Read about the effect of Bollywood as one reporter analyze its
influence and (in the second story) how Bollywood seriously
influenced a Canadian (non-India) filmmaker/artist.


==============


Planet Bollywood?
Indian musicals are hip, sure, but the Hollywoodization of Bombay
cinema may not be as imminent — or as desirable — as advertised
by David Chute
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/16/features-chute.php

AMITABH BACHCHAN IS THE MOST POPULAR movie actor in the world. And
he can prove it: Back in 1999, he was voted the Star of the
Millennium in a global poll conducted by the BBC. But if you've
never heard of him, don't curse Entertainment Weekly. Bachchan is
instantly recognizable only within the alternate universe known as
Bollywood — a slang term, popularly credited to a Bombay fan-
magazine columnist writing in 1979, for the Indian movie capital
that turns out more than 1,000 films per year.

Then again, Bollywood is not just an Indian, but a global,
phenomenon. "Our films have reached half the world," declares the
expat Indian director Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding). "The Middle East,
all of Africa, all of Russia, the Far East, and the Indian diaspora
everywhere — the half of the world that Hollywood has not yet
recognized." For many of those people, Amitabh Bachchan is Bollywood
personified. He's their Robert Redford or Harrison Ford — only
bigger.

It's October 2001, and Bachchan is on location in downtown San Pedro
to shoot Kaante (Thorns), an unabashed Hindi-language remake of
Quentin Tarantino's career-launching 1992 indie hit, Reservoir Dogs —
an adaptation which, as it turns out, will open worldwide early in
2003 (and which plays next week at an L.A. Weekly-sponsored special
event at the Directors Guild of America). Bachchan has signed on to
this, the first Indian movie to be shot entirely in the U.S., to
play the eldest of the criminals involved in Reservoir Dogs'
famously bungled bank heist — the Harvey Keitel role.

Unfortunately, on the day I meet Amitabh Bachchan, the great man has
a toothache. I am informed by my contact on the set that my
scheduled interview with the Big B will, with profuse apologies,
have to be canceled. The idol of millions is about to be whisked off
to Beverly Hills to undergo a root canal.
'A slo-mo walk, familiar
to Tarantino fans...'



Bearing up stoically in the face of blinding physical discomfort,
the 6-foot-3-inch, 59-year-old Bachchan, dapper in a floor-length
black Armani overcoat, looks a great deal like the brooding poets
and doctors he portrayed in his youth in middlebrow semi-art movies —
figures close to his own patrician upbringing as the son of a
famous poet. He became a fixture of Bombay cinema only in the mid-
1970s, when he went down-market in a string of popular action films,
including Sholay (Flames, 1975), the industry-altering "curry
Western" whose box-office grosses stood unchallenged in India for
more than 15 years, and Mard (He-Man, 1985), in which he laid waste
to hundreds of leering foes and could communicate with animals. But
now, in the comeback projects of his middle years — epic melodramas
like Mohabbatein (Loves, 2000) and the gorgeously upholstered
superhit Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Sometimes Happy Sometimes Sad,
2001) — Amit-ji has regained all of his missing dignity, and then
some, as the most imposing patriarch of the Hindi screen,
reinventing himself yet again, this time as a monumental
representative of Hindu family values.
Twilight of the gods



Still, the brief snippets of ferocious action I witness on the set
that afternoon in San Pedro suggest that Bachchan has undertaken a
fairly ferocious, Mard-like role in Kaante. There is a pistol-
whipping, a plate-glass-door-smashing and a brief gun battle, after
which a half-dozen prop police cars are loudly detonated. A few days
later, the crew repairs to Century City, where the principal cast of
six tough-guy bank robbers does a slow-mo walk, familiar to
Tarantino fans, across the pedestrian bridge spanning Century Park
East.

Could we be talking crossover here? Stylistically, anyway, the
signs — and the signifiers — all point in that direction. According
to Sanjay Dutt, the droopy-eyed "Robert Mitchum of Bombay" who is
Bachchan's co-star in Kaante and also one of its producers, "We guys
have all grown up with Hollywood films. All the educated people in
India stay up-to-date with the films made in the U.S., and we see
the quality. It was always my dream to do this, to come here and
work with an American crew, and shoot like they shoot here."



