Bollywood Now!
by David Chute
Published in LA WEEKLY, October 5 - 11, 2001.
by David Chute
Published in LA WEEKLY, October 5 - 11, 2001.
When, if ever, will it be OK to have fun again?
Some day, but perhaps not yet, suggests Mona, a young Syrian Muslim woman who has traveled from the city of Orange to the Sports Arena on a Sunday evening in September to join 12,000 other fans of popular Indian "Bollywood" cinema at a mammoth public appearance event called Craze 2001.
Mona is clearly torn: she loves Bollywood's life-affirming movies, these three-hour full-course meals of music, romance, comedy, action and melodrama. And the film that is be re-enacted as the centerpiece of tonight's program, the lavish period cricket drama Lagaan (Land Tax aka Once Upon a Time in India), about a high-stakes match between a scrub eleven of beleaguered rural villagers and a team of sneering colonial Brits is, she says, "a lovely, positive movie," one of her personal favorites.
Perhaps she has spent a bit too much time just sitting there waiting, as the auditorium slowly filled over the course of hour, due to long delays caused by stringent new security procedures. Craze 2001 is a traveling stage extravaganza, a 23-city tour of the United States and Canada, whose main attraction is a chance to see Indian movie stars in the flesh, lip-synching to song hits from their recent blockbusters. What could possibly be more frivolous? "I am here," Mona says, "but yet I just don't know."
No one connected with the tour seems to be inclined to let recent events put a damper on the festivities, although a Craze show in Chicago had to be canceled due to travel restrictions. Headliner Aamir Khan, the producer and star of Lagaan, was recruited last week to deliver the "show must go on" speech to the assembled press in Vancouver, and in this case it actually made sense. If any group of show people of earth knows how take the minds of an anxious, hard-strapped audiences off its troubles it the gang of tireless crowd pleasers of Bollywood, whose single-minded dedication to delivering intense pleasure to an enormous and diverse audience is absolutely unmatched.
You go into something like this expecting runaway glitz and even certain amount of curry-flavored cheese, and you will not be disappointed. Craze 2001 was staged by one Mohamed Morani of Bombay, a body-building media tycoon whose business interests include film production and a fireworks company. His model seems to have been the exhausting excess of Hindi cinema itself. In addition to flashy movie star production numbers he piles on straight musical performances and audience participation segments, and even a "comedy track," a well-received set by Bollywood impressionist Sunil Kumar. With all this padding the often explosive show (judiciously spiced with Morani company pyrotechnics) stretched to almost 3 1/2 non-stop hours, even longer and louder than the average Hindi movie.
A Bollywood show without an element of overkill would not be true to its own essence, and Craze 2001 was already over-stuffed with A-level star attractions. In addition to Gracy Singh, Aamir Khan's debutant leading lady from Lagaan, and rising icon Preity Zinta, his spark-plug co-star in the highly-regarded new "yuppie romance" Dil Chahta Hai (The Heart Desires), there was also the exceedingly tall and elegant Ms. Aishwarya Rai, recently dubbed "the second most beautiful actress on earth" by no less an authority than Roger Ebert.
Still, Aamir Khan was the clear favorite, India's current reigning box office champion and a widely admired actor who is increasingly seen as an innovative creative force in the industry. In part this means that he has been championing world-standard manufacturing practices (like consecutive production schedules and synch sound recording) that are all but unknown in the often crazed and slap-dash Bollywood environment. Khan is reputed to be a perfectionist who sweats the details, and the polished professionalism of the musical numbers adapted from Lagaan seemed to reflect this. They were the most fully staged and the best rehearsed segments of the evening, amounting to a condensed reenactment of the entire film in three installments, true snippets of musical theater that suggested Broadway rather than an off night in Vegas.
And then something unexpected transpired: Anil Kapoor managed to hold the stage for close to forty minutes entirely on his own, alone on a bare stage with a cordless mike, stalking around in a big-belted Elvis-y outfit with silver trim. Now in his mid-40s, Kapoor has been a Bollywood star for over 20 years, and he's looking a little puffy around the edges. Has been so popular for so long that he is sometimes referred to as "Mr. India," after the title role he played in Shekhar Kapur's 1987 invisible man blockbuster. Yet running through a medley of hit tunes from his catalog of more than 80 star vehicles---all in his own often wavering middle-aged voice, without benefit of playback ---he was the first performer of the night who really lifted people out their seats.
In part this was a consequence of elementary career mathematics, the law of celebrity averages: from among the hundreds of songs that he has picturized over the years it must have been fairly easy for Kapoor to string together a set guaranteed to draw delighted gasps of recognition from a desi audience. And a song like "Ek larki ko dekha" ("I saw a girl"), from 1942: A Love Story (1994), was familiar and haunting enough to tingle the scalp of at least one a sympathetic firangi. On one level, Kapoor was a typical overdressed showbiz smoothy, a filmi lounge crooner, playing the audience like a cheap guitar---but he was doing it (if this makes any sense at all) without cynicism, totally invested in the stereotyped gestures of an exalted-yet-humble star reaching out to his beloved fans.
Bollywood may be in the process of become more "global" and more professional (which inevitably means "more like Hollywood"). But it is not quite there yet. No American movie star would go anywhere near a glitz-fest like Craze 2001, not without freighting the proceedings with irony and thinly veiled contempt. This is a mistake that Anil Kapoor would never make. If anyone at Craze 2001 represented the true "show must go on" spirit, it was Mr. India.