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Shubhra Gupta

While the past year proved to be good for Hollywood, Bollywood has not been so lucky. A clear signal that it is time for Bollywood to stop aping old success and also to move on.

A still from the film, Bollywood Hollywood.

A character in Deepa Mehta's new film `Bollywood Hollywood', says, `Holly Bolly, it's the same wood'. Or words to that effect. 2002 turned out to be a goodish year for Hollywood products, both outside as well as within India. But you could well be tempted to use the sweeping statement as a metaphor, mix it further, and apply it to the current state of the industry in Mumbai: our filmmakers appear to have missed the wood for the trees. All of last year, films crashed. And the way the New Year has begun, it looks as if the blight will continue.

There was a faint hope that `Talaash', a big-budget extravaganza starring Akshay Kumar and Kareena Kapoor, made by the experienced producer-director duo of Pahlaj Nihalani and Suneel Darshan, would turn the tide. But it turned out to be beyond bad: the storyline stretched credulity, and the treatment was pure 1960s. The lessons of last year have clearly not been learnt.

Mehta's film spoofs tried-and-tested Bollywood conventions to tell the story of Toronto-based NRI Rahul Seth, who is forced into a piquant situation by his ever-loving mother and grandmother. They want him to marry Good Indian Girl, eschewing the dubious charms of Bad Western Girl, who does not know how to respect traditions. While drowning his sorrows at a bar, he bumps into the drop-dead gorgeous Sue, who is an escort. Which means that for a price, she spends evenings with men, making conversation, and giving them company. Nothing else, but that also means that she is Not Good Indian Girl. The desperate Rahul offers her wads of cash to pretend to be his fiancée, and promptly falls for her.

After being dead serious in `Fire', and `Earth' (the third of the trilogy, `Water', on the plight of Indian widows, has been indefinitely stalled), Mehta tries for fun in `Bollywood Hollywood'. But it doesn't work, neither as a send-up of Bollywood, nor as a Hollywood-style love story, where people kiss at the end of a first date, and end up in bed, by the second. Referencing popular Hindi movies, running as a continuous strip on assorted TV screens as the movie's characters go about their business is not enough. For a real satire, you need to have a sharp script, and meaningful insights about the culture you are parodying.

Mehta's direction has no bounce; her story and characters are equally limp. `Bollywood Hollywood' has had a good run in Canada, which means that audiences in the West are receptive to anything that purports to let them into the mysteries of `Bollywood': which, to the West, has come to mean movies full of meddling parents who insist on `arranged marriages', pancaked heroes and heroines breaking into song-and-dance routines at the drop of a hat, and loud melodrama. After Mehta's movie, though, one doesn't know which is worse: bad Bollywood products, which take themselves too seriously, or bad parodies of the same, which end up saying nothing.

`My Big Fat Greek Wedding', a shoe-string Hollywood production which made oodles of money in the US last year, also uses parody to showcase an unlikely romance. But the result in this case is genuinely funny, and for those of us who are used to big fat Indian weddings, and noisy, interfering families, a great deal of resonance comes off the movie. It tells the story of 30-year-old plain Greek jane Toula, who is considered firmly on the shelf by her father. Daddy believes that every Greek girl must marry a Greek boy, make lots of Greek babies, and feed the men till she dies. Rings a bell?

In a perfect case of opposites attracting, Toula falls heavily for Ian, who has nuclear family, is vegetarian, and is, horrors, not Greek. Several interludes later, wherein much fun is poked at American and Greek cultures, a big fat wedding happens, and Ian and Toula go blissfully off into the sunset. The key to the comedy is affection: here's a director who delves deep, and takes telling swipes at both cultures through lovingly-sketched idiosyncratic characters. It's not as if there aren't superficial set-pieces, but the whole thing is dealt with a lightness of spirit, which allows you to laugh with the characters, not just at them.

The most memorable movies globally have always combined local cultures and universal themes: an Ang Lee does a `Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon' using hundred-years-old Chinese characters and traditions, jazzed up by latest Hollywood technical flash, to make a moving romance which reaches out to the world; a Gurinder Chaddha uses her Indian-African-Punjabi-British roots, to do the same. Both are vastly different movies, depicting very different worlds, but at their root, what they are doing is telling us stories, which mean something.

In the last decade, rising production costs, astronomical star fees, and other commercial imperatives have driven filmmakers into a corner where derivative stories, and styles, have been the norm. If a Sooraj Barjatya makes Rs 100 crore with his four-hour-long marriage video, `Hum Aapke Hain Koun', along comes an Aditya Chopra, and does the same in his `Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge'. So does Karan Johar in his `Kuch Kuch Hota Hai'. Everybody and their uncle climbs on to the marriage bandwagon: they make copies without any of the charm or the novelty of the `originals', and the industry is struck all in a heap because they fail.

As the past year proved, with mounting losses of over Rs 300 crore, it's not just the lavish `shaadis' audiences are tired of. Mafia tales, too, have to have something new about them; not everybody can be a Ram Gopal Varma, with his landmark `Satya', and `Company'. It's time to stop aping old success. It's time to move on.

The author can be reached at Shubhrag@vsnl.com

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