July 8-14, 2004

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Cinema India! (through Sun., July 11, $5-$6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) Foreign-film buffs who lament the global dominance of American blockbusters, breathe a sigh of relief: It turns out we're not number one after all. You wouldn't know it from where we sit, but there's a film industry whose production far outpaces Hollywood, which claims as much as 20 million viewers a day in its native country, and whose products are ubiquitous across much of the globe.

By now, you've guessed I'm talking about Bollywood. Turning out over a thousand films a year which are widely exported to Asia, Africa and the Middle East, the Indian film industry easily claims the title of world's biggest. So why haven't most Americans ever seen a Bollywood movie? For one, they've rarely had the chance. While the work of Indian art film directors like Deepa Mehta has received steady, if limited, U.S. distribution, the brightly colored, expansive spectacles that make up the Indian popular cinema have remained somewhere between a rumor and a myth.

Movies like Mehta's Bollywood/Hollywood, Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding and Anurag Mehta's American Chai reflect Bollywood's style and concerns, but tone down the stylistic flourishes that — at least in the minds of film distributors — turn American audiences off. Chief among these missing elements is the reliance on elaborately staged song-and-dance numbers, which erupt into the plot with little provocation and often take the characters across innumerable dreamscapes, from snowy mountains to the pyramids of Egypt. Once you've been inaugurated into Bollywood's pleasures, such cosmetic surgery seems tantamount to sacrilege.

We've been hearing about Bollywood — or, the preferred term, filmi — for a long time, and now, at last, it's time for the real thing. Assembled by Radha Welt Vatsal, the six-film "Cinema India!" is obviously not intended as a comprehensive survey, but its mixture of art film, thriller and documentary along with the expected family melodrama conveys the richness and diversity of contemporary Indian cinema, and instills a deep hope that this won't be the last taste we get.

Chief among its pleasures is The Braveheart Will Take the Bride (Thu., July 8, 7 p.m.). Better known as DDLJ, for Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Aditya Chopra's story of star-crossed lovers lays claim to being the most popular movie in the history of the world's largest film industry: It opened in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) in 1995, and hasn't stopped playing since.

It's not hard to see why. Though American movies have largely discarded the family melodrama as passé, DDLJ reminds us of the genre's potency, its ability to stage social and generational conflicts. Like any good screwball couple, Simran (Kajol) and Raj (Shahrukh Khan) begin by hating each other. The children of immigrant families living in London, they separately opt to spend the summer riding Eurail with their school friends (a rite of passage for European teens). They're both late for the train, and end up trapped in an implausibly empty compartment, where they take an instant dislike to each other. The shaggy haired Raj is a self-styled pickup artist, though his confidence has little to do with his success rate, while Simran is a tightly wound romantic, instantly offended by Raj's crass come-ons. Chopra isn't shy about letting us know they're meant for each other — early on, before they've met, the two pass in the street, and an orchestra explodes out of the speakers — but he knows the best love stories aren't between characters on-screen, but between actors and audiences. He doesn't mind letting us dislike his leads until we come around: Kahn's cocksure smarm is as insufferable as Cary Grant's in His Girl Friday, while Kajol's glasses and conservative dress set the stage for her inevitable sexual awakening (keeping in mind that Bollywood characters rarely kiss, let alone run the bases).

By the time Raj and Simran get home, they're indisputably in love, and their troubles are just beginning. At this point, DDLJ is almost 90 minutes old, and it's not half over. Though three-hour-plus running times are commonplace in India, American theater owners often balk at cutting a screening out of their daily schedule, and audiences roll their eyes and shift their fannies. But there's nothing daunting, or self-consciously "epic" about DDLJ, and it goes by a lot faster than Troy. (It's got an intermission, too.) Think of it as a miniseries, one that really gets cooking in Part Two.

See, while Raj and Simran are delighted by their unexpected love, Simran's father (Amrish Puri) has other ideas. He's already promised Simran's hand to the son of an old friend back in India, and when he finds out that she's fallen in love with another, he moves the whole family back for good. The film, of course, follows.

