Re: Indian Free Sexy Movies
Irmgard Verzi
Beautiful megastars Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai appear on the covers of Forbes and Time magazine and are considered more famous globally than Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts. Michael Ellis of the Motion Picture Association admits that US studios have not penetrated the Indian market. Until 2008, American cinemas did not screen Hindi movies. Now they do, big time.
In the remarkable film Guide (1965), Rehman, a dancer, was stuck with an archaeologist husband much like Casaubon in Middlemarch. A sexy tourist guide came along and the heroine went off with him. That, though, didn't end her deep unhappiness. In her most famous film Pakeezah (1972), Meena Kumari played a dignified courtesan exposing society's duplicities.
So where are we now? In the words of the novelist Hari Kunzru, "Bollywood has taken a contemporary turn and production values often overshadow narrative. Social-conscience movies dissolved during the 1980s into a torrid orgy of wet-sari clad violence and were overtaken by a new generation of super-glossy love stories with big budgets and international locations."
Modern global capitalism has changed all that. Indians in the US and UK are upwardly mobile, über-aspirational and getting wealthy. They disdain moralising stories about dirt-poor rural Indian villagers or oppressed women. In India itself, too, the rapidly growing urban middle- and upper-classes want movies which cast them as heroes of a brave new world, not tearful folk tales.
In India this January, the shrill daughter of a wealthy financier gave me an earful: "I mean, you arty types like all those sad films with the poor and weeping women and all that. Why? Is it that you can't accept that India is now a superpower? That you want us to stay backward for your entertainment? Why do you hate and mock Indians who walk tall in Jimmy Choos?" Maybe she has a point. Are those who fetishise old, socially concerned movies refusing to acknowledge, new, shining India? Perhaps, but only because those old divides and injustices have become worse.
And anyway, there is no turning back: Bollywood in the 21st century is a rising brand. Of 12 white students interviewed at Middlesex University for this article, most recognised the "product" and big names and some had watched the movies. That never happened before. Of the Asian students also interviewed, trendy and irreversibly British, almost all watched the films and felt affirmed by them, just as Syal did way, way back.
Though there is too much dross, Bollywood has, in this decade, been making movies of real substance, displaying innovation, high production values, courage and artistry. Examples include Omkara, based on Othello, a multi-layered film of the destructive love between a gullible outlaw and his lover from a respectable family; and Barfi!, a story of a dumb-and-deaf charmer, the highest-grossing movie in India in 2012. The most highly paid stars are now choosing to act in non-glam films with meaning.
So the future looks bright. My American friend, married to an Indian, is unsettled by that: "These movies are great, but they tell me power is moving away from the US, going east. And you know that's hard for us Americans." Her husband cut in, "It's time things were hard for you all. Hollywood will be humbled by Bollywood. Watch this space." Someone should make a movie about the clash of these two titans.
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