IF YOU'RE LIKE MOST AMERICANS, BOLLYWOOD IS at worst a tired Apu
joke from The Simpsons, at best a faraway rumor, golden anklets
jangling in the distance. If you've seen only a few grainy clips of
Hindustani song and dance on TV shows like Namaste America, or in
the opening-credit sequence of Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World, or in
the snide trailers for The Guru, you can be forgiven for jumping to
the conclusion that Indian musicals (which, to judge from these
glimpses, means all Indian movies) are badly crafted, garish orgies
of joke-shop wigs and ill-fitting body shirts.
The new faces, etc., of Bollywood



Such dismissive stereotypes, however, are at least a decade out of
date. The typical Indian commercial movie today is probably
handsomer than it has been at any time since the 1950s, the so-
called Golden Age of Bollywood — or, more precisely, the
Expressionist Chiaroscuro heyday of noir-inflected auteur directors
like Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt.

By the early 1970s, however, Bombay's great studios, and the giants
who flourished there, had either passed on or were in steep decline.
Financing had to be cobbled together from shady entrepreneurial
sources (e.g., the mob got its hooks in), and a system developed
known as the "heterogeneous mode of production," whereby each
essential "attraction" in the standard mix of action, music, dance
and comedy that defines the unique Indian format known as "the
masala film" (from a culinary term for a combination of flavors) was
farmed out to a semi-autonomous craft specialist. Budgets that were
already small by Western standards were stretched paper thin, so
that even major releases ended up looking like three-hour poverty-
row B-movies into which stars and disco numbers had been
unaccountably inserted. By the 1980s, when video piracy was becoming
rampant and every Indian production was a long shot, actors had
acquired the habit of attaching themselves to six or seven fly-by-
night projects simultaneously, just to be on the safe side. Much to
the detriment of continuity, the films were often shot piecemeal in
two- or three-week chunks, whenever the actors happened to be
available, over a period of up to two years. "In America," says
Sanjay Dutt, "they plan for years and they shoot for weeks. In India
they plan for weeks and shoot for years."

Then another shift took place, in the early '90s, when a group of
gifted filmmakers from South India's Tamil-language cinema — many of
whom had cut their teeth on music videos and commercials — helped
set new visual standards for the medium. A younger generation of
Westernized Bombay directors, including Mohabbatein's Aditya Chopra
and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham's Karan Johar, took up the Southern
challenge. Today, says Krutin Patel, the writer-director of the
successful Indo-American indie ABCD (2001), "Bollywood movies have
some of the highest technical standards in the world, second only to
Hollywood."

Aamir Khan, who became a major star in 1989 and is now in his mid-
30s, is at the forefront of Bollywood's "young Turks," commercially
ambitious craftsmen who are vigorously pursuing the aesthetic and
technical reforms — synch-sound recording, unified production
schedules — that have helped make recent Indian films look more
presentable to Western eyes. Today, more and more Bollywood movies
(including Kaante) are being shot "Hollywood style," on a single
production schedule, a condition Khan insisted on for both of his
2001 releases, the Oscar-nominated colonial-era cricket epic Lagaan
(Land Tax) and the yuppie-buddy drama Dil Chahta Hai (The Heart
Desires). This one-movie-at-a-time approach has obvious financial
benefits, especially if you're borrowing money and sweating interest
payments, but it can also pay creative dividends: Rather than sport
a single generic hairstyle designed to be more or less appropriate
for half a dozen disparate roles, Khan was able to change his
appearance radically when he shed his peasant dhoti to move from
Lagaan to Dil Chahta Hai, adopting for the latter a close-cropped,
mini-bearded look that sparked a tonsorial fashion craze among
Bombay teens.

Even more damaging to perceptions of Hindi cinema than various
technical shortcomings are knee-jerk responses to the idiom itself,
to characteristics that will seem inherently outlandish to most
Westerners no matter how adroitly they are executed. Take the one
thing that almost everybody knows about Bollywood movies: that by
rigid convention they all contain five or six (or more) elaborate
song-and-dance sequences. The split between native and tourist is
especially wide on this issue. Indians regard the film song (and the
decades-old tradition of the pre-recorded "playback singer") as the
crowning glory of their cinema. For many Westerners, though, the
songs are the deal-breakers — which is why they are often the first
element a Bollywood go-getter thinks about removing when plotting a
crossover to the "mainstream" (read "white") audience in America or
Europe.