Love story notwithstanding, it's Simran's father who proves the movie's most fascinating character. He's the kind who used to populate American movies by the hundreds: the proud immigrant pining for his native land, wanting a better life for his children but unable to accept that the freedoms he's won for them threaten his most cherished traditions. Dominated as they are by youthful spirits, movies usually take the children's side in such disputes, often demeaning tradition in the process. But from its opening moments, when Simran's father stands in Trafalgar Square pining for his native Punjab and then is magically transported there, DDLJ pays tradition its deepest respects, at the same time recognizing that individual happiness and cultural responsibility are sometimes irreconcilable. More than its likable stars or catchy tunes, it's the movie's appeal to the families of the disapora that is the cornerstone of its worldwide success.

After Raj follows Simran to India (you didn't think he'd just let her go, did you?) she offers to elope with him, something of a stock ending in Indian film. But Raj, as much as he loves her, refuses. He will only marry her with her father's consent, no matter how long it takes to get it. Underneath his loutish skin is a staunch traditionalist. Before Simran has fallen for Raj's charms, the two become separated from their friends and are forced to spend a night together. Ever the bad influence, Raj coaxes Simran to take her first drink, and when she wakes the next morning, she can't remember what happened. Raj tricks her into thinking they've spent the night together and Simran dissolves in tears, but suddenly the mood turns serious. He was just joking, Raj tells her. "I'm not scum. I'm Hindustani. And I know what honor means to the Hindustani woman."

Not the kind of stuff you expect to find in a lighthearted romantic comedy, but the movie's frivolity is always balanced by its very real concerns. Rather than scoff at the movie's musical numbers — and as far as I'm concerned, if you don't like musicals, you don't like movies — note how deftly Chopra, only 24 when he directed the movie, interweaves fantasy and reality. The setting for the song in which Simran outlines her ideal man (what the folks at Disney would call an "I want" song) is her family's house, which looks more like a real house than almost any I've seen on screen, and not just in a musical. If you turned the knobs on the kitchen stove, I have no doubt the burners would flare.

There's a pat quality to the movie's resolution, which goes particularly fast considering how long you've waited to get there. But as in the 1950s melodrama of Douglas Sirk, the ending's abruptness undercuts its sincerity, even as it gives the audience what they obviously want. Clearly, the issues the movie's exposed can't be so easily reconciled, and just as clearly, we wish they could. DDLJ overlaps the reality and the desire, and deepens your understanding of both.

As much as it evokes The Awful Truth or The Philadelphia Story, Raj and Simran's relationship throws in a hefty dose of Jane Austen as well, but for a full-on Austen adaptation, you'll have to turn to I Have Found It (Fri., July 9, 7 p.m.), which re-situates Sense and Sensibility in present-day South India. Slicker than DDLJ, I Have Found It's dance numbers have elaborate costumes and masks, and music by Bombay Dreams composer A R Rahman. But it's not nearly as appealing, though as the flighty sister, Aishwarya Rai demonstrates the magnetism that has made her one of the world's biggest stars. (She's currently filming another Austen adaptation, Bride and Prejudice, directed by Bend It Like Beckham's Gurinder Chadha.) Likewise the dour Maqbool (Sat., July 10, 7 p.m.), which shifts Macbeth to the Mumbai underworld. No singing here, and not much life either, despite a brief turn by the reliably great Om Puri.

The Speaking Hand: Zakir Hussain and the Art of the Indian Drum (Sun., July 11, 1 p.m.) is a must for fans of Indian music, a profile of the tabla virtuoso which includes generous performance excerpts. (A concert by Shaafatullah Khan follows.) The series closes with Anything Can Happen (Sun., July 11, 7 p.m.), a zippy gangster satire that opens with a declaration that its plot has been freely plagiarized, and closes with a dedication to Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers. Director Shashanka Ghosh includes the requisite dance numbers, but works them into the plot to the extent that one singer is accidentally shot dead during a gun battle. (I haven't even mentioned the Punjabi rap group.) The story, which involves a copywriter caught between warring street gangs, twists itself in knots you're probably not meant to follow, and the tone keeps shifting from wry to jaded to overwrought. Better than any other film in the series, it demonstrates the "masala" quality of Indian film, the mixture of different traditions and styles that creates a work both openly derivative and wholly singular.