Bollywood in Cleveland
Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 19, 2006

The demand is high because Bollywood's Hindi-language movies are hugely popular everywhere in the world - everywhere, that is, except America. Outside of museum retrospectives and special showings for Indian communities in the United States, Bollywood movies are hard to find here.

But that does not mean American audiences have not experienced Bollywood. Its extravagant aesthetic - think Busby Berkeley musicals crossed with Harlequin romance novels (minus the sex and even the kissing), as styled by Liberace - is slowly crossing over into American pop culture. You can see its fab-wacky influences slipped into movies as varied as "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," "Bend It Like Beckham" and "Vanity Fair," the Thackeray adaptation starring Reese Witherspoon.

It's not just movies, either. This week, the Broadway road show of producer Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Bombay Dreams" stops in at the Palace Theatre (Tuesday-Sunday, April 2), bringing what by all accounts is both a parody and a fond tribute to the genre - plus a working fountain.

What brought on this sudden desire for scattered marigolds, desperate love stories, crimson silk saris and song-and-dance numbers that often span the globe and go on for 10 minutes or more?

It turns out that reality is overrated. We've had it with the fake reality that TV producers, memoir writers, pundits and politicians of every stripe are dumping on Americans at the moment. Real reality is even worse: Every day, we confront lists of American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, news clips of roadside bombings, images of lives shattered by Katrina and other natural disasters.

So, enough reality. What we need is a little surreality.

Berkeley, a master of the surreal, knew what he was doing. "In an era of bread lines, depression and wars," he once said, "I tried to help people get away from all the misery . . . to turn their minds to something else. I wanted to make people happy, if only for an hour."

In the case of Bollywood, better make that three or 3½ hours. The classic Bollywood musical needs that much time to fit in all the conventions of the form.

They share many of these conventions with American soap operas and Spanish-language telenovelas. Young, beautiful, star- crossed lovers are a standard, as are meddling parents and at least one quite dastardly and cunning villain and one foolish relative. Plots depend heavily on misunderstandings, reversals of fortune, long-lost characters, unlikely coincidences and sudden, implausible resolutions that lead to a happy ending. Needless to say, lavish wedding scenes are almost required by law.

Then there are the song-and- dance numbers, which snake through homes and city streets and sometimes even jump entire continents right in the middle, transporting the hero or heroine to the Swiss Alps, say, and giving them costume changes along the way. Usually, the characters are drenched in water in at least one of these numbers.

Traditional Bollywood works the songs into the plot, like a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, with characters suddenly bursting into songs that move the plot along. But many contemporary movies use something called an "item number," which features a singer-dancer who is not a character in the movie, singing something that may have nothing to do with the story.

It's exhausting, it's excessive, it's an experience not to be missed. But moviegoers who are not ready to go for the full Bolly can get a taste in several American and British films.

Gurinder Chadha, a British filmmaker, worked a few Bollywood conventions into "Bend It Like Beckham," her generational cultural-clash story of a girl from a traditional Sikh family in England who dreams of playing professional soccer instead of following the traditional path to marriage and children. Chadha included a spectacular wedding scene with a Bollywoodesque song-and-dance number and all the glitter and movement a fan could desire.

She went even further with her next film, "Bride and Prejudice," a splendid Bollywood-lite adaptation of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice."

Austen's plot, which revolves around a meddling mother's efforts to marry off her five daughters, translates impeccably into a world of arranged marriages and dominant parents. The English class conflicts of the novel become conflicts of cultures, as Indians, Americans and Westernized Indians fail to connect.

Austen's Elizabeth Bennet becomes Lalita Bakshi (gorgeous Bollywood superstar Aishwarya Rai), while the proud Mr. Darcy becomes stiff Will Darcy (Martin Henderson), an American whose family owns an international hotel chain. As with their counterparts in the novel, these two start off on the wrong foot, letting pride get in the way of their mutual attraction.

As in all Bollywood musicals, the action stops regularly for big, madcap musical extravaganzas filled with so much color and kitsch Berkeley would weep with envy if he were alive to see them. Remarkably, they blend beautifully with the restrained, polite tone of Austen's writing. Bollywood gives the love-besotted characters a chance to pause at key moments, strip off their masks of propriety and let loose all the craziness they feel inside. Their liberation is enchanting and hilarious at once.

Hilarity of a different sort pops up in Tim Burton's epically insane "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," which features actor Deep Roy as all the Oompa- Loompas. Burton outfits him in a series of increasingly bizarre costumes and then multiplies him into a cast of hundreds to put on elaborate musical production numbers.

Like Chadha, filmmaker Mira Nair blended Bollywood style and 19th-century English literature for a cross-cultural "Vanity Fair," with Reese Witherspoon playing William Makepeace Thackeray's heartless, social- climbing protagonist Becky Sharpe.
Though this matchup sounds less promising than Chadha's, Nair pulls it off, seizing on a few Thackeray references to characters' colonial posts to India to create a scene in which colonial fever runs high among the fashionable set. She does not do a full-on Bollywood treatment but layers the period English setting with Indian marvels. Her frames fairly burst with rich ambers and deep reds, silky textures, ankle bells and exotic animals.

Even better is Nair's exuberant "Monsoon Wedding," a movie she described as "a love song to Delhi, my home." It is also a love song to the Bollywood films she grew up watching. Nair, who moved to the United States to study at Harvard and teaches in Columbia University's film department when she isn't making movies, gives Westerners a generous taste of the candy-colored extravaganzas.

The romantic comedy bubbles and overflows with characters and plotlines, like a towering champagne fountain at a wedding reception. Naturally, a wedding is at the center of the story. The movie takes place during the four days leading up to a huge Punjabi wedding, and Nair plunges the audience into the thick of things, where we can observe the swirl of secrets and complications that inevitably ensue when families reunite.

Nair uses nearly all of the Bollywood conventions in the movie, not least the monsoon rains of the title. But rain is not the only element drenching the proceedings. Joy saturates the movie, too, in abundance. So does color. And music. And dancing. And romance.

Sounds more inviting than racism, corruption, terrorism and censorship, no?