Couch Festival: August 2005
“Gone to Bollywood…”
By Jennifer Hearne

Indian summers typically occur in the fall, but I'm enjoying one right now.  Postcards from the couch read "Gone to Bollywood..." and my usual salutation, "so much cinema, so little time" is an understatement, considering the length of most Indian films.

My interest in Indian cinema is shamefully post-2000 in origin.  And I have unlikely instigator Roger Ebert to thank.  It all goes back to opening day of The Cell, the film that took a surreal trip into the mind of a serial killer.  The buzz had me in a frenzy reserved for very few opening days. I couldn’t wait to get to the theater.  I hoped to find a horror movie on acid, as the trailers seemed to promise.  While the imagery was definitely worth the rush, The Cell’s cast and plot proved anticlimactic.  But I continued to extol its virtues to friends and family alike as it tanked at the box office.  After reading his August 18, 2000 review in the Chicago Sun-Times, I felt that Roger Ebert and I were the only two people in America defending The Cell (obviously we weren't, but that's how it felt).  Ebert vigorously supported the film while his contemporaries panned it.  Of the film's director, Ebert said:

"Tarsem is an Indian, like M. Night Shyamalan of The Sixth Sense, and comes from a culture where ancient imagery and modern technology live side by side. In the 1970s, Pauline Kael wrote that the most interesting directors were Altman, Scorsese and Coppola because they were Catholics whose imaginations were enriched by the church of pre-Vatican II, while most other Americans were growing up on Eisenhower's bland platitudes.  Now our whole culture has been tamed by marketing and branding, and mass entertainment has been dumbed down. Is it possible that the next infusion of creativity will come from cultures like India, still rich in imagination, not yet locked into malls?"

Ebert's observations were so elementary (and such a pleasant surprise) that I forwarded his review to everyone on my mailing list and vowed to expand my global film knowledge accordingly.

The Indian film market is the largest in the world and Indian films are notoriously some of the longest. Unlike us, Indian filmgoers are used to viewing their films with an intermission.  Thus it's normal to find Indian films with lengths of 160 minutes or more.  When I embarked on this month's cinema summer, I set out to acquire some of the finest of the Bollywood exports.  Little did I know that my visual travels would take me not just to Bollywood but also to Tollywood and Kollywood, the other regions that comprise the national film market.  I would soon learn which Indian regions spoke which languages; absolutely necessary was the need to distinguish Bengali from Hindi as I got in the habit of noting the language label on each film package.  A crash course in Indian geography and history was in order; most importantly I had to brush up on my polytheism – knowing which Gods and Goddesses matter to the Indian population allowed me to understand the metaphysical themes inherent in so many of the nation's films.

When dealing with the global film market, we must leave our ethnocentricity behind.  What better way to begin to immerse yourself in Indian culture than to revisit the films of Satyajit Ray.

While it would be easy (and an honor) to focus this month's column entirely on the masterpieces of Ray, I suggest a weekend spent exploring his first film, Pather Panchali, and his last, The Stranger.  The erudition inherent in all of Ray's works are identified by these first and final contributions to the world of film.

When creating his art, Ray was more than a humanitarian, he was a magician; All great directors are.  And in being a director/magician the trick is to tell a visual story so well that we can spend two hours with the film and believe we have known the characters our whole lives.  1955's Pather Panchali (song of the little road), the story of a rural family who endures many losses, is so rich in scope and texture it is nearly indescribable.  The way that we dream or see things in our imagination while reading a great novel is the way that Pather Panchali is presented.  The shots are unhurried and lean in dialogue; man and nature are equal storytellers – water is a protagonist and a villain.  The story is simple enough: a rural family deals with the indignities of bad luck and poverty and keeps the faith that some day soon their luck will change.  Without spoiling the story, I can only say that Ray wields his camera in such a way that we are not aware until the last shot that everything we have seen, literally from the opening shot, is critical to the story's protagonist, Apu.

