Deepa Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood

This has been a strange year for the Bombay film industry. The year has been one of a drought at the box office, with one after another of the promised block-busters failing to deliver on their promise with the exception of Devdas. And yet, this is a year when Bollywood has created unprecedented buzz about itself in the West. It all started with Aamir Khan’s 'Lagaan' and Meera Nair’s box office bonanza, 'Monsoon Wedding'. The mystique about Indian cinema, and the Indian diaspora, has been kept up by the success of 'Bend It Like Beckham' and 'Bombay Dreams'. Now Deepa Mehta seems to be all set to catch this wave with her Bollywood/Hollywood.

Deepa Mehta is a unique product of Bollywood and Hollywood. She grew up in Delhi in a world steeped in Bollywood. Her father was a distributor of Hindi films; cinema was not only part of her upbringing, it also brought food on the family table. She came to Toronto in the 1970s and married the son of Percy Saltzman, a well-known Canadian TV broadcaster of that time. Her first film, 'Sam and Me', was about a young new Indian immigrant and a cantankerous old Jewish Canadian. The film was critically acclaimed but was not a commercial success. Mehta then turned her attention to her native India and started to produce a trilogy of films named after the elements of nature, 'Fire', 'Earth' and 'Water'. The first two films established her as a serious, though controversial, film maker while the third got mired in controversy and could not be completed. An emotionally drained and frustrated Mehta then decided to take a break from both India and serious cinema and escaped to Canada to make a light-hearted entertainer. 'Bollywood/Hollywood' is a result of this effort.

The film opens with a dying Indo-Canadian father asking his son to uphold Indian traditions and values. The son, Rahul Seth (Rahul Khanna) grows up into a young dot.com millionaire who falls in love with a Canadian pop star but cares enough about his culture to seek his family’s approval, an approval that her mother (Moushumi Chatterjee) and daadiji (late Dina Pathak) refused to give. His mother threatens to cancel his sister’s forthcoming wedding unless he finds an Indian fiancée before her scheduled wedding. The pressure on Rahul mounts when he finds out that his sister is already pregnant with her fiancé’s child. The solution to Rahul’s problems presents herself in the form of a stunningly beautiful Sue (Lisa Ray) whom Rahul meets in a bar. Sue is an escort whom Rahul takes to be Spanish. He hires her to act as her girl friend until his sister is married. This shade of Pretty Woman soon fades into the reality of Bollywood as Sue turns out to be an Indian, Sunita Singh, who charms Rahul’s family while playing her contractual role as Rahul’s girl friend. As is to be expected, he also falls in love with his escort.

The film then takes the familiar Bollywood route with actors breaking into songs and dances at every opportune and inopportune moment, including one on a Toronto landmark, with goras joining in the chorus. Within it is woven the reality of Indo-Canadian diaspora with bhangras, parties, ladies sangeet and the whole desi shebang. People watch bollywood films on their DVDs/VCRs, sing old Indian songs and talk about Raj Kapoor and old Indian films.

Bollywood/Hollywood is an over-the-top film, which exaggerates the follies and frolics of Hindi films, though in an affectionate manner. It is candy-floss of a film without any serious message or theme. Deepa Mehta has discovered her forte and it is comedy. Rahul Khanna looks the part of a handsome, young millionaire for whom Indian culture holds little attraction but who is still sensitive to his family’s feelings. Lisa Ray, a Canadian model, gives a delicious performance in her role as a high-priced escort. But the best performances are from the supporting cast – Ranjit Chowdhry as the chauffeur Rocky, a closet gay who spends his nights as a drag queen in Toronto’s gay bars; Kulbhushan Kharbanda, as the hard-drinking car mechanic father of Sue who is still in love with his Panjab town of Batala; and most of all, the late Dina Pathak who gives a rollicking performance as the cool daadiji. But Moushmi Chatterjee fails to impress as Rahul’s mother. The film is spiced with some interesting dialogues and hummable songs, old and new.

The real star of the film is Toronto. If there is any one city in the world that defines multiculturalism, it must be Toronto. No wonder that when you cross Bollywood with Hollywood, you get Toronto. The Toronto film festival chose Bollywood/Hollywood to inaugurate its Canadian Perspective segment where the film got mixed reviews.

I watched the film with a mostly gora audience in a regular theatre. If their reaction is any indicator, Deepa Mehta should have no problem recovering her 2 million dollar investment, plus a tidy sum for her labours. The audience clapped at the end of the show and stayed in their seats as the lengthy credits rolled down to the accompaniment of the old song, Mera naam chin chin choo, from the old film, Howrah Bridge.

All in all, a nice evening diversion for you and your gora friends.