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Reflecting countries and cultures and crossing cultures in movies
I had the pleasure of seeing a couple of movies at the Mumbai Film Festival organised by MAMI at the weekend.
Well, I say pleasure….in fact, one film was atrocious and the other was groundbreaking and amazing.
The atrocious film was Life Goes On by Sangeeta Dutta. This was this particular film’s world premiere and let’s hope it is it’s first and last screening, and it is binned. It was the most clichéd film full of stereotypes about British Asians and Brits in the UK that I have ever seen.
I went to see it because it had a lot of hype around the fact it was starring Sharmila Tagore and Soha Ali Khan. What possessed these two luminaries to act in this flick is beyond me. (Neither of their acting was particularly up to the mark either – but that can probably be put down to the script they had to deal with.) The film, in English, was set in the UK about a British Asian family living there. The first generation immigrants or the ‘parents’ were portrayed as more Indian than English; set in their Indian ways, despite having lived in the UK decades, and not integrated. The father was a doctor who’s reputation in the community was paramount (yawn).
The mother was a housewife who stood in the kitchen and cooked Indian food. She dies early on and the rest of the film is about how “important” she was in everyone’s lives. She keeps reappearing as a ghost in scenes, like sitting on a swing next to her brother-in-law and singing songs with lyrics such as ‘What is love? Love is pain’. It was so cheesy you wanted to vomit. The film aimed to make out that an Indian mother was the ultimate linking force in Indian families, that tied families together, which true or untrue, is not scintillating subject matter for a film in the year 2009.
Moreover any mother does that in all families across the world, not just Indian ones and it was so OTT (and reminiscent of a cheesy sentimental birthday card) the way the film appeared to ‘worshipped’ the mother figure at all. Cliché no. 2 was that all the children in this British Asian family had ‘gone off the rails’ as a result, obviously of living in the UK (which the film – yawn – portrays as immoral.) So, in this film, one British Asian daughter was a lesbian dating a French lesbian (because all French are lesbian, of course).
The other daughter was dating a Muslim (who was in a rock band that was close to having terrorist links – of course!)
The third daughter had equally ‘strayed’ and married a white guy. Disgrace.
Of course, their relationship was strained, and her father kept telling her she ‘shouldn’t have married him’ because he was white.
The white guy, meanwhile was a ‘bad husband’ who spent too long a work leaving his Indian wife left alone with the baby. The second daughter gets herself ‘up the duff’ with the Muslim (because of course that is what British and British Asian girls do in the UK – get pregnant prior to marriage). Her mother nearly faints upon hearing this (before dying) and her Dad, when he finds out later, goes mad.
It was Sangeeta Dutta’s first feature film, so I can let her off somewhat. She is a Bengali Indian who I believe now lives in London . Perhaps she didn’t know these subjects have a) been done to death on soap operas, films, books, you name it and b) no longer reflect the reality of the lives of British Asian or British people in the UK (who in fact are completely integrated with each other, inter-marrying happily and not stuck in cultural time warps.)
Why can’t one of these crossover filmmakers come up with something innovative and seminal to say than trashing about out the same old rubbish in the same old themes?
And Soha Alia Khan’s scenes when she was dancing around a tree were laughable.
The other film I saw at the festival, which I really enjoyed, was The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela. This Filipino movie by an Icelandic director was about a Filipino transsexual and her dreadful life in the Philippines. What I liked about this movies was it was about a subject few of us in Mumbai knew anything about; it covered the subject in a documentary investigative journalistic manner. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to win the confidence of a transsexual to do these interviews with?
The film was a series of interviews with the transssexual (or Ladyboy) and her family members as well as a fly-on-the-wall style piece trailing her walking the streets and taking part in a web cam business. . It showed the gritty horridness of life in the Phillipines, without trying to elevate it to something it is not. The film had no shame in portraying the trap these transsexuals are in. The title of the film refers to someone, a Queen Raquela, who had been born in a country as ancestor to a throne and then got lost and grew up in a slum in another country and always felt like she didn’t fit into slum life because somewhere else she had a kingdom. Well, the transsexual in this film also feels she deserves a better life. Finally she escapes to Iceland where she is forced to work in a fish factory and there the exploitation of foreign labour in Iceland is portrayed.
It is no surprise the flick has won three awards so far. When it ended, the Mumbai auditorium, which was packed, erupted into spontaneous applause. It would be nice to see more Indian and British filmmakers attempt something like this.
Anyway all is not lost as I went to see London Dreams last night and really liked it. For the first time ever a Bollywood film did not portray London biasedly (eg as an immoral place) but portrayed it for what it was: a multicultural city, of rich and poor, where, yes, in Soho there is a red light district but, otherwise it is a melting pot of people where an Indian rock band would be accepted by the public, as much as any other.
Of course, the scene when Ajay Devgan says “I want Wembley. I dream of Wembley” is OTT, cheesy, unrealistic and ridiculous and the second half of the film lacks direction and needs better editing.
Yes, the way the Punjab was presented was hysterical (country bumpkins bouncing around, consisting of women in red sequined saris and men in dhoti) – but this was funny – and done in a deliberate self-mocking manner, which was at the end of the day intelligent. (Everyone knows the Punjab isn’t like that. I’ve been to Chandigarh which is posher than Mumbai and even Gerrard’s Cross.) And in the end (if my Hindi was good enough to understand it) there was a great deal of warmth and fondness for the Punjab expressed. This film was in my view seminal. It elevated ways of presenting the west in Bollywood and also did not have some kind of superiority complex throughout it, as many Bollywood films do There was something fresh and global about it. Anyway my views may be all wrong as I watched it in Hindi. But I thought it was as good as Rang de Basanti and Fashion; and better than Rock On..It is on my list of top Bollywood films….Await your views…
(7 votes, average: 2.71 out of 5)
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) have lived a mjor portion of my life in africa and then in london for few yrs.
Naomi Reply:
November 4th, 2009 at 11:28 pm
Have you seen London Dreams? if you haven’t, please go and see it. It is truly groundbreaking and I would love to hear your views. In any case I need to discuss it with someone who speaks fluent Hindi as I’m not sure if I understood it fully. I think I did. Salma Khan plays a hammed up role as some bumpkin from a Punjab village. It’s really funny. Ajay Devgan is gorgeous and Asin plays a Bollywood heroine very well.
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