Ray continued Apu's story in 1957's Aparijito (the unvanquished).  Apu must make the decision to continue his education in Calcutta or stay in a rural village with his mother.  Again, there are no spoilers here - as in Pather Panchali, Apu is changed forever by film's end.  Satyajit Ray's perspective was that of a poet's; he was also well educated, anthropological and wanted to make films that broke away from stereotypes.  This second look at Apu's journey from boy to man asks many philosophical questions of it's viewers.  Apu's manhood is explored in the last of the trilogy, 1959's The World of Apu.  Apu is a lot like Ray; a man of conscience with a love of mankind.  Still, these endowments do not seem to change Apu's ultimate karma.

1991's The Stranger, Ray's final film, is a gift to all humanitarians.  The tale is simple: a niece receives a note from a long lost uncle who requests her hospitality.  The niece must decide if he really is her long lost relative and question his motives in returning to her city after a life long absence.  The Stranger is so full of delicious suspense that if you have never seen it, you must ask yourself, all the way to the end, whether you believe that man is basically good or is he evil?  Do you suppose the film will have a happy or a tragic ending?  Rather than exploring these films in great detail here, I'd rather whet your appetite for them and simply hope they'll catch on.  Ray is in the pantheon of director gods and it is the wisdom of his themes that make his films such simple but universal depictions of twentieth century man.  When I say that I am "soaking up the Rays" this summer, it has nothing to do with the outdoors.

The Apu trilogy is in Bengali and is no more typical of Bollywood than Woody Allen would be of Hollywood or Fellini of the Italian film market - Ray is the glorious exception, not the rule.  Most of the Bollywood films are in Hindi and if you are new to the market, you might want to begin with 1957's Mother India.  Mother India gives new meaning to the term "long suffering" - meaning that the movie is long (172 minutes) and our protagonist does more suffering than almost anyone I have ever seen on film.  While melodrama and dance numbers are formulaic for Bollywood, Mother India is atypical in that it is treated as an epic.  More than anything it resembles Gone With The Wind and took longer to make than most Bollywood tearjerkers.  It was India's first entry at the Academy Awards, and star Nargis looks like the Indian Elizabeth Taylor.  The film begins on her wedding day, when we find out that her mother-in-law has mortgaged their land in order to pay for her only son's wedding.  What follows is heaps and heaps of inevitable doom.  It isn't enough for Radha (Nargis) to endure twenty years of misery and thwarted dreams, her fate as a tragic heroine beyond any hope of earthly reprieve is sealed when one of her sons has no other goal in life but to avenge the injustices against his mother, epitomized by the golden bangles she once hocked and he is hell bent on retrieving.  Nargis is thoroughly capable of aging beautifully and believably on film as life and its cruelties take a vast toll on her - her transformation from maiden to mother
to crone is both exhausting and engrossing.  Sociologically, it is easy to suppose that stories of human suffering may be cathartic for audiences that subscribe to the caste system.  In that case, Mother India hits the motherlode - I can hardly imagine anyone having a more burdened onscreen life than our girl Radha.  Mother India is such essential viewing that it is one of the few Hindi classics you can now find on DVD.

Trying to create a Bollywood hot list proved so difficult this month that I chose instead to try to spark curiosity for the Indian film market.  Thanks to websites like www.bombayave.com, www.erosentertainment.com, and www.indiahuthouse.com; you can now explore at your own pace and decide whether to rent online or to buy.  All three sites offer such features as the Top 100, as well as Indian classics, like 1967's The Jewel Thief, high on my list of films that were previously impossible to find.  If you're anything like Enid in Ghost World, searching for Indian rock ‘n’ roll and/or following the global trend of learning Bollywood dance routines, these sites are worth studying in depth.  You'll also find the latest Bollywood film stars, like Aishwaryia Rai and Aamir Khan and modern classics that have crossed over into Western consciousness, like 2001's Lagaan.

So this summer, I encourage you to wander these websites like a street fair: explore at your leisure and who knows what treasures you will find?  I cannot tell you what to buy, only where to go and what to look for when you get there.  

Next month, you're in for a treat - the couch gets a SUGAR HIGH as we explore the "sweetest" titles in cinema.