[Review] Bollywood/Hollywood
Muffy St. Bernard
http://www.dazzled.com/dangermuff/bollybob
but since there aren't any pictures you might as well just read it
here!)
Bollywood/Hollywood (2002)
Starring: Rahul Khanna (Rahul Seth), Lisa Ray (Sunita Singh), Moushumi
Chatterjee (Mummy ji), Dina Pathak (Grandma ji), Kulbhushan Kharbanda
(Mr. Singh), Ranjit Chowdhry (Rocky), Jessica Paré (Kimberly)
Writer & Director: Deepa Mehta
Music by: Sandeep Chowta & Pravin Mani
When "Bollywood/Hollywood" opened last year -- on my birthday, no
less -- I didn't see it. Was I remiss? Did I shirk my duties? My
friends were certainly gung-ho about getting me into the
theatre..."Come on!" they'd say, "You're a fan of Bollywood, and
there's a drag queen in it, and it's a cross-over film! It was shot in
Toronto! It's playing just down the street! Put your tail feathers on
and let's go!"
But I said no. I shushed them away like bothersome flies. I made
excuses about being busy, or being sick of Indian cinema, or needing
to stay at home and oil my cat. But my real reason for never seeing
the film was because I was SCARED.
Yes, I admit it. In fact this is the first time I've admitted it
to anybody, anywhere. I was scared because "Bollywood/Hollywood," with
that ominous slash in the middle of the title and the "Same wood,
different tree" catchphrase was meant to appeal to Western and Eastern
audiences in equal measure. It was a film combining two elements
together, one of which I deeply enjoy and another that I'm deeply
suspicious of. That combination spells "eventual bastardization of
Indian films until they end up looking like bland porridge with a few
raisins in it." A little creature deep down in my guts was telling me
that if Bollywood ever seriously caught on with a non-Indian audience,
the film-makers would start targeting the west...and before you know
it Amitabh would become Jackie Chan and there'd be a hundred rail-thin
versions of Rambha on MTV. NO!
So, paralyzed with fear, I stayed at home (and oiled the cat) and
shunned the movie like I might catch atypical pneumonia from it. I
muttered under my breath about money-grubbing filmmakers who can't
leave a good thing alone, and my friends called me names like
"elitist" or "stupid" or "covered in oil." This resulted in me
missing a great film and denying the filmmakers that little dribble of
money that they would have earned from my cinema ticket. The best I
can do now is buy the DVD and the soundtrack -- even if it does have
an abysmal version of "Mera Naam Chin-Chin Chu" at the end -- and hope
that I can make up for lost time.
Deepa Mehta has taught me something about the Bollywood AND
Hollywood genres, but before I get into that I'd like to tell you what
this movie is about. Then I'd like to discuss a little creature that
lives inside of our guts, because it has some relevance to What It
Might Possibly Mean To Be A Canadian Or An Indian, with a caveat that
I'm going to make some wild generalizations very, very soon. I'll
explain right off the bat that I majored in Psychology and am
therefore, even today, filled with half-baked theories and
pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo. I'm telling you now so you can be
ready when I reveal them. Freud damaged me as much as he damaged
everybody else, especially those rich, hysterical, corseted women who
didn't realize that their feet were numb just because their laces were
too tight.
But first, a brief synopsis. The cunningly-named Rahul (Rahul
Khanna) is a very rich man whose family insists that he marry an
Indian girl. PRONTO. Maybe they're worried that if they stretch
things out any longer, the viewers might want to know how Rahul became
so rich and want to see his office (no Indian business tycoon's office
is complete without a wall-to-wall mural of a woodsy landscape...and
do you know how hard it is to find those things nowadays? It would
destroy the budget!) When his flaky white girlfriend Kimberly --
forever quoting Deepak Chopra and levitating around -- fails to
impress the clan, Rahul comes under intense pressure from his mother
and grandmother: "find an Indian girl and marry her, or we'll hold off
your sister's wedding." And since his sister is pregant, the clock is
ticking.
I'd like to point out that calling a girl "Twinky" in North
America is bound to lead to early pregnancy, but I digress.
Rahul meets Sue in a sparsely-populated, Atom Egoyan-esque "club."
