http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Sunday-Times/frontpage.html?999
An Indian summer is on the way, says Stephen Armstrong
Hello, Bolly!
The first Bollywood film I ever saw was called Raja Hindustani, which I watched in a cinema in Calcutta. I’d been taken there by a rickshaw driver who promised to translate for me if I paid for him to get in. As the movie unfolded in front of an audience who seemed to have brought stoves to cook their evening meal, my translator silently lost himself in the plot, turning to me with enthusiasm every time there was a fight to shout: “Fight! Fight!”
Later, when I recognised a tune from the film during a cab ride back in London, the driver took the soundtrack tape from his machine and gave it to me as a present. After that, the film’s style started filtering through. Images were flashed on club walls during the upswing in Nu-Asian clubs like London’s Anokah. Snatches of dance routines popped up on MTV, taken from MTV India. Late at night or early on Sunday morning, clips appeared on BBC2. And it looks like I was not alone in getting the message.
This seems set to be the summer that Bollywood begins its trek into the western mainstream, after hanging around for, well, as long as there have been cinema cameras. Andrew Lloyd Webber is currently working with Meera Syal on a musical based on Bollywood, and has collaborated on the score with top industry names, such as the music prodigy AR Reham and film-maker Shekhar Kapur. A CD called The Very Best Bollywood Songs, from Outcaste Records, recently entered the charts at No 29, outselling Phil Collins and Ministry of Sound’s The Annual. The East Coast rapper Missy Elliott’s Top 5 single, Get Ure Freak on, uses a tabla percussion base and Bollywood-style dance routines in the video, while Basement Jaxx’s summer hit, Romeo, uses a full-scale, full-dress Bollywood dance routine in its video.
“I don’t think we were really chasing any trend,” says Basement Jaxx’s manager, Andrew Mansi. “The band come from Brixton, and it’s a hugely diverse cultural melting pot down there. You walk down the high street and you’ll hear music from all these different nations. The Bollywood movies are great - lots of eye candy and really beautiful to watch. We shot the video out in Bombay, using dancers from this huge pool who work on all the movies out there, and the whole thing was done really professionally with a mainly local crew.”
“We’ve released two compilation albums before this, but they weren’t as successful,” says Sunny Sharma, the Hounslow DJ who hosts a night at London’s ultra-hip Cargo and who compiled the Bollywood CD with his colleague Harv Nagi. “We found it easier to approach people about selling it this time round because the West seems to be embracing all things Bollywood at the moment.”
While the music and fashion crowds are revelling in Indian culture this summer, the film industry is also waking up to the appeal of Bollywood. Directors such as Shekhar Kapur have already begun working on western films - via the UK production company Working Title. Kapur’s Elizabeth used many traditional Bollywood techniques, such as the dance sequence between Elizabeth and her lover and the use of veils between camera and female lead. At the same time, there’s some pretty open imitation of Bolly by Holly now reaching the mainstream.
Take, for instance, Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. The whole film is shot on a soundstage, with no attempt to disguise the fact. Even the locations are clearly a painted backdrop. The stylised song-and-dance routines use contemporary and therefore anachronistic music. Nicole Kidman’s lair, where the key love scene takes place, is a boudoir in the guts of a huge elephant. Come on, Baz. It’s Bollywood through and through. Perhaps to acknowledge this, Kidman wore a dress by the Indian designer Ritu Beri to the premiere of the film.
Perhaps this is just a fad, or perhaps Hollywood looks at the 800 films made in India every year - for an average cost of £1m-£2m and an average domestic box-office take four times that - and sees good, solid, easy money. With poor international distribution, Bollywood still takes £225m a year in exports and, since it began to sell overseas in the 1950s and 1960s, has a better penetration in China, Russia and the Middle East than US cinema.
Indeed, some pundits attribute the global success of certain Hollywood films - such as Titanic - to their perceived similarity to Bollywood. “Titanic is pure Bollywood,” says Jessica Hines, author of a new book on the Bollywood überstar Amitabh Bachchan. “The story of a poor boy and a rich girl falling in love and then her family’s attempts to foil him, all set against the huge sweeping drama of the ship? That’s the plot to most Bollywood romances.”
Certainly, Sony has looked at this new global economic picture, realised how many people make up the Indian domestic population plus diaspora, factored in China, and decided it could do with some of that action. This year, it has set up an international distribution chain for Bollywood films and has just started to invest in Bombay-produced movies.
The first fruit of this deal is a film called Lagaan - Bollywood’s own attempt to cross over into the mainstream. Produced by and starring one of the biggest names in Indian cinema, Aamir Kahn, its cast is half British, half Indian, and its Sony connection has seen it get the nearest thing to a full mainstream release that any Bollywood picture has yet achieved. Just out, it’s already in the UK Top 10 films, even though it’s showing on a mere 30 screens nationwide. But these aren’t just the traditional Bollywood cinemas such as the Bombay in Glasgow and the Bradford Odeon. Lagaan has also jumped into Odeon, UCI and Warner theatres in Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, Bristol, Birmingham, Newcastle, Manchester and even Milton Keynes.
“We hadn’t originally planned this to be a crossover movie,” says Kahn. “We’d thought it would just be a domestic film that made the usual money from Indians living overseas. But half the cast are English, and when we came over to London to do the casting, the response to the script by the British actors was so overwhelming that we began to think about it a little differently.”
The film itself crosses Gone With the Wind with The Great Escape. It’s set in India under the Raj, just after the mutiny. Evil British governors in cahoots with the Rajah tell the drought-stricken village of Champaner that the agricultural tax - the lagaan - is to be doubled. Consternation ensues, but a confusing love triangle between Bhuvan (played by Aamir Khan), his village sweetheart and Elizabeth, the English sister of the dastardly Captain Russell, helps resolve the issue. Somehow, the English are persuaded to play the peasants at cricket, with a hefty bet riding on the game. If the British win, taxes are doubled again. If the Indians win, they’re halved. With all that to play for, the villagers start to learn the game of cricket, and you can probably guess how it ends. Despite excellent reviews from Radio 4 and The Guardian, the curious should be warned that Lagaan is long. Very long. It comes in at three and a half hours plus interval. No wonder people take stoves.
“We had planned to cut the film down for its release into the mainstream,” Khan says. “We thought of taking out some songs and scenes, but in the end we decided to be true to the film and release it in its full form. Hopefully there is enough interest out there to sustain it. We think there’s a chance. Bollywood’s time has come. Mainstream Indian cinema doesn’t take things very seriously. It’s full of colour and music and laughter and dancing, and we think it’s a pretty life-affirming style.”
Khan’s hopes are fortified by the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and a new interest in genres of Asian cinema that have previously been limited to hardcore foreign-film enthusiasts. On his side is the fact that Lagaan is the most expensive Bollywood musical ever made, coming in at a total budget of £3.5m. It may still prove faintly difficult for the non-art-house crowd to fall in love with, but little moments like an Untouchable inventing off-spin, and a heavily bewhiskered Chris England playing a vicious bodyline bowler, make for an entertaining evening.
In any case, it’s got to be better than Pearl Harbor.