Jhoom Baraabor Jhoom is the third film by director Shaad Ali, a young and talented film maker, who has brought something new to fantasy world of Bollywood-social realism. The first film I saw by Shaad Ali was Saathiya, a story of a young couples relationship. The striking thing about them was that they were an ordinary lower middle class Indian couple. They lived in a very modest, rundown flat, and actually wore clothes that people wear in real life. The interiors and exteriors were shot on location in vibrant and decrepit Mumbai. The acting, dialog and story was very naturalistic (barring a few bits of the film). Shaad Ali used his considerable budget to glamourise everyday India. Rani Mukherji, the heroine and a big, big star, never looked better, despite the simplicity the role required.
Shaad Ali's next film, Bunty and Bubbli, carried on his love affair with the everyday life of India, this time mainly in the drab urban exteriors of the state of Utter Pradesh (UP) in India. Shooting in Practical locations, I got the sense that Shaad Ali was deeply in love with UP, ugliness and all, and he found a way of making his audience fall in love as well.
In fact Shaad Ali has an extraordinary ability to immerse his audience in the geography of his films, in a way that only one other director has done for me -Alfonso Cuaron (in "Y Tu Mama Tambien", the third Harry Potter and "Children of Men".
Despite, my two positive experiences with Shaad Ali films, I wasn't too keen on Jhoom Barrabor Jhoom. The couple of reviews, I read declared the film nothing special, and the posters made it look completely mindless. If it weren't for Shaad Ali and prestigious Yash Raj Banner, I would have ignored the film totally. In fact the only reason, I saw this was because the film i really wanted to see (the Transfomers) had no more tickets left.
The opening of the film doesn't offer much promise. In a "Brief Enounter" type scenario, two strangers (Abhishek Bachan and Preity Zinta) waiting for a late-running train, start telling each other how they had met first met their respective fiances (Lara Dutta and Bobby Deol), who they had come to get at the train station.
The love-at-first-sight meeting scenarios that the two narrate is pure Bollywood- so lame, that disbelief is impossible to suspend. Rikki (Abhishek's character) falls in love with and gets engaged to Anaida, the manager of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Alvira (Preity Zinta) meets and falls in love with Steve a ridiculously rich lawyer, with an office the size of a town hall.
I sighed, and decided to enjoy the film, for what it did have to offer- some witty dialog, good performances, fabulous songs and choreography and Shaad Ali's talent for geography immersion, this time at a London train station and Paris. I mean, after seeing this film, I wanted to go to Paris, it looked so lovely. But underneath it all, I kept thinking, "Shaadji, you have sold out, and made a stock standard, lame, meaningless and pointless Bollywood movie, with no story (like the Indiafm.com review said)".
Over telling their stories to each other, the two fall in love. I could see the whole film collapse into tedious melodrama.
It didn't. Something so very unexpected happens, that it turns the film into completely different direction. Something that made me decide that this was the best film Shaad Ali had made and that the writers had outdone themselves.
At this point, quit the review if you haven't seen the film and would like to.
You have been warned. It turns out the two hadn't come to the station to pickup their fiances. Abhishek's (Rikki) character had come to pick up a friend, Preity's character (Alvira) her sister. The fiances were complete fabrications. Alvira fabricates her fiance, to avoid being hit upon. Rikki fabricates his fiance so that Alivra would talk to him. Neither how to back out of their respective lies.
The film at this point is at strange juncture. The lameness of the love-at-first-sight is revealed to be a fiction within the reality of the film. It seemed that the film would have to abandon it's hysterical, slick pace now that it was telling a real world story. It doesn't.
The story moves to Southhall, the Indian Quarter in London, where Shaad Ali breaks from Bollywood tradition by depicting the reality of the place, but making it look beautiful at the same time. This is the first big budget Hindi Film that attempts to bring a sense of realism to the way Indians Live overseas. Rikki, the hero, lives in a small rundown flat with a squeaky bed, and not in a palatial flat overlooking the House of Parliament as would be the case in a normal Hindi Film. But that doesn't stop the film's slick frenetic pace, throwing twist after twist at the audience culminating in a gaudy, garish, feverish and bombastic dance competition in Southall.
Shaad Ali knows and loves his old Hindi Films. He constantly refers to them through songs used as ambient sound in both Bunty and Bubli and Jhoom Baraabor Jhoom . But he also recognises the flaws and limitations of Hindi Films. His ambition is to make old time Hindi Films without their suckiness, just like Spielberg did when reinvented the adventure serial with Indiana Jones.
So in Jhoom Barrobar Jhoom, Indians don't live implausible lifestyles in London. Indian Girls, brought up in the Western Style aren't sluts but no virgins either. In a dream sequence, Shaad Ali films a song between a simple Indian Girl and Simple Indian Guy- classic old style Bollywood, but Shaad twists this scenario by showing them (very tastefully) have pre-marital sex. In Bunty and Bubli, Shaad Ali romanticises small town domestic life in India, but then has the heroine, who offered a way out of this life at end of film claiming "Thank god, we are leaving. If I had to make another pickle, I would scream."
I am not sure how this will fare. It might be too clever for Indian Audiences, and non-Indian audiences might dismiss it as fluff, but I can't wait for the next Shaad Ali film.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Introduction
The low point of Bollywood for me personally, was some awful film that decided to use the iconic soundtrack of James Cameron's, Terminator II in the early nineties. I love this movie, and to see it's brilliant score debased, caused me to renounce Bollywood films for nearly 10 years.
