I spent Thursday evening, my last full evening in Chennai, seeing a movie. And I really mean full evening. The movie went a little over three hours, counting the 15-minute intermission. I can only say that I have never seen anything like it. I kept thinking of that scene late in Blazing Saddles when the whole cast busts into a studio where some Busby Berkeley extravaganza is being shot, and the two movies get all mixed up. Except it would have been Jet Li breaking in instead of Mel Brooks.
I know this stuff has been available around here for a long time, but I’d never really paid any attention. I’m going to start now. It is magical. But it didn’t finish until after 9:30, too late to get dinner. I was ready to take my work friends out to an expense-account joint, but it was late and raining, so we all just went home.
This particular movie was a police thriller about an innocent boy from the Bombay slums who is somehow blackmailed into impersonating a crime capo. Both of them are played by the dashing Shah Rukh Khan. (Warning: spoilers ahead. If you think you might see this movie, stop reading now.) Doubles and impersonations are among the most standard of the standard Bollywood devices, I’m told. So is the presence of not one, not two, but three leading ladies, one of them killed off in the first reel but not before starring in her own production number, for which the term “elaborate” is entirely inadequate.
The way it seems to work is, Indian movies are rated for lewdity (not for violence) by something like a much stricter MPAA board. They put up a certificate on the screen before every trailer with the signatures and credentials of two or more clergy, to attest that what follows is just as squeaky clean as it could be. Everyone’s clothes stay on at all times. At any point in the story where you might expect a sex scene in an American movie, you get a dance routine instead. Also, all party scenes and disco scenes are automatic candidates for a mass dance routine. The friends I was with said the standard is to have an outburst of song and dance every half hour, which means six on average. The plot twists came at a rhythm of about one every 15 minutes, I thought. I’m not that literate in the policier vocabulary, but all the usual twists I could think of were checked off: the police inspector who turns out to be a bad guy, the child hostage (twice), the escape from the doomed getaway car, all that stuff.
The acting was broad enough so that I could pretty much understand everything without subtitles, but it was professional. The bad guys were quite unmistakably evil, but a little ambiguity was allowed for a while as to the good guys. This was resolved by a sort of double-twist at the end in which the crime boss turns out to have been impersonating his impersonator all along, having switched hospital beds way back in the second reel. Some throwaway business, involving a CD that may or may not contain valuable information, is made to string together most of the central subplot. I kept thinking John Sayles could learn something about subplots from these guys.
In the office the next day, talking it over with the local elite, I sensed some discomfort with Bollywood. For anyone who went to school where I did after the 70s it’s a matter of course that The Wizard of Oz is as fine a map to the underlying social relations of its time as The Jungle, if you want to work with it. Does it portray something different from “real life?” OK, how different? In what ways? Why in those ways and not others? Anyway, what is “real life,” or, more interestingly, who gets to say what it is? But to my colleagues there, the distance between Bollywood and “real” India was an embarrassment, an indictment of a culture industry gone bad. When I raved about the dance routines, the costumes, the cast of thousands, all the stuff that I loved about it, they just squirmed and looked away. One more in my series of lessons on when to just shut up.
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