What I mean by that is that the club looks like a set-designer's wet
dream, but resembles more of an art installation than a place where
you want to get drunk and vomit. Sue looks like she can pass for any
of a dozen ethnicities (she claims Spanish) and she loves Bollywood,
which Rahul claims makes her an "honorary Indian." Sensing a scheme,
Rahul pays her to pretend to be his bride-to-be, and with some
coaching she fits right in with the rest of the family. Everyone is
happy. Mummy ji is enchanted when Sue (now "Sunita") is willing to do
"whatever Rahul tells me to do." Grandma ji is intrigued by Sunita's
straight-talk. On her part, Sunita has had her own effect on the
family, transforming Govinda (Rahul's younger brother) from a horrible
nerd into somewhat less of a horrible nerd, and she actually gets
Grandma to dance at a party held in a shopping mall. Rahul himself is
falling in love with Sunita, as you'd expect, and it's mutual. The
only catch is that they can't get over the origins of their conceit.
He's paying her, she's taking the money, and she's a professional
escort. In the best Bollywood tradition they are worthy, wonderful
people being kept apart by lies and deception and their own personal
hang-ups. And that's the tension of the movie.
You can already see the Bollywood elements here: a melodramatic
and somewhat hysterical mother (referred to as a "drama queen"), a
grandmother with a stony manner but a warm heart, a son who wants to
"do what's right" (or, in Rahul's case, who wants to keep a promise he
made to his dying father AND to get this whole unpleasant business
over with) and a future bride who isn't quite what she appears to be.
There's also the knowledge that, no matter what, these lies between
Rahul and Sunita need to be revealed sometime, and when they come out
in the open there's going to be some head-clutching and weeping and
hopefully a heart-wrenching song on a mountaintop. At least, that's
what would happen in Bollywood. What about in this strange, hybrid,
Canadian film?
Deepa Mehta's got it all figured out. She has a few ways of
making this palatable to the west, first off by injecting some
ever-popular culture clashes: grandma ji quotes shakespeare, the NRI
ladies get confused about the origin of ecstasy ("it's a drug, like
hashish"), and there is a running gag with an Indian woman who wanders
around at all the events saying "What a bunch of losers," which I
found extremely funny in that Addam's Family, repetitive humour sort
of way. In fact, I'd rank this running gag as one of the top five
moments of the film, right up there with the ghostly visitation scene
near the end and Sunita's hilarious Urmila Matondkar impersonation.
But Deepa has an even more impressive method method up her sari,
something I wasn't aware of until the film was over and I was oiling
the cat again: she made this film tasty to a western palate by
SOFTENING it.
Now, Bollywood films are inherantly harsh. They have strictly
defined codes of conduct that lead to strict plots, strict scenes, and
strict ranges of emotion. They have, generally, sharp transitions
between those scenes: a funny sequence ("to release tension"),
followed by an action sequence ("to outline who is good and who is
bad"), followed by a song ("the inner dialogue") with very little to
connect them. The characters usually have a role that the viewer is
aware of as soon as we see them walk on the screen: the guy with the
scary moustache = bad guy = will remain unsympathetic to the audience
until the end, when he MAY repent and try to fix the situation before
he dies...and he MUST die, always. That's the harsh fact of Bollywood.
Things MUST happen, certain elements MUST be there, and it's the
ELEMENTS of the movie that matter the most, the scenes, the
moments...NOT the transitions between them, not the western idea of
"plot," lord forbid!
"Bollywood/Hollywood" softens the Bollywood approach in the same
way that Ram Gopal Varma tends to in his movies. He creates a plot arc
that's smooth and isn't tangential. There are no bad guys, just
ordinary people who are obstructions. This is what Deepa Mehta does.
When the grandmother objects to something, she doesn't stand up and
yell, the camera doesn't zoom in on her as she says something vicious
about the heroine...grandma ji just makes a firm but funny joke. When
she calls Kimberly a whore, the circumstances around the insult are
light and funny. When Sue's father gets angry at her for sneaking out
at night, the scene ends with a somewhat maudlin and touching
examination of his frailty and his shattered dreams. Nobody in the
movie is a strictly "comic" character, or "bad" character, or even
"hero" or "heroine" (both of whom have got problems of their own
regarding their backgrounds and ability to commit emotionally, I
suspect). While there are certainly typical characters in this movie,
they are not constrained as they would be in Bollywood. They're
allowed to be both sympathetic AND annoying, funny AND sad. But never
"tragic" or "cruel."
