TALKING recently about expectations for his latest work, Farhan Akhtar, a 32-year-old Bollywood director, wore the stricken expression of a tightrope walker contemplating a particularly perilous move. Mr. Akhtar’s third film, “Don,” released on Oct. 20, is a “Mission: Impossible”-style action adventure, featuring the superstar Shah Rukh Khan as an international master criminal draped in blondes and high-tech toys. It combines stylized action, gadgets and a breathlessly paced plot that traverses Malaysia, India and France.
Shortly before the release of the film, which had a strong opening in the various Indian markets and abroad, Mr. Akhtar said he was aiming for Bollywood’s Holy Grail: a hit that could entertain both the educated nonresident Indian in Boston or London and the semiliterate viewer in Bihar or Uttar Pradesh.
In an interview in Mumbai, Mr. Akhtar said: “I don’t want to lose anyone in the twists and turns. For me, all markets are equally important. I want to make sure that everyone enjoys the film.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/movies/29chop.html
The enormity of the task explains his nervous expression. The universal Bollywood hit is becoming increasingly difficult to pull off. A decade ago, the Hindi film market was largely considered a homogenous monolith. What worked in one town was likely to work in another. But over the years the business has splintered dramatically, forcing industry pundits to create new labels for films.
In a conversation about the box office you are likely to hear the following:
“Supergentry”: a film that connects best with the prosperous, sophisticated viewers mostly found in metropolitan areas like Mumbai and overseas in the United States and Britain.
“Front-bencher”: a picture that attracts working-class viewers who sit on the front benches — that is, the cheap seats.
“Multiplex movie”: usually a medium-budget, nonformulaic film that works best at the 250-odd multiplexes that have opened in Indian metropolitan areas since 1997.
“Single theater movie”: a more pedestrian film with broader appeal, likely to work best at the old-style single theaters, where ticket prices are much cheaper.
“Overseas hit”: Usually a film that seduces non-resident Indians with stars, set-piece songs and family values.
“Interior hit”: Precisely the opposite — a film that works in small towns and villages, usually with dollops of rowdy action.
India, home to more than one billion people, 23 officially recognized languages and multitudes of religions, has always been a country of contradictions. But since economic liberalization in 1991, when India opened its markets, the distance between the country’s many communities has increased, leading to fragmentation in the film world. One India is poised for economic superstardom; the other struggles with an estimated 300 million people surviving on less than a dollar a day.
Jaideep Sahni, a leading screenwriter, said in an interview in Mumbai: “I’m constantly aware that I’m managing disparities. The psychographics of the country have polarized too sharply. There is no pan-Indian movie because there is no pan-India.”
Case in point: “Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna” (“Never Say Goodbye”), a lush-looking, much-hyped August release about marriage and adultery set in New York, grossed $13 million in six weeks overseas, the highest total ever for a Hindi movie. But “Alvida” did not do well in Bihar, where there are no multiplexes and the audience, mostly rural and working class, pays less than 50 cents a ticket.
The returns from the urban markets (where multiplex tickets cost up to $5 each) and the overseas markets (where viewers pay in dollars and pounds) are so much higher that Bollywood has sharply skewed toward them. Nonmetropolitan India has been relegated to the periphery, both as a market and as fodder for film plots. Anil Thadani, a leading distributor, said in an interview in Mumbai, “The storytelling has shifted because the economics have shifted.”
Screen space is largely occupied by urban stories with a decidedly Western veneer. A-list movies are now regularly situated in foreign locations. “Jaan-e-Mann” (“Heartthrob”), another big-budget, multistar film released on Oct. 20 — this one about a love triangle — was extensively shot in New York. At one point, the lead actor, Salman Khan, who plays a Bollywood star, does an Elvis Presley impersonation.
The director Shirish Kunder said in an e-mail interview that the film was “Indian in soul but Western in treatment and styling.” Mr. Kunder said he “tried to strike a balance between rural and metro/overseas audiences,” but he had to make a choice, and “opted to cater” to the latter. In some scenes, the characters speak entirely in English.
Many other filmmakers are making the same choice. Through much of the last decade, Bollywood has dished out what the director Rohan Sippy calls “prefab movies”: consumerist fantasies set in glossy urban locations, in which rich, beautiful characters grapple with matters of the heart. Even the more gritty and grounded films flashed an urbane attitude and sensibility.
Small-town and rural India, meanwhile, was sidelined, providing an opportunity for smaller regional cinemas. In the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, Bhojpuri-language films, earlier derided as the poor country cousins of Hindi cinema, sometimes do better business than A-list Bollywood films. The large migrant populations in metropolitan areas also flock to this basic, homegrown fare.
“There was always a divide between the city and countryside,” said Gyan Prakash, a historian at Princeton University who specializes in modern India, by e-mail. “But the divide between the audience for ‘Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna’ and that for Bhojpuri films represents something new. It suggests that the globalizing, metropolitan middle class has abandoned the countryside altogether. This is different from the cinemas of the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s, when the category ‘nation’ still had some purchase and Hindi films sought to address a ‘national’ audience even though the nation made up various divisions.”
The demographics of the industry have also helped further the segmentation. A generation of younger filmmakers is now wielding power. Many of them are from film families, and almost all are city born and bred. Mr. Sippy, 36, who graduated from Stanford University, where he majored in philosophy, is the son and grandson, respectively, of the filmmakers Ramesh Sippy and G. P. Sippy. He said the new filmmakers were simply telling stories that they knew and were comfortable with. “The nonurban space has to be reinvented,” he said. “It’s just waiting for the right kind of director.”
Meanwhile the director of “Don,” Mr. Akhtar, the son of two famous screenwriters, Javed Akhtar and Honey Irani, says he hopes the power of the narrative will finally trump all divisions. “At the core of it, the audience is the same,” he said. “India has a great storytelling tradition. Genetically we are programmed to identify with stories. If the story is worthwhile, the film will work everywhere.”