The problem is, in well-integrated examples of the Bollywood style,
major issues of plot and character development are worked out as
often in the song lyrics as in action or dialogue — the music, in
other words, can't be skipped without gutting the narrative. (This
would be much more obvious to Western viewers if the theatrical and
DVD distributors of Hindi films dropped the frustrating practice of
subtitling everything but the song lyrics.) Bollywood movies
are "melodramas," and not only in the sense of heightened conflict
between characters who are embodiments of social forces, but in the
root sense of "music dramas," operas (or operettas) in a glossy pop
format, achieving a range of emotional effects that, at their best,
can be scalp-crawlingly effective.

To put it another way, Bollywood isn't just a random collection of
inexplicable gestures that has accumulated over time. It is a form,
an all-encompassing "supergenre," combining within itself all the
possible permutations of story line and every possible kind of
entertainment. That Hindi films all seem, one way or another, to be
based on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata; that the incorporation of
ritual elements from village folk theater inevitably ends up
favoring repetition over innovation; that the idiom is steeped in
the conventions of British blood-and-thunder stage melodramas and
Victorian fiction — what all of this adds up to is an approach to
storytelling that has always been, to a degree, stylized, and that
continues to honor narrative conventions that haven't had much
currency in the West since the early silent era.



STILL, IF YOU LISTEN TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE YOU could swear that a Hong
Kong-style Bollywood-chic movie cult is even now gathering force to
erupt into the mainstream. Supposedly there are hopeful signs
everywhere: in that photo of Madonna sporting henna and a bindi at a
Hollywood premiere; in Baz Luhrmann's famous nods to the genre in
Moulin Rouge; and in the Bollywood-themed stage productions that
have set their sights on Broadway — the Andrew Lloyd Webber-produced
London hit Bombay Dreams, and a full-dress musical adaptation of
Mira Nair's art-house favorite Monsoon Wedding. The odd thing is
that very little of this trendy talk has yet translated into
bookings of films at venues outside the flourishing "four-wall"
circuit — where distributors rent space at your local multiplex —
that serves the NRI (non-resident Indian) community. Rarely has
there been so much buzz in the U.S. about a species of cinema that
so few "mainstream" Americans have ever actually experienced. The
question is, can this buzz be transformed into a positive Need To
See among the firangi (foreigners), and if so, how?

Some of the more delirious predictions of an imminent Bollywood
incursion into Anglo consciousness have arisen in England, where
Lagaan played to packed houses in central London, was well reviewed
in the English press, and edged into the Top 10 at the British box
office, attracting measurable numbers of non-Indians in the process.
One reason for such success is Britain's Asian-oriented ethnic mix.
There are roughly as many South Asians in the U.K. as in the U.S.,
around 1.5 million, but they constitute a much larger percentage of
the overall British population.

Bollywood has a much longer row to hoe in the U.S., and the current
ragtag NRI distribution system simply isn't up to the
challenge. "Overseas," in general, is seen not as a true foreign
territory, but simply as a segment of the larger Indian market.
According to business and entertainment consultant Vipul Gupta, the
growth of the U.S. theatrical and video markets for Hindi movies has
been stifled by the limited outlook of the head men in Bombay: "They
feel they're already getting enough business in the U.S. just from
the Indian audience."

Another factor contributing to the insularity of the U.S. wing of
the Indian market could be seen as psychological rather than
institutional. For decades, Hindi film screenings have been
important social events in NRI enclaves around the world, offering
opportunities to reconnect with the home culture in a relaxed, all-
Indian atmosphere. (Film Comment critic Maithili Rao refers to such
screenings as "tribal celebrations.") Many desi ("homeboy") fans
talk about their favorite movies with a peculiar mixture of pride
and defensiveness; they are passionate but also wary, as if they
can't quite set aside the suspicion that the films they love will
inevitably fall short in the eyes of viewers house-trained by
Hollywood.