And what's more, these scenes CONNECT. There's a flow between
them, presumably because this flow seems to be much more important to
Western viewers than it is to Eastern ones. When the actors break into
a song -- normally a somewhat jarring transition to one not used to it
-- a helpful subtitle is given ("The Romantic Song" for instance) to
ease the movement to a new type of scene. The way Deepa Mehta
accomplishes this is masterful and subtle, and besides having written
a funny (and great) script and directed a wonderful film, I
congratulate her most on this "softening" of Bollywood. I think it
manages to keep the important elements without bastardizing them or
mixing them up, which was my initial fear.
But it's not all chameli and margosa leaves. My biggest problem
with the Bollywood/Hollywood mix involves -- bear with me here -- that
little creature living in your guts. Please forgive me while I explain
this.
All of us, I think, have a little creature down there that
mediates our behaviour. I'll call it an imp. It's sort of like Freud's
"Ego," but it chuckles (in a nasty, high-pitched way) at many of his
other theories and likes to stomp around demolishing the Oedipus
Complex. This little creature wears different regional clothing and
is as distinct as a set of fingerprints, and if you put your head near
your boyfriend's belly you can sometimes hear it gurgling.
The Canadian version of the imp is dressed like a theatre usher,
and it takes it's job very seriously. When a Canadian laughs at a
joke, or gets up to dance, or goes to see a band perform, that little
imp is always saying "Shhhh, keep it down! Don't bump into anybody!
Don't act crazy! Act like an adult! You look silly doing that! It's
getting late, time to go home!" I have a feeling that the Indian imp
is a little different...it often does that Daler Mendhi dance (with
it's fingers pointing up in the air) and it plays wicked Antakshari.
It is just as restrained as the Canadian imp sometimes -- "Bow
respectfully to your auntie! Take Hanumann seriously!" -- but it also
knows when to have a coffee break and stop controlling things. In some
ways the Canadian imp is a good thing, as we don't often have riots
here and aren't apt to spot killer Monkey Men when we travel to Delhi.
But our little creature is FAR too concerned with keeping things neat
and clean and tidy. It doesn't make "rock the boat" when it should.
It doesn't get out of line when it should. And, most importantly, it
won't let us party.
Most of the actors in "Bollywood/Hollywood" are not Canadian,
which makes this observation seem sort of strange: some of them,
especially Sue (played by Lisa Ray) are just not letting loose like
they should. Lisa Ray is brilliant in the movie, playing an entirely
convincing role and looking gorgeous as sort of an added bonus. But
during her song & dance numbers, you can see the Canadian imp holding
her back...her eyes are distant, her arms are awkward, her
interactions with other dancers are nervous and aloof. Maybe this is
what growing up in Ontario does to a person. The other actors, as
well, just don't seem as energetic as most Bollywood characters are.
Maybe, when a foreigner comes to Canada to make a movie, they are
given their own Canadian imp to keep them in line, or maybe they feel
outnumbered by the Canadian imps in the production staff that
surrounds them...I don't know. But while "Bollywood/Hollywood" cuts
loose more than your average Canadian film, it still looks like it's
holding something back, which was disappointing.
A case in point: the much-touted drag numbers. It turns out that
Rahul's chauffeur (Rocky) is a closet drag queen who has -- somehow --
achieved international acclaim by looking terrified and wooden on
stage. As much as I loved Rocky's character as a man, his drag numbers
(as "Rockini") are stilted and unnerving, and the movie would be
better off without them. I mean, he's doing BOLLYWOOD numbers --
which, as I mentioned, even Lisa Ray falls short of providing the
requisite mugging and energy for -- but he's just standing in one
spot, eyes almost shut, apparently impersonating a sleep-walking
Marlene Dietrich who isn't actually walking. Rockini just doesn't make
the cut as a drag queen, let alone one in a song & dance extravaganza.
Though his "tuck tape" revelation is fun, not least because it takes
place in Toronto's Shubh Laxmi Jewelers, a sort of mecca for Canadian
Bollywood fans (we at the BollyBob Society know every Shubh Laxmi
commercial off by heart, right down to when one of the employees picks
up his enormous 1980's cel phone and tries not to look at the camera).
