Bollywood: Hindi films succeed in UK and U.S.

Bollywood: Hindi films succeed in UK and U.S.

Jessica Winter, Guardian News Service, London

On a recent weeknight at the Harrow Warner Village movie theater
in West London, the only film to sell out its screenings was also
the only film without a promotional poster displayed outside the
lobby. You may not have heard of it, but the Hindi musical
melodrama Kal Ho Naa Ho, directed by Nikhil Advani, has nestled
comfortably in the British box-office top 10 for two weeks now.

Showing in just a few dozen theaters, Bollywood's latest
export -- three tempestuous hours of laughter, tears, strops and
spontaneous song-and-dance -- boasts easily the highest per-
screen average of any movie currently playing in the UK.

Western pop culture has borrowed liberally from Bollywood
pageantry for years, with everyone from Missy Elliott to Andrew
Lloyd Webber taking a cue from Bombay, though a full-fledged
crossover film hit -- reaching Hindi and non-Hindi mainstream
viewers alike -- is yet to come.

Meanwhile Bollywood abroad is doing just fine, thanks, finding
a devoted audience in the UK by skipping over the major Anglo
advertising outlets and concentrating promotional efforts with
NRI (non-resident Indian) newspapers, TV, and radio.

Overseas ticket, video and DVD sales now account for perhaps
40 percent of revenues for Bollywood, a multi-billion-pound
industry.

"The export market for Hindi films is especially important due
to the low value of the rupee," says Rachel Dwyer, chair of the
Center of South Asian Studies at the University of London and
author of several books about Indian cinema and pop culture.

"A ticket in London is 10 times the cost of a ticket in even
the most upmarket theater in India."

With an eye toward attracting the Hindi communities of
Southall in London and Jackson Heights in New York), Bollywood
has in the last decade incorporated a new staple character: the
NRI returning to the motherland.

Kal Ho Naa Ho -- which translates as "Tomorrow May Never Come"
-- inverts this common premise.

"The novelty is that there's no return to India -- it's set
entirely in New York, which is a first," Dwyer says. (Kal Ho Naa
Ho was shot partly, and noticeably, in Toronto.)

Just as trendsetters in New York and London have kept close
tabs on Bollywood fashions and pop music, Bollywood has absorbed
more and more from MTV-style choreography, graphics and quick-
fire editing; as the production values have increased, the
spangly outfits have accordingly shrunk.

Kal Ho Naa Ho's frenetic central love triangle (portrayed by a
summit of superstars: Preity Zinta, Saif Ali Khan and Shahrukh
Khan) is further agitated by fast-forwards and rewinds, slow-
motion and split-screening. The exuberant first dance sequence
brings to the New York streets a multiethnic rhythm nation of
cuties in halters and hip-huggers, all waving little American
flags.

Surprisingly, according to Vijay Mishra, author of Bollywood
Cinema: Temples of Desire: "Bollywood entrenches not so much
hybridity as cultural absolutism -- although in the realm of
visual representation, the opposite is the case, as skimpy
outfits and bulging bodies are the norm."

Mishra points out that Kal Ho Naa Ho uses a marriage ceremony
as a climax point (as do many popular Hindi films).

"I was struck by the fact that the dance sequences related to
the wedding took up a full half-hour," says Mishra, a professor
of English and comparative literature at Murdoch University in
Perth. "There's a voiceover intoning the Sanskrit wedding
mantras, and this is both cinematic spectacle -- connecting the
wedding to Vedic ritual -- and a statement about tradition within
modernity."

How to juggle traditional duties in the midst of contemporary
intergenerational conflict is a theme buoying many Bollywood
narratives. Queuing for Kal Ho Naa Ho in Harrow this past week
with her husband and two daughters, Harshida Rajani cited the
recent hit Baghban as one of her favorite Bollywood films of the
past year.

"It's a good family drama about the relationships between
parents and children -- what children expect from their parents
and what the children should give back, the compromises the
different generations have to make."

Rajani points out similar themes in the huge smash Kabhi
Khushi Kabhie Gham (popularly known as "K3G" and directed by
Karan Johar, a co-writer and producer on Kal Ho Naa Ho).

Lately, Rajani notes, theaters have been consistently
providing "subtitles for the younger ones," though song sequences
generally remain subtitle-free -- frustrating, but less so in Kal
Ho Naa Ho when Shahrukh Khan belts out a Hinglish rendition of
Pretty Woman, or when a club crowd gyrates Travolta-style to the
chorus of It's the Time to Disco -- nothing lost in translation
there.

All the same, Dwyer says, "A Hindi film doesn't always make
sense to a Western viewer. If you want to market Hindi cinema to
the West, you have to give the West what it wants to see, and
generally that's maharajas or poverty.

"They don't understand Indian girls in miniskirts. You can
quote a Hindi film" -- as Ghost World and Moulin Rouge did --
"but the whole picture won't work."

Hence the tightly targeted promotional campaigns for Mumbai's
(Bombay's) exports to Britain.

"Our advertising is specifically geared to the Asian community
in the UK," says Eros International marketing and PR executive
Martin Gough. Eros has distributed several of the top-grossing
Bollywood productions of the past few years, including Baghban
and the Bafta-nominated hit Devdas.

"Outside of those communities, the films are seen more as art-
house fare. It's a sad indictment of the moviegoing public, but a
lot of people say, 'Oh, there's subtitles, I can't be bothered.'
Once you have subtitles, the marketplace narrows completely.
These are movies made for a mainstream audience, but financially
it's just not viable for us to market them like they're
blockbusters."

Eros has high hopes for the upcoming Line of Control, a four-
hour account of the 1999 Kargil war between India and Pakistan
featuring a glittering firmament of Bollywood actors (including
Kal Ho Naa Ho's Saif Ali Khan).

"We'd look to market it to a crossover audience," Gough says.

But Dwyer is skeptical about its box-office chances: "Line of
Control won't do well in London because it's already perceived to
be anti-Pakistani -- because it 'mentions' Pakistan. It loses a
great section of the population right there. Many Pakistanis have
already said they'll refuse to see it.

"The dream of the crossover is yet to happen, but it will,
with the right film and the right marketing campaign," Dwyer
continues. "Most likely it would be a historical epic."

That bodes well for the forthcoming 1857: The Uprising,
starring megawatt actor-producer Aamir Khan, the name above the
title for 2001's Oscar-nominated phenom Lagaan.

Mishra thinks that Lagaan -- the extravaganza that launched a
thousand style articles and drew impressive numbers of arthouse
patrons -- might be the prelude to a more profitable Bollywood-
Hollywood exchange.

"At one level, Bollywood is crass, melodramatic excess, but at
another level, it is exemplary entertainment cinema, which also
makes it quite clear to the spectators that it's not reality,"
Mishra says.

"There is a kind of distancing effect -- associated with
Brechtian theater, but going back to Sanskrit drama theory --
that is also part of the system. I think it is quite some cinema,
and probably much underrated."