THE FILM THAT SERVES AS A TOUCHSTONE FOR many newly minted crossover
dreams, not just in India but throughout Asia, is Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon, which — with its strong showing at the 2001 Oscars —
established that foreign filmmakers, when they are working with the
right basic ingredients, don't have to abandon their distinctive
national specialties in order to seduce the infidels. Director Ang
Lee's central innovation was actually quite subtle: a brush-stroke
application of psychological nuance to characters that, on their
home turf, were familiar heroic archetypes. A true Bollywood epic
like Lagaan, which honors but also tastefully elides some of the
core narrative conventions that Westerners find most off-putting,
stood some chance — even despite its nearly four-hour running time
and its presumptions of familiarity with what goes into a cricket
match — to become the Indian Crouching Tiger. But although producer-
star Aamir Khan says that he chose Sony Pictures Classics as his
American distributor on the strength of its slow-build box-office
triumph with the Chinese hit, in fact the company did not even
attempt to duplicate that strategy with Lagaan, allowing it to
dribble away in a handful of one-off bookings.
Megastar Amitabh Bachchan,
bearing up in San Pedro



It's no wonder that Krutin Patel, the director of ABCD, chose to
bypass the American indie distributors in favor of EROS, a company
that in the past had handled only Bollywood releases on the NRI
circuit. "EROS knows the Indian market," Patel says, "and many of
the independents in Hollywood just don't. Either they don't know how
to market to it, or they're not interested in it. They offer you a
much smaller release, because they don't know how to capitalize on
the Indian audience." In other words, Vipul Gupta's "two different
audiences" argument cuts both ways: Four-walled Bollywood releases
now turn up routinely on Variety's Top 50 domestic box-office chart,
edging out many domestic productions, while U.S. distributors seem
to be oblivious to a marketing opportunity that they should be
pouncing on with a wolfish grin.

For the last two decades, domestic distributors have tried to woo
the art-house audience with "transgressive" films like Takeshi
Miike's Audition (or anything by Guy Ritchie). Such an approach is
hopeless with Bollywood, which is a radically conservative cinema
not of unease, but reassurance. Still, the very things that make it
seem square could potentially attract the hipster audience that
loves Gilligan's Island. Even more, one can easily imagine some of
the more mild-mannered, family-oriented Bollywood films catching on
with the older, My Big Fat Greek Wedding crowd (my parents love
Indian musicals), or even with opera queens and Broadway-musical
fans.

Indeed, one of the leading non-Indian voices — and the best writer —
on the Usenet group rec.arts.movies.local.indian is Canadian drag
artist Muffy St. Bernard, who performs in clubs in the Toronto area
dressed up as Helen, the legendary dancing vamp of high-'60s Hindi
cinema; his piθce de rιsistance is Helen's "Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu"
number from Vijay Anand's pop-art thriller Jewel Thief (1967). "I
grew up on a constant diet of pessimism, cynicism and irony," says
St. Bernard, "and quite frankly, that sort of thing turns my stomach
now. I've seen too much of it. What I love about Bollywood movies is
what makes them different from other types of films." (For further
observations from this source, see the accompanying article "I
Rejected Coronation Street".)

The 19th-century roots of many of Bollywood's signature narrative
conventions are, naturally enough, echoed by the content — and even
the world-view — of its most aesthetically coherent productions.
That these British-influenced elements may also, in a sense, be the
most distinctively Indian was brought home to me recently by the
cross-cultural commentator Pico Iyer, in his review of Rohinton
Mistry's wonderful new novel, Family Matters: "Visitors to India,
even in the 21st century, are often surprised by how heavily the
recent British past still weighs upon the present, with P.G.
Wodehouse still dominating many a bookshop, and schoolchildren
routinely [asked] to memorize Tennyson . . . Indian writers from the
middle classes, writing in English, are naturally connected to a
19th-century tradition that has never been displaced in India (as it
has been in almost every other English-speaking country) . . .
People still carry on their lives as if religion had not been
unsettled by science, and Nietzsche had not arrived to tell them
about the death of God."

