WORLD CINEMA

Festivals

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Cannes 2007: Bollywood calls on Cannes

Indian beauty Aishwarya Rai will be at Cannes this year in a different avatar. As the new bride of Bollywood’s first family, Bachchans, Rai had donned several roles at the French Riviera, as juror, as the face of L’Oreal and as the glamorous heroine of “Devdas”, in a Special Screening in 2002.

Aishwarya Rai

Rai will be part of a large mostly Bollywood brigade that will include her own husband, Abhishek, her mighty father-in-law, Amitabh Bachchan, actor Hrithik Roshan (known as India’s Superman for his part in “Krrish”), models John Abraham (seen in Deepa Mehta’s “Water”) and Bipasha Basu, and director Ashutosh Gowariker (whose “Laagan” – Tax -- was short listed for the 2002 Oscars in the foreign picture category).

But India’s presence is confined to glamour, and Cannes’ plan to celebrate its 60th edition along with India’s six decades of Independence did not succeed when the Festival found nothing suitable for Competition, and had to be content with seven movies in an unimportant sidebar, “Cinema of the World”.

Despite the 1000-odd films India makes every year with Bollywood contributing a fourth, the country’s cinema is still not universal enough with nuances and mannerisms frighteningly foreign to the global audience that gathers every May at what is the biggest date in cinema. In 1994, when Kerala director Shaji Karun’s “Swaham” (Self) competed at Cannes, most people walked out. Not because the movie was bad, but its idiom and language were too alien. Since then there has not been another Indian film in Competition, though Cannes included in its other sections a few pictures from Bollywood and elsewhere, but with little success. While “Devdas” exasperated viewers with its length, and was ripped apart by Cannes critics, Rai, proved to be the darling of the Riviera crowds and parties.

Her latest work, “Jodhaa Akbar”, where she plays the 16th century Hindu Queen of India’s Mughal King Akbar, will be screened in its rough version at the Festival market, and so will her “Guru” (in the Cinema of the World), where she is the wife of a wealthy industrialist. However, Cannes is not Rai alone: for the first time, a Tamil movie, “Veyil” (Sunlight), will show how a young man’s passion for cinema creates turmoil in his life. And Bengal’s “Dosar” (Companion) on extramarital affair will hopefully add sizzle to surf and sand.

(Webposted May 16 2007)

INDIAN CINEMA

Other Movies

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Social Bollywood

Bollywood in a welcome departure last year (2006) produced two films that went beyond mere entertainment. They looked at important social issues in a refreshingly different way.

Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s “Rang De Basanti” (Paint It Yellow), India’s official entry to the 2007 Oscars, tackled political sleaze in the age of kickbacks. A Defence Minister signs a contract to buy cheap and spurious spares for MiG fighter planes (termed flying-coffins because of their high rate of accidents) in return for a bribe, and a young test pilot dies when his jet crashes after a malfunction. His friends rehearsing a play on India’s freedom struggle are driven by the historical characters and situations to protest the corruption. Like the freedom fighters who once confronted the might of the British Raj, the friends take on the evil of politico-economic fraud in contemporary times.

“Rang De Basanti” did remarkably well at the box-office, grossing ,685,899 worldwide. In the U.K., it collected pounds 2,21,226 during its first weekend, and it debuted in the British movie charts at number 13.

A part of the film’s success lay in Mehra’s no-nonsense style of treating a social malaise with the seriousness it deserved. His work reflected the attitude of young India, which, though caught up in a self-gratifying consumerist culture, was disturbed by political crime, and has now begun to address it through serious debates and writings.

Bollywood director Karan Johar moved away from public domain to private space when he looked at the institution of marriage in his “Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna” (Never Say Goodbye). Though a glossy production compared to “Rang De Basanti” with Manhattan and River Hudson forming frequent backdrops, this Johar work stood out for the way it tackled marital infidelity. There have been any number of Bollywood movies dealing with this subject, but they have seldom said what Johar did: dissolve your marriage and go to your lover. A very bold statement in Indian cinema, though “Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna” was merely mirroring what is now happening in Indian society. In the film, a man and a woman married to different partners find that they are attracted to each other, and eventually the two come together.

The movie collected pounds 750,000 in the U.K. during the first weekend, and broke the first week Indian cinema record worldwide by fetching Rs 7.2 million. A film buff had just a single word to describe Johar’s work: gutsy.

(Posted on this website on January 11 2007)