Bully for Bollywood! The film industry in Bombay—nicknamed `Bollywood'—is bigger and busier than its counterpart in Los Angeles, but Americans are only just discovering Indian cinema

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 24, 2002 | by Victor Morton

In a scenario derived from Agatha Christie, a murderer is bumping off the survivors of a plane crash on a deserted island. So what do these endangered souls do? Among other things, they have a beach party and perform the exuberant song-and-dance number "Jaan Pehechaan Ho."

Welcome to "Bollywood." India long has had the world's most prolific cinema, producing more than 1,000 films a year in all the nation's languages, and the world's biggest box office. Twice as many movie tickets were sold in 1999 in India as in the United States, and 10 times as many as in third-place Indonesia. Yet the signature Hindi popular cinema--nicknamed Bollywood after its production base of Bombay--has had little success in the West.

While Bollywood remains an acquired taste with a cult following, the increasing number of Indian immigrants in the United States has encouraged theater owners to open cinemas catering to their interests. Nearly every Indian specialty store has a video section to rent Bollywood films, and numerous rental sites are available on the Internet.

"With the increased profile of Indian theaters in the U.S., and more frequent subtitling, it appears that Bollywood is finally making serious inroads on our shores," says Michael Sicinski, a film-studies lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. The New York City and San Francisco areas boast all-Indian multiplexes of 13 and eight screens, respectively. The Washington area has two theaters showing Bollywood on the big screen, including Loehmann's Twin Cinemas in Annandale, Va.

"Sometimes Americans will come if the film is subtitled, which is not always the case" says Madhav Thapa, the manager at Loehmann's Twin. Distributors of the biggest attractions--films such as Lagaan and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham--provide subtitled prints. Bollywood's attraction for Indians is easy to understand. Because the Hindi film industry releases a film simultaneously worldwide, Indians in New Delhi as well as New York "are very happy to see them, united, on the same day" says Thapa.

Lagaan is a totally accessible film--a Hindi Bad News Bears in which Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan leads some high-spirited Indian peasants in a cricket battle against British colonialism. The film, which also features Gracy Singh, displays the characteristics that make Bollywood cinema unique--the long running time, the multiple plotlines, the sudden bursts into song-and-dance sequences, the archetypal characterization, the outsized acting.

These features are not, as critic David Chute argues in the prestigious journal Film Comment, botched attempts to imitate Hollywood's "seamless realism and disguised artifice." Rather, they are conventions, like vaudeville or stage revues, that openly acknowledge their artifice in the name of the kitchen-sink approach to "putting on a show."

Even the current hit Indian film Monsoon Wedding, although not made in the pure Bollywood style, pays homage to the genre. In one late scene, a character at a wedding reception performs a musical number known to all--Hindi-speaking and Punjabi-speaking, indigenous and expatriate.

Some American film distributors hope to make this Bollywood formula popular with the firangi (Hindustani for "foreigners"). Spurred by its Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film--the first for a full song-and-dance Bollywood movie in almost a half-century--Sony Classics picked up Lagaan to play subtitled in U.S. art-house theaters this summer, another Bollywood first.

Besides its films' growing prominence, Bollywood also is influencing U.S. films and popular culture:

* One of the musical numbers in Moulin Rouge has Nicole Kidman clad like a movie Devi singing on a stage with Bollywood art direction. The multiple-Oscar-nominated film also shows Bollywood stylistic influences in its antirealistic acting, hyperemotional love songs and total disregard for verisimilitude.

* The film Ghost World, a critics' favorite from last summer, opens with its central character, Enid, boogying along to the "Jaan Pehechaan Ho" number, from the film Gumnaam.

* Andrew Lloyd Webber is teaming up with British-Indian director Shekhar Kaput and Bollywood composer A.R. Rahman to make a Bollywood-inspired stage extravaganza Bombay Dreams, scheduled for a June premiere in London.

The New York Times has declared a Bollywood craze among New York's glitterati, who have embraced its latest styles in fashion, travel, jewelry and cosmetics. Film Comment just published a 12-page package of articles on Hindi popular cinema titled "Bollywood 101." Indeed, the quiet way Bollywood has gained popularity resulted in a minor tiff in December between Daily Variety, the leading Hollywood trade magazine, and the distributors of Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham.

In its opening week, the film grossed slightly more than $1 million, which would have been good enough to place it among Daily Variety's top 10 films at the box office for the Dec. 18, 2001, issue. That achievement would have been a first for a Bollywood film with near-zero publicity outside Indian-targeted channels such as immigrant newspapers and specialty stores. "They found the number too high," Yashraj Films spokesman Jawahar Sharma told the Indian news Website rediff.com. "They doubted that on 73 prints we managed such a high gross."