Much the same could be said of India's popular cinema, and this
sense of a deeply embedded tradition may be at the heart of why at
least a few of us find Bollywood movies so immediately,
instinctively satisfying. It's easy to imagine a card-carrying
cultural-studies academic waxing δ wroth about the "post-colonial
nostalgia" of this suggestion. And how might a conservative
Bollywood producer react to the kind of flagrant hijacking that
Muffy St. Bernard is perpetrating — to the fact that, even as we
learn to stop worrying and love Bollywood, we are bound to
understand the movies differently, to make something of them that
their creators could never have anticipated?

Besides, appropriation is a two-way street. What critic Nasreen
Munni Kabir has to say about Indian film music is also true of
Bollywood cinema as a whole: It has "always been a magpie form,
hungrily absorbing influences from all corners of the globe." From
their beginnings, Bombay talkies latched on to imported Western
technology, and to the conventions of the already-Westernized form
of popular theater, and put them to work on stories drawn from the
ancient Indian epics. One of the most famous of all Bollywood film
songs, the opening "tramp on the road" number in Raj Kapoor's Shri
420 (Mr. 420/The Grifter, 1955), makes exactly this point:

Mera joota hai Japani
My shoes are Japanese

Meh padloon Englishstani
My trousers (are) English

Sarpeh lal topi Russi
On top (a) red Russian hat

phir bi dil hai Hindustani
Still my heart is Hindustani

"This song is a direct retort to globalization," says Mira Nair, who
quoted it in her steamy diaspora romance, Mississippi Masala. "It
accepts all these foreign goods but says that your soul remains
Indian. A cinema that embraces everything, as Indian cinema does,
without losing its heart — that's the cinema that really does work
for me." In the politically polarized climate surrounding issues of
globalization, we feel all but obligated, now, to see any hint of
Western influence upon a Third World society as a form of cultural
imperialism, of alien forms imposed from abroad by a conspiracy of
international conglomerates. But in so doing, we underestimate the
force with which foreign cultural elements are often actively
confiscated and put to use in new ways, the liberating freedom with
which their meanings can be rejiggered and reassigned.



"YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO ENJOY trashy shamelessness to enjoy old
Hollywood," Pauline Kael once wrote. Much the same could be said of
even some of the finest Bollywood melodramas.

Consider Devdas, the lavishly romantic literary adaptation that was
India's unsuccessful candidate this year for the Best Foreign
Language Film Oscar nomination. One of the clearest recent examples
yet, along with Lagaan, of the emergence in Bombay of what could be
called a neo-traditionalist movement, Devdas is something like the
10th film version of a classic 1917 novel about a weak and self-
pitying rural Bengali aristocrat who exiles himself to the corrupt
metropolis of Calcutta in order to drink himself to death in a
miasma of unrequited love. The Devdas-style hero — the type of the
pampered male heir, the mama's boy writ large — was supposed to have
been supplanted once and for all in the 1970s by none other than
Amitabh Bachchan, setting the standard of Bollywood masculinity for
most of the subsequent two decades. So the attempt now to
rehabilitate Devdas, updated for the new millennium by the
ebullient '90s megastar Shahrukh Khan, is a gesture fraught with
symbolic significance — an attempt to revive, or reinvent, one of
Bollywood cinema's foundational archetypes. If a smart American
distributor were able to get on its florid wavelength, Devdas could
prove to be an irresistible wallow for a certain kind of American
movie geek.

Unfortunately, indie-cinema gatekeepers in the U.S. will probably be
a lot more comfortable with the synthetic Kaante, a conscious
attempt to give a Bollywood gloss to the sort of cynical neo-noir
crime film that American distributors already know how to sell to
the fan-boy crowd that has already embraced animι and Hong Kong
cinema. But while Kaante's $8 million dollar budget may have been
huge by Bollywood standards, each dollar buys a lot less here than
it does in India. The on-location footage often looks rushed and
threadbare, and Kaante owes most of its visual flash to ex post
facto digital-editing manipulation. It's odd, but I think also
telling, that recent state-of-the-art films made entirely in India,
like Lagaan and Devdas, end up looking much more "world class" than
the self-consciously "global" Kaante.

