Sunday, June 20, 2010

Bollywood

Posted by Laura / no comments » / , bollywood, movies, review

At the Cleveland International Film Festival this year, Johnathan and I spontaneously decided to skip the movie that we had scheduled at one point and instead go to see Dil Bole Hadippa (My Heart Goes Hadippa). It was a festive experience in bold color and catchy music, and it was an exposure to an art form that was entirely new to me. I was in love. It was so different than what American cinema is willing to do, and I loved every minute of the two and a half hours that the movie spanned. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was the start of something new and big for me.

After we got home, I added the movie to our Netflix queue so that I could watch it again. Part of me wanted to ensure that I hadn’t just imagined how good it was, and that I wasn’t just in a particular mood to like it, which would mean that it wasn’t as likely to be repeatable. The rest of me just wanted to watch it again. (I do things like that.) I got it on DVD (because, sadly, it is not available on Netflix streaming), and verified that, yes, I had enjoyed it and it was a lasting enjoyment. The colors were vibrant and the dances were interesting. The usage of music was so unique to what I’m sued to in American cinema that I couldn’t help but be drawn to it.

Netflix, as it turns out, has a fairly healthy variety of Bollywood films available for streaming, which conveniently we can do right from our Playstation 3. I’ve been making my way through the ones that look interesting to me lately. So far, I’ve watched ten Bollywood films on Netflix Streaming. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but at an average of 2.5 hours long, I can, at best, watch two or two and a half films during my work-from-home day, which is when I use the streaming most. (As a matter of perspective, I can easily watch 4 American films, sometimes 5 in this same span of time.) They are long, but somehow they keep my attention through the end.

What I have seen so far:

• Chance Pe Dance: This has the same actor in it as My Heart Goes Hadippa – Shahid Kapoor. For this reason alone I put the movie into the streaming queue, and I don’t regret it. He is a very good dancer, and he seems to have less reservation when it comes to looking silly on film, which I find incredibly endearing. Chance Pe Dance was about a guy who was trying to make it in the film industry in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), and his struggles as relate to that goal. It is an endearing movie, and the dance and music sequences didn’t hurt its entertainment value.

• Kismat Konnection: I found this one very interesting. It also stars Shahid Kapoor, but it takes place not in India but in Toronto, Canada. This, I have learned, is not uncommon for Bollywood cinema. The films may be intended largely for Indian audiences, but they do not all take place in India, which differentiates the industry from Hollywood, where most American films take place in the United States. It, of course, centers around an Indian community, which makes sense. There’s a boy who was once very successful, but now seems to have nothing but bad luck. He’s told by an oracle that he needs to find his lucky charm and stick by her. He finds her, and they immediately don’t get along, but of course that changes through the course of the story. The conflict surrounds an Indian community center, which is going to be demolished to make way for a mall, and boy is an architect who finds his luck in being signed on to the project.

• Jab We Met: Shahid Kapoor again! Are we shocked? Boy is depressed because his mother ran off with another man and now his fiance has left him, and he has a business to run but doesn’t want to anymore because his mother is making crazy demands on her rights regarding the company. He gets on a train with the intention, it seems, of killing himself, and a well-meaning girl intervenes. She is chatty and interfering without, it seems, intending to be, and the movie centers around the things that happen to them as she tries to get home and he tries to figure out what it is that he really wants out of his life. Very sweet, very endearing.

• Pyaar Impossible: Nerdy boy sees popular girl and falls in love with her. She gets in trouble and he saves her, but as a result of her trouble, Daddy takes her out of college. She gets married, and boy doesn’t see girl again for a long time, but remains in love with her. Later, he has some software stolen and goes to Singapore to track down the evildoer who stole it, and happens to run into girl while he’s there. As it turns out, she is divorced and has a 6-year-old daughter, and he, through a series of misunderstandings, ends up as the nanny. Mayhem ensues. This is the first film I saw with Priyanka Chopra in it, and I was very impressed with her from the start. I found her very endearing, and I must say, she isn’t bad to look at, either. (She didn’t win Miss World for no reason, I suppose.)

