BOLLYWOOD AS SEEN FROM TWO PERSPECTIVES
(The following DVD and book reviews supplement two feature articles on Bollywood Cinema, “Bollywood Cinema: Making Elephants Fly” by Meenakshi Shedde and “The New Bollywood: No Heroines, No Villains”by Thessa Mooij, featured in Cineaste, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, Summer 2006.)
The Inner/Outer World of Shah Rukh Khan
Directed by Nasreen Munni Kabir. Two-disc DVD, color, 140 mins., 2005. Available through www.erosentertainment.com or www.amazon.com .
When London-based writer/director Nasreen Munni Kabir proposed the idea of doing a documentary on Bollywood's biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan, to Channel 4, to which she regularly contributes programs, the response was, “Shah Rukh Who?” The station eventually green-lighted the idea anyway, but when they insisted on a long window for the DVD release, Shah Rukh stepped in and financed this two-part documentary himself. The first part, called The Inner World, is a glimpse into his daily life, with Shah Rukh commenting in a monolog.
The former mass-media student is a formidable talker, and it's hard to forget that as an actor, he is in control of every eyebrow flutter and self-confessed weakness. But Shah Rukh has risen up in the Bollywood pantheon all by himself, without family connections. His monologs, astutely coaxed out of him by the filmmaker, have a jazzy free-form feel to them, spontaneous and sometimes substantial. This is in stark contrast to contemporaries like Abhishek Bachchan, who got his first break thanks to family connections, or John Abrahams and Arjun Rampal, who got started because of their looks. Their media appearances tend to be wooden and sometimes teleprompted to the point of empty artificiality. Perhaps their ascent to stardom was not unlike that of the fictional Ashok, in Sashi Tharoor's novel Show Business, who rises to the top simply by sticking to the script laid out for him by others.
Cinematographer Peter Chappell's camera shapes the narrative perspective of The Outer World, which focuses on Shah Rukh's professional life as a film actor and live performer. Upon landing in the U.S. for a live tour of NRI (non-resident Indians) audiences, Kabir asks the megastar what he likes about America. After a long silence he replies, “Everything is too big—the food, the cars.” Apparently, that includes even the NRI audiences, who turn out to be not so much homesick Indians—frozen in time—but also full-blooded Southerners whooping up a storm in an Atlanta arena.
Although he has billions of fans from the entire Asian continent, the former Soviet Union, some parts of Africa, and even Europe, Shah Rukh is more approachable than any Hollywood A-lister. His bodyguards will make way for fans who manage to keep their cool. He remains a calm eye in the storm that he creates everywhere he goes—a discipline that he demonstrated in real life when presenting this documentary at the frantically packed Eagle Theater in Queens last November.
Kabir maintains that her producer/subject has not censored her at any point. We see Shah Rukh tired, frazzled, and certainly not always blow-dried and ready for action. Her two-part film serves as an excellent fly-on-the-wall introduction to Bollywood, its biggest star, and the global frenzy he inspires. Her solid credentials as a Western-based chronicler of Bollywood and a British Film Institute board member ensure a serious approach that is a far cry from Mumbai's gossip-hungry media—probably the reason Shah Rukh gave her unprecedented access.
Behind the Scenes of Hindi Cinema:
A Visual Journey Through The Heart of Bollywood
by Johan Manschot and Marijke de Vos. Amsterdam: Dutch Royal Tropical Institute, 2005. 160 pp., illus. Hardcover: 35 EUROS.
Since Bollywood is built on visuals par excellence, any pictorial journey through its heart is bound to be attractive. This carefully designed book, published by the Dutch Royal Tropical Institute, includes a series of articles by mostly Indian writers. For those unfamiliar with Bollywood, the chapter “A Short History of Songs” provides an excellent introduction.
Since music is the throbbing heart of Bollywood films, any article about the subject will inevitably touch upon this crucial facet of the phenomenon. Written by Bombay-based documentary filmmaker Brahmanand Singh, this book offers an excellent overview, starting with nineteenth- century Urdu poetry and ending with what he calls the loss of this formerly widespread love for refined lyricism in the violent Seventies when action heroes took over, and the crass Eighties, when banal sexuality eclipsed suggestive sensuality. The article stops short of including film music from this century, which sees traditional Indian sounds absorbing African and Pacific world music influences and thumping Western techno beats.
Other chapters approach Bollywood from different angles. “Tamil Cinema,” by Chennai-born filmmaker and teacher Soudhamini, compares the criteria for a successful film hero in her native Tamil Nadu to those of Bombay. In order to be a super star like Rajnikant, actors and actresses (females are expected to be stronger than their Hindi counterparts) have to be both larger than life, big enough to fill the colorful billboards that deify them, and humble, modest everymen-and-women at the same time.
The article on “Soviet Fans” by Sudha Rajagopalan (Ph.D.) who teaches Soviet history at Indiana University in Bloomington, explains how Hindi films captured the hearts of Soviet audiences during Khrushchev's thaw in the early Fifties. After decades of Stalinist propaganda films, Soviet citizens were hungry for human emotions onscreen rather than dramatized five-year-plans. To them, Bollywood films offered both a look at real life, as far as emotion and family drama were concerned, and exotic escapism in the form of beautiful people and faraway locales. Behind the Scenes of Hindi Cinema is not the definitive book on the history and spiritual essence of Bollywood, but it does offer a striking visual journey, and while the essays tend to take a backseat to the engaging graphic design, taken together they represent a helpful overview of the subject.
Thessa Mooij is a Brooklyn-based journalist and screenwriter who teaches Film Criticism at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