"I really think that you cannot design a crossover film," says
Lagaan director Ashutosh Gowariker, who did, in fact, manage to make
a film with something like universal appeal from all the way inside
the Bollywood idiom. "We cannot make movies by keeping an American
or a European market in mind. Because then you will not be making a
movie anymore. It will just be a package. Filmmakers should make
what they want to make, and what they believe in, and if those films
find an audience in America, then so be it."

This seems exactly right: Let Bollywood be Bollywood, and let the
chips fall where they may. Ambitious entrepreneurs looking to expand
into foreign markets may bristle at the following suggestion, but as
a card-carrying xenophile I would have no problem with a future in
which Bollywood remained irremediably a world apart, in which it
absolutely failed to cross over. As a moviegoer, I really have no
stake in these films bowling over Western audiences (beyond, that
is, the thought that it would be nice to be able to see a few more
of these films on the big screen with subtitles, at venues closer to
my apartment). Their otherness is, if you will, part of their
essence — or at least, of the essence of their appeal to the
xenophile. Bollywood really does depict a parallel universe of
movies, just different enough from the mundane environments we're
used to, to be exhilarating.

Working almost nonstop this year on Bollywood-related projects, for
this publication and for Film Comment, tapping into the DVD mother
lode and watching Hindi movies almost exclusively, I've begun
telling people that I no longer think of myself as a tourist, but as
a "resident alien" in Bollywood, increasingly comfortable and
conversant with the local customs, even though I never expect to go
native altogether, or to renounce my Hollywood citizenship. This
assertion seems somewhat outlandish to some people, even to many
Indians who claim to love their movies dearly. It elicits a
wonderfully expressive variation of that all-purpose subcontinental
gesture, the side-to-side head wobble, the exact desi equivalent of
the French pout-'n'-shrug, which in this case unmistakably
means: "If you are pleased to say so, sir, I have no response. I am
much too polite a person to dispute this bizarre claim of yours."


=======================


I Rejected Coronation Street
How Indian filmmakers stole my soul
by Buffy Saint Bernard
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/16/features-bernard.php

MOST ADOLESCENTS TREASURE MEMORIES of their first job, their first
kiss, their first fuck or their first drunken brawl. But I was
different. My most treasured teenage moment was seeing Bappi Lahiri —
the obese, froglike music director responsible for the song "You
Are My Chicken Fry" (among other horrors) — wearing a bulging T-
shirt with iron-on letters that spelled "Michael Jackson Is Cool." I
don't know what movie I was watching, and to be honest I'm not even
sure it was Bappi . . . it was only a fleeting glimpse. But it
burned directly into my retinas and set up a new group of nerve
cells in my developing brain, a specialized bunch of synapses that
craves only Bollywood.

Picture me, a 16-year-old kid living in a small southern Ontario
town, chafing at my mundane existence and craving a life of
fabulousness. "Fun" in my neck of the woods was vintage-car shows
and the yearly Mennonite Relief Sale. If you were lucky enough to
catch the Apple Butter Festival, you could spend the entire
day . . . well, watching people make apple butter. Can you imagine?
I was like Dorothy in Kansas — I desperately needed to escape. I'd
pray nightly for aliens, a plague, a tornado, anything to save me
from my black-and-white existence. The natural disaster that finally
rescued me was Bollywood, the Indian film factory that many have
heard about but few have had the courage (or the constitution) to
really explore.

The only way I could get in touch with Bollywood was by watching TV
on Sunday mornings. For about three hours — just before the long-
running British working-class soap opera Coronation Street — CITY-TV
transformed into the magical world of CHIN, a multiethnic montage of
programs aimed at specialized communities in Toronto. Among other
things I'd see on Sunday mornings was footage from current Indian
films, usually segments of the musical numbers that Bollywood is so
famous for: a playful man and a shy woman would hide behind trees
and frolic among the flowers, or maybe they'd be in a gigantic,
smoky discotheque full of a wide range of physical specimens smiling
from ear to ear (unless they were villains) and executing a range of
hybrid dance moves — ones I'd previously thought impossible (or at
least impractical). The heroines sang in beautiful, ear-piercing
voices, and the men proclaimed their love and fidelity with the
broadest gestures: hand on heart, eyes to the sky, true exuberant
love without a trace of irony and without a single false note. At a
time when cynicism was replacing Michael Jackson as the new cool
thing in my world, Bappi still advertised unconcerned adoration on
the front of his T-shirt. When people in Bollywood loved somebody,
they didn't piss and moan about whether their love was true.
Instead, they jumped out of lotus flowers, rolled down hillsides and
pretended to be mentally handicapped in shopping malls . . . because
it was fun! I couldn't help wondering (and I still wonder today),
why don't people court me this way?

