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 Not the type who goes for lush romance or lavish musical numbers? Good news. That may be the stuff that inspired Bombay Dreams, but Indian cinema has also given us frank depictions of the human condition - as well as ancient monsters menacing horny teenagers.
The seventh annual South Asian Film Festival concludes today with four offerings at the NFB Mediatheque. Among them is Cricket ... and the Meaning of Life, in which Ontario filmmaker Sanjay Talreja re-examines his Indian heritage as he watches his old country's national sport take root in a group of Toronto boys.
"The air we breathe in India is movies and cricket," says Talreja, but the movies aren't strictly spectacles. Talreja recalls growing up going to film festivals in Mumbai and - though documentaries per se are only now emerging there - being exposed to works featuring an eye-pleasing aesthetic but also "having something to say."
Talreja's 51-minute film, screening at 4:30 p.m. and also airing Aug. 22 on Newsworld, takes the viewer through his personal history and a history of the game - with stirring exhortations about its moral lessons along the way - before following the Toronto team on a road trip to Trinidad, home of some fearsome bowlers and batsmen indeed.
Talreja advises that India's cinema servings include "very humanistic films examining the complexity of human society." He singles out for praise 2002's Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, a story about class, sexism and religious warfare - all the things the musicals avoid.
He derides much of those "sexist, patriarchal, simple-minded" offerings as appealing here mostly to "children of middle-class, conservative Indian parents. For them it's about nostalgia." For Pete Tombs, however, old-time crowd-pleasers are exactly what he's keen on. The British author is behind The Bollywood Horror Collection, DVDs offering seminal sub-continental scare-fests.
As explained in a documentary (online at tinyurl.com/eawxb), U.S. fright features - especially Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddy Krueger - inspired a wave of imitators in India. In them, as Tombs says over the phone, "a bunch of kids go out into the country, find or wake an evil monster and in the end they defeat it."
A top entry is 1984's Purana Mandir, in which an Indian dad has good cause to protect his daughters: thanks to a curse, they'll die if they get pregnant - and the baby will become a horrible monster. Needless to say, much blood is shed (with musical numbers!). Another is 1990's Bandh Darwaza, in which a vampire is thwarted at one point not by a crucifix but by a Hindu aum symbol.
Both movies are in the first edition of Bollywood Horror Collection, out next month. No plans in the works for a musical. Pity.
Published by the Toronto Star
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It all depends if art becomes detail for detail itself is what generally creates art, it is the unthreading or unraveling of art in which we at personal level that we squeeze the juice of detail from. Art is simply a carrier for details embedded in the work. When it comes to Bollywood there are some things far more topical than abstract depictions of the human condition. We forget that there is an increase of Bollywood actors who have Islamic names and this because Bollywoods casts it?s influence in markets that are Islamic. At a time when an Islamic audiences are becoming hostile to western influences, the impact of Bollywood to reach into places such as Afghanistan is interesting, for when it comes to the human condition, attention is today?s premium and Bollywood has found a way to grab attention in these markets. Beyond the Islamic nature of Bollywood there is globalization. It is incredible how much product placement flows through modern Bollywood and while Bollywood has always emulated influences from Western music, whether that is actress with a beehive in the rock and roll age, or Abba music turned into Indian music in the 70?s or an of today?s emulations; what makes Bollywood interesting today is the chief communication tool of modernization ? it is a distinct commercialization that is moving Indian film from the imaginative audience to audience image. Branding and PR have found their pathways into India, which is the first foothold of globalization. Ironically it was an Indian who best exemplified the human condition. His name was Jiddu Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti?s way of examining the human condition was very simple, he observed deeply but Bollywood or any other form of film today is in constant movement, and so the human condition is being conditioned and this conditioning creates the very spectacle that made Guy Debord suicidal. It is not all bad, so long as you keep all of the madding crowd from ones own doorstep. Art is simply an orange with juice in it and it is the detail captured by the artist which is the juice, the human condition is simply an unpeeled orange.
M.