Bollywood

It’s not misspelled.  It’s a contraction of Bombay and Hollywood, and it’s a term for the Indian film industry, which might well be the fastest growing and most vital film industry outside of Hollywood. 

I went through the “foreign films” phase in college, listening to Europeans drone on endlessly and unintelligibly in well-composed but slightly grainy images while the story was told in jittery subtitles at the bottom of the picture.  Some of these films were great art.  A lot of them were boring.  But the European industry never developed the vitality and power of Anglo-American film.  Among other things, the European industry has been hampered by the Tower of Babel problem of a limited audience for any particular language. 

The Hong Kong film world has come closer to overcoming this barrier.  Throngs of devotees to Chinese film genres like martial arts movies pushed the industry from cult status to a mainline force.  Crossover stars like Bruce Lee, Chow Yun Fat and Jackie Chan were the first representatives of what is now a stampede.  Major Chinese female stars have crossed over too – including Michelle Yeoh, the martial arts superstar that emerged as a James Bond girl in Tomorrow Never Dies and Chinese femme fatale Maggie Q, who appears with Tom Cruise in his upcoming film Mission: Impossible III.  Michelle Yeoh was also a star in the incredible crossover film Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, which although it was subtitled, sailed into the box office top ten and stayed there for weeks while other hits came and went – the most successful “foreign film” in history.  Subsequently, another vibrant work of art from China called Hero did the same thing.  The transcendence of Chinese film is a subject of its own.

But only recently did I become aware of Bollywood.  I read an article somewhere, then with a yawn of idle curiosity, picked out a Bollywood film at my Netflix.com Internet DVD rental service and calmly waited for it to arrive.  When it came it sat on the shelf for a long time, and I began to wonder if I was really going to watch it or whether I should simply send it back.  One day I flipped it into the tray and started to watch.  Within minutes I was completely hooked.  The film was thoroughly entertaining and I couldn’t stop watching.  For two days afterwards I recalled it with pleasure and I played excerpts for friends when they came over. 

I couldn’t help wondering if I had hit the first and only great Bollywood film.  Could there be other good ones? 

After a few tries I have found the genre to be uniformly charming, colorful and uplifting.  It is not only good art, but it is art in its best tradition.  It is clean, optimistic and fun. 

The characteristics are a remarkable throwback to an earlier time in American film.  One of my favorite genres is the 1930s musical.  Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made them.  Eleanor Powell made them.  Esther Williams made them.  Or the “screwball comedies” from the same era, with actors like Hepburn and Tracy and Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart.  The plot lines were gentle and warm.  Nobody died.  Nothing was blown up.  There were no handcuffs, there was no crime.  The story was always something like boy meets girl, misunderstanding develops, is resolved, boy gets girl.  Or girl goes to big city to make good, works hard, overcomes obstacles, makes good. 

It is an important fact that these films were enormously popular during a time when America was on the skids.  It was the middle of the Great Depression.  The stock market crashed in 1929.  For the better part of the next decade, the country went through the greatest economic depression in its history.  People lost their home and their farms.  Wandering migrants, not from Mexico, but from Oklahoma and Texas, made their way to California to find a new life.  Hoboes were “riding the rails” hitching on trains in empty boxcars, and jumping off before the train rolled into a station so they wouldn’t be clubbed by police.  Armies of homeless built tent cities where they could.  Life was tough. 

These films were the right antidote for the situation.  Glossy Hollywood musicals and comedies painted a world where people were wealthy and secure – where money wasn’t a problem.  They told stories about people who not only found a way to survive, but to do well and prosper.  They gave real hope to people who needed nothing more than the assurance that there was a better life to be had.  The love stories were real friendships – spiritual relationships, made to last.  There were no nipples, no naked butts.  Kisses were rare.  Instead there was real admiration and affection and lots of witty and clever dialogue. 

I can’t help drawing a parallel to India and Indian film.  India is an emerging country.  Their financial problems are ancient, not new.  But there is an emerging wealthy class there.  The Bollywood films I have seen are musicals.  And they are happy.  And they are clean.  And nobody is killed, nothing is blown up.  There are no handcuffs, and no crime.  The stories don’t dramatize poverty -- they antiseptically ignore it and focus instead on the growing wealthy class – the people who have leveraged India’s low cost of living and its well-educated English-speaking labor pool into America’s outsource service for telephone support, software development and manufacturing. 

Unlike other “foreign” film factories, India has the remarkable advantage of having the largest English-speaking population of any country in the world.  Yes, that’s right.  After centuries of British rule, India’s people still speak their many local ethnic languages, but the common tongue is English.  Bollywood movies are subtitled, but the spoken language flips back and forth from English to other languages in what appears to be a real approximation of the mixed-language speech pattern actually used there. 

These films are intensely colorful.  And their musical character is not bashful or self-conscious.  The characters are acting along, and they suddenly burst into song.  And the songs are great little pop numbers that harken back to early rock ‘n roll or soul music – very sweet and tuneful.  And the dancing is wonderful.  It’s somewhere between MTV and Busby Berkeley (the old Hollywood director who used to put together enormous production numbers with hundreds of girls dancing and forming into shapes that could be photographed from overhead like the halftime performance at a football game). 

The movies are long.  They often clock in at three hours, more or less.  But they don’t seem long.  I’ve always been disappointed when they ended.  I am swept up in the music and the color and the light and fluffy love stories between characters that you can’t help but like and admire. 

A few weeks ago I had one of these films in the house, and my brother-in-law came by with his family.  I said, “You have to see this dance number from this film.”  He sat down to watch it and wound up watching the entire movie. 

In one such film that I saw recently, there was a wedding, and when the bride came to her home town for the marriage, the whole town turned out and started singing and marching through the streets, singing something like, “Thank you for bringing the wonderful marriage to town.  Thank you for bringing this wonderful union of man and woman to our beautiful town.  It makes us all love each other (etc.)…”  All of them had on colorful costumes, and the bride and her bridesmaids danced before the procession like MTV rock stars, before finally riding off on an elephant.  It was truly beautiful. 

In the words of L. Ron Hubbard, “A society is only as great as its dreams, and its dreams are dreamed by artists.”  Bollywood has been doing some dreaming, and they are creating a real vision of a happier and better future for India.  The stars and directors are a mix of Muslims and Hindus in a country where the two groups coexist.  But there is never any mention of any conflict between these groups, either on or off the set, if you read about the industry.  It is a real Indian melting pot. 

I had a Russian friend that told me when she was young in Russia she went to Indian films all the time, because American films were forbidden – so she was brought up on the Indian film industry. 

Two that I would recommend if you are interested in sampling the genre are:

Dil Chahta Hai   A story of three young men coming of age, finding their mates.  One is in a family that strongly believes in arranged marriages.  Another is firmly dedicated to catching a certain young woman who spurns him at first.  The third develops an unusual relationship with a woman twice his age.  The whole story is charming and uplifting. 

Bride and Prejudice  An Indian treatment of the beautiful Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice. 

Both of these films are played on an international scale, based in India but ranging with the wealthy and successful people involved into locations in Australia, England and the United States.  They are completely charming.