On top of this — on top of such sincerity — was the kitsch: Amrita
Singh wearing beautiful, glittery white disco outfits with big belts
and a Wonder Woman headband; Manisha Koirala, scorpion painted on
her face, donning her tail feathers and dropping a dwarf in a well;
Anil Kapoor, with his shirt open down to his navel, humping the
dirty ground over and over again to prove that he was in love, that
he was happy, and that he could DANCE!

Well, sort of.

Contrast this with what the other people on my street were watching:
Coronation Street. The crustiest bun in the entertainment bin. I
didn't want to be somebody named Madge or Mavis, with curlers in my
hair, serving beer to a bunch of farty old bastards in a pub. I
wanted to be Rekha doing a snake dance over the prostrate, bell-
bottomed corpse of her latest victim. Why couldn't everybody else —
my friends, my family, my teachers — understand?

It was years before I could actually see an entire Bollywood film.
Whenever I asked for Indian films at the video store, they'd try to
force Sam Peckinpah or John Ford on me. Despite what could be
considered an inexhaustible mine of fun and silliness, Bollywood has
never really caught on in the West, and there are a few good reasons
for this. First of all, most people weaned on Coronation Street
don't like the idea of sitting through such long films — just under
three hours seems to be the norm. Some viewers are turned off by the
masala mix of styles in nearly every movie: screwball comedy one
minute, bone-crushing melodrama the next, followed by a fight scene,
a romantic interlude in Switzerland, and a dance number featuring a
trained dog (or was that Govinda?). More important: If a person's
only motivation for watching an Indian film is for the kitsch and
chintz — the initial attraction to Bollywood for many — they'll be
doing a lot of fast-forwarding past the "forbidden marriage"
and "honor thy mother" portions of the stories.

In order to truly appreciate Bollywood, you need to be able to enjoy
the kitsch and the melodrama. You need to laugh when Johny Lever's
hair catches on fire, and poke fun at Rishi Kapoor's paunch. You
need to sigh when the heroine reads a tender love letter, and cry
when her beloved becomes paralyzed after falling out of a
helicopter. You must squirm at the villain's nefarious plans. You
must thrill at the meticulous plotting — so special to Bollywood —
which results in ordinary people being forced to do terrible things
to other ordinary people. You must join in with the heroine when she
screams at a statue of Hanuman, and exult when the aforementioned
Hanuman goes whizzing off his pedestal to set things right in answer
to her prayers (usually by crashing into the heads of squadrons of
goons wielding cricket bats). Finally, you need to jump off your
futon and cheer when the bad guys are brought to justice and the
families finally bless the union of the hero and his girl.

Fun? Yes. Silly? Almost always. But also beautifully crafted. Indian
filmmakers make the most of their 160 minutes of film. So much
attention is paid to the lunacy of Bollywood — and I'm guilty of
this as well, because the lunacy is so inspired — that it's easy to
miss the cleverness of the plots, the depth of the
characterizations, the poetry of the dialogues. You need to look
beyond the cardboard sets and variable film quality to find the
things that so impress Bollywood fans like me.

Suffice it to say I've made it my mission to save people from their
black-and-white, Coronation Street lifestyles. As a crazy-dancin',
feather-wearin', melodramatic drag queen, I'm a living testament to
the fabulousness of Indian films. This sort of thing may not be for
everybody, but if you want your children to grow up happy, give them
a daily dose of Bollywood. And leave Coronation Street to the kind
of people who shun the sunlight, play darts all night, and eat dust
and old socks.

Ms. St. Bernard will perform her song-and-dance routine at next
week's L.A. Weekly-sponsored screening of Kaante (Thorns), the
Bollywood musical adaptation of Reservoir Dogs, at the Directors
Guild of America. Call (323) 993-3604 for more information. In the
meantime, you may want to visit Muffy at her Web site.