"Bollywood/Hollywood" does what I felt no film could do: it
actually manages to combine elements from both genres (or at least,
take elements from one genre and streamline them for western tastes),
and make an enjoyable film...without becoming bland or generic. What's
more, the movie was touching (if not exactly tear-jerking), and was a
gentle and successful satire. Congratulations are in order! All that's
lacking is energy and a certain degree of conviction...somehow the
actors never reached high gear, which was a shame. The ideal blending
of genres is still on the horizon, and I'm no longer quite as
terrified of it.
This does NOT, however, mean that I'm going to rush out and see
"The Guru."
Ashok
>
>{Yup, as usual, this is available (with other Bollywood Reviews) on:
>
>http://www.dazzled.com/dangermuff/bollybob
>
>but since there aren't any pictures you might as well just read it
>here!)
<chopped>
> This does NOT, however, mean that I'm going to rush out and see
>"The Guru."
>
>Muffy
>http://www.dazzled.com/dangermuff
Here's a film that Muffy should rush out, see and review. It is
a Western film doing a Bollywood: actresses bursting out into songs.
Yes, it only has actresses! It's a French film titled "8 Women".
There are 8 songs, roughly one each (two youngsters get two
duets). Tell us how you react to it.
Ashok
Muffy St. Bernard
> Aankhen (old one with Dharmendra, Mala Sinha)
> Khoon Pasina (Amitabh and Vinod Khanna)
The only downside is how difficult it is for me to get these films.
I can either make a pilgrimmage to Little India in Toronto (that's a
$40 bus ride, on top of buying the DVD's) or I can order them online
(plus shipping, plus always getting nailed by duty because the
companies I deal with are always too honest to write "gift" on the
package...ka-ching, another $15 added to my order!) During the summer
I'm going to return to the local spice shop here in town, and see if
they've started actually selling DVD's yet.
The moral: next time I have the bucks to order films, or am in
Little India, I will certainly pick these up! Until then, though, I'm
mostly rooting through the $8 bins and living off charity.
> Yes, it only has actresses! It's a French film titled "8 Women".
> There are 8 songs, roughly one each (two youngsters get two
> duets). Tell us how you react to it.
Oh yes, everybody's raving about this! I must see it, and
fortunately I CAN rent it locally.
I still need to actually watch a James Bond movie and decide whether
or not "Namak Halaal" is crazier. Things off in the distance...
Vijay Kumar
> Though his "tuck tape" revelation is fun
Excellent review but I swear I heard him say 'duct tape'!
Muffy St. Bernard
> muf...@hotmail.com (Muffy St. Bernard) wrote in message news:<2d0226f7.03033...@posting.google.com>...
>
>
> > Though his "tuck tape" revelation is fun
>
>
> Excellent review but I swear I heard him say 'duct tape'!
Yes he did...I think his exact words were "industrial strength duct
tape" (poor guy!)
In my experience, "duct tape" is a specific term and "tuck tape" is
a generic category, sort of like "Scotch tape" or "masking tape" are
both specific types of tape, but can be lumped into the generic
category of "tape."
"Tuck tape" is any sort of tape that drag queens use to "tuck" with.
And that is usually "duct tape" (though it can also be some kind of
"medical tape")
Incidentally, I've heard "tuck tape" used to describe any tape that
queens use to crimp their bodies with at all (tape across the chest,
or around the waist, or to fiddle with a wig, etc.), but I think
that's just so they can rip the tape off and then hold it out to
somebody who's annoying them and say "smell my tuck tape." It's more
effective than "smell my cleavage tape." And NASTIER.
There's a lexicon waiting to be written...
Arun Iyengar
news:2d0226f7.03033...@posting.google.com...
> {Yup, as usual, this is available (with other Bollywood Reviews) on:
>
> http://www.dazzled.com/dangermuff/bollybob
>
> but since there aren't any pictures you might as well just read it
> here!)
>
>
> Bollywood/Hollywood (2002)
<snipped>
Wow! That was hilarious and unbelievably well written especially given the
length of the write-up. Waiting for more...
A
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