• What’s Your Raashee?: Boy is away at college in Chicago, and his family calls him home under the pretext of father having a heart attack. (This seems commonly done in Bollywood films.) His family convinces him to get married within ten days so that he can get his inheritance from his grandfather to pay off his brother’s debts. He goes to a matchmaker of sorts, refusing a dowry, but insisting that he meet one girl of each Raashee (sun sign) to help his chances of finding someone with whom he will be compatible. Priyanka Chopra was also in this one, and played twelve different characters in the film – all twelve girls that he goes on a date with. His grandfather explains this similarity away by saying that he is searching for the face of his perfect mate in each of them, which is why they all look so similar. I think this has been one of my favorites so far, because of how well Priyanka Chopra played all of the different women, and how well executed it all was.

• Main aur Mrs. Khanna: Girl is an orphan and has no surname as a result. (God forgot to give her a last name, she explains.) Boy woos her and marries her, saying that she can share his name. Aww. They get married and move to Australia. Then his career tanks and he sort of unintentionally takes it out on her. He goes to Singapore for an opportunity, and instead of booking a ticket for her to go with him (as expected), he buys a ticket for her to fly to Dehli. She doesn’t go, and befriends two rather bumbling bartenders and gets a job at the airport. One of the bartenders calls her Mrs. Khanna all the time instead of her name, and this is a big deal throughout the film. It was a sweet film, although not as engaging as some of the others, I’d say.

• Bachna Ae Haseeno: Boy wants to be a playa. He befriends a girl on a vacation in Switzerland, and woos her. She falls in love with him, and he promises to save her from her arranged marriage. When they separate at the airport, he brags to his friends about all the “stuff” they did, none of which is true. She hears and her heart is broken. Later, he shacks up with another girl. He expects her to stay behind when he gets a job in Australia as a video game designer, but she decides it’s high time for them to get married. She goes so far as planning, well, everything, and then he ditches her on their wedding day without a single word of apology, and flies to Australia. While in Australia, he meets and messes around with a different girl each night, always managing to strike out with them eventually because he doesn’t actually care about them. He later meets a girl who is a taxi driver and she doesn’t believe in marriage, and he ends up falling for her, and she breaks his heart much in the same way as he broke the hearts of the other girls. Go figure! So he decides to go on a mission to apologize to the other two girls, learning a lot along the way. I won’t tell you how it ends, although I’m sure you can guess. It was very sweet, and I really liked the perspective of how Indian women are expected to live and behave, versus what I’m used to in the USA.

• Fashion: Priyanka Chopra again. Meghna (I love that name) wants to be a fashion model. The movie centers around her experiences in the fashion world, from beginner to top model and everything in between. It is dark and gritty, but also really shiny. It focuses less on music like other Bollywood films, but it definitely exposes a side of Indian culture that is different than American culture. The fashion industry there is much more… I want to say sheltered, but that is not the case. It has different standards and as a result, their scandals are not the same as our scandals. Interesting film.

• Chup Chup Ke: Boy is badly in debt after money-making scheme after money-making scheme failed. His creditors are on his case and want their repayment now, or else! He decides to throw himself into the ocean and drown himself so that his family will get the insurance money and will no longer be burdened by his debt. He… fails. And ends up playing a deaf mute in order to survive with his new companions. This one was long, and not my favorite as far as halfway through. I actually let it sit for over a month before finishing it. It turns out the end is better than the beginning! I really like Kareena Kapoor, and she was in this one (as well as others), and of course, Shahid Kapoor (no relation). I thought it was very sweet, and I might have cried a little.

So, ten films and counting (I recently popped a bunch more into our streaming queue for my work-from-home days). What have I learned? I don’t know a lot about Indian culture and norms. The movies help me learn a little bit, but I think it is distorted knowledge, because of course they’re movies, not accurate representations of life. I need to learn a lot more about the culture if I want to truly understand these movies. It probably wouldn’t hurt to learn a bit of Hindi, either. I’ve also learned that while the characters might say things like “shit” or “damn” or “bastard,” the translation will never, ever say that. It makes me laugh, actually, how much the subtitles are censored.

I feel like I have discovered a whole new genre of movies, and in a way, I have. It’s not exactly new, but it’s new to me, and it is, I think, braver than American cinema. American filmgoers are not happy to accept singing and dancing characters unless the movie is advertised as a musical. Some of these films have singing and dancing but would not, I feel, qualify as musicals because often the musical numbers have little or nothing to do with the actual story. It’s like a shiny, modern version of the 1930s and 40s Hollywood musical era. The music might not relate to the story, but who cares? We love those movies anyway. I love these Bollywood movies more than I ever expected I would. And I am all for expanding my horizons!