Mind you, the use of Hollywood soundtracks was an innovation of a sort in Hindi Films (I prefer the term Hindi film to Bollywood film). Prior to this, in the eighties, Hindi Films used stock music. The same lame piece of music, film after film after film, till the sound of it, was enough to drive me out of the house (my mother used to shoo me out during Hindi Films because I used predict the dialog with annoying accuracy). This is fine example of cutting corners the Indian way. You hire a composer, a lyricist and an orchestra, for bollywood dance numbers, but not for background music.
The Year 2000 was a turning point. I saw a film called Mohabatein, starring Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan. As with most Hindi Films, the story was slight, BUT, it had something, Hindi films hadn't had in decades- Production Values. The photography was good. Lighting didn't come from a bad porn film. The film had pace, careful editing, reasonable dialog and some nuanced performances.
Since then, for me personally, Hindi films have gotten better and better. I have taken up watching them again, and my iPod is full of modern Bollywood Pop. The most heartening thing about the new Bollywood, is that it seems to be evolving along its own path. Film's are attempting to find their own original voices, without being derivative.
Nowhere is this more evident then in the Bollywood song and dance numbers. Bollywood music, which I felt had nowhere to go after the eighties (with a few exceptions) suddenly started sounding very different. Rather than becoming bastardised and derivative with western influences, a new crop of composers, transformed bollywood pop with regional Indian influences. Brilliant composer AR Rahman, got the ball rolling by introducing South Indian Percussion to Bollywood. The sounds of Punjab, found their way into a lot of dance tracks, and boy they keep getting better. Directors like Sanjay Leela Bhansali in Devdas, demanded and got hardcore Indian music tracks inspired by classical, folk musical traditions of Northern India. Films like Dev, used the Islamic Sufi Music. Ancient Musical traditions that were in danger of drifting out of general public consciousness, had an abrupt revival. Lyricists began writing songs in Persian, Punjabi, Urdu and regional dialects of India.
Of course, this doesn't change the fact that most Hindi Films are still lame and in a lot cases pure shite. But they are improving very, very fast.
Hindi films haven't always sucked. Fine films, in quantity were made in the fifties, sixties and the seventies. They declined, like India in general did in the eighties. In the ninteies, India opened up its economy. It also opened up the Media. From one stodgy government Television Station, India now has galaxy of TV stations. New talent sprung up. Indian Films moved away from getting their finance from organised crime syndicates to more legitimate source of funding.
Hindi Films have a long way to go. Even the best films made in India each year are easily outshone by films made elsewhere. Subtitles, while better than they used to, still arent adequate. Also, Bollywood hasn't crossed over to a non-Indian audience. I think it will one day, but it doesn't really matter if it doesn't, provided it continues to have it's current audience.
Mind you, the use of Hollywood soundtracks was an innovation of a sort in Hindi Films (I prefer the term Hindi film to Bollywood film). Prior to this, in the eighties, Hindi Films used stock music. The same lame piece of music, film after film after film, till the sound of it, was enough to drive me out of the house (my mother used to shoo me out during Hindi Films because I used predict the dialog with annoying accuracy). This is fine example of cutting corners the Indian way. You hire a composer, a lyricist and an orchestra, for bollywood dance numbers, but not for background music.
The Year 2000 was a turning point. I saw a film called Mohabatein, starring Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan. As with most Hindi Films, the story was slight, BUT, it had something, Hindi films hadn't had in decades- Production Values. The photography was good. Lighting didn't come from a bad porn film. The film had pace, careful editing, reasonable dialog and some nuanced performances.
Since then, for me personally, Hindi films have gotten better and better. I have taken up watching them again, and my iPod is full of modern Bollywood Pop. The most heartening thing about the new Bollywood, is that it seems to be evolving along its own path. Film's are attempting to find their own original voices, without being derivative.
Nowhere is this more evident then in the Bollywood song and dance numbers. Bollywood music, which I felt had nowhere to go after the eighties (with a few exceptions) suddenly started sounding very different. Rather than becoming bastardised and derivative with western influences, a new crop of composers, transformed bollywood pop with regional Indian influences. Brilliant composer AR Rahman, got the ball rolling by introducing South Indian Percussion to Bollywood. The sounds of Punjab, found their way into a lot of dance tracks, and boy they keep getting better. Directors like Sanjay Leela Bhansali in Devdas, demanded and got hardcore Indian music tracks inspired by classical, folk musical traditions of Northern India. Films like Dev, used the Islamic Sufi Music. Ancient Musical traditions that were in danger of drifting out of general public consciousness, had an abrupt revival. Lyricists began writing songs in Persian, Punjabi, Urdu and regional dialects of India.
Of course, this doesn't change the fact that most Hindi Films are still lame and in a lot cases pure shite. But they are improving very, very fast.
Hindi films haven't always sucked. Fine films, in quantity were made in the fifties, sixties and the seventies. They declined, like India in general did in the eighties. In the ninteies, India opened up its economy. It also opened up the Media. From one stodgy government Television Station, India now has galaxy of TV stations. New talent sprung up. Indian Films moved away from getting their finance from organised crime syndicates to more legitimate source of funding.
Hindi Films have a long way to go. Even the best films made in India each year are easily outshone by films made elsewhere. Subtitles, while better than they used to, still arent adequate. Also, Bollywood hasn't crossed over to a non-Indian audience. I think it will one day, but it doesn't really matter if it doesn't, provided it continues to have it's current audience.
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