin what a Cheever story might be for a businessman living in Westchester: a sympathetic depiction, only slightly exaggerated, of his work and life.”

And his personal comments on how the filmmakers themselves are shaped by the demands of their work:

“Whether they’re making art films or masala films solidly in the mainstream, the people in the movie industry are all the same: big dreamers. In India, their dreams have to be bigger than everybody else’s. In India, they’re making collective dreams; when they go to sleep at night they have to dream for a billion people. This distorts their personalities. It also accounts for their egos: the demands of scale. The Bombay movie-makers are afflicted by megalomania.”
Another important observation he makes, apparently one that he made while working with director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, is something he “gradually find out about Bollywood: The people working in it are far smarter than the product they turn out.” This is one fundamental truth about the industry that bothers me to no extent. Chopra adds his own touch to the argument.

“I’m constantly saddled with a viewer who’s cinema-illiterate. It’s like trying to talk Shakespeare with Khem Bahadur [Chopra’s Nepali cook]. My fear is that through constant simplication and trying to talk Shakespeare with Khem Bahadur, I’ve lost the ability to discuss Shakespeare with people who know Shakespeare... We’re dwarfing our intellectual selves in order to make films for a Hindi film audience.”
This was ten years ago. The situation seems to be worse now. I don’t like the sound of this whole thing.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey HD, it is worrisome, yes, but I think there is hope. Indie movies are experimenting and we do see a lot more of them, than 10 years ago. Now, whether we like them or not, is a completely different issue altogether.

Don't know whether you caught this interesting, though wordy, write-up by Sudhir Mishra on why he thinks our movies are like they are -
http://passionforcinema.com/the-boy-who-made-yeh-woh-manzil-to-nahin/

10:44 PM  

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