Goodbye, Bollywood Boulevard

The air in “Before the Rains” tingles, presaging a tempest. The setting is southern India in 1937, on the cusp of monsoon season. Santosh Sivan’s lush, finely acted Merchant Ivory period drama is also full of the rumblings of India’s independence movement — but the real storm brewing may be South Asian cinema.With Indian media giant Reliance Entertainment’s acquisition of more than 200 North American cinemas expected to bear its first (imported) fruit this month, those rumblings are closer than you might think. Can you hear them in the Tribeca Film Festival’s lineup of world cinema? Well, not really. But two offerings — “Before the Rains,” which made its Tribeca premiere Tuesday and screens again Friday night before making its wide-release premiere on May 16, and Mehreen Jabbar’s borderlands drama “Ramchand Pakistani,” which plays Friday and Saturday — do hint at the shifting winds of today’s Indian and Pakistani filmmaking scenes.One thing these serious-minded films have in common is Nandita Das, who is not your typical Indian actress. She made a big splash 12 years ago playing a neglected housewife in “Fire,” Deepa Mehta’s taboo-breaking exploration of homosexuality and tradition-inflicted ennui. Despite her obvious talent and striking beauty, however, the Delhi-based actress, who holds a master’s degree in social work, has kept her distance from the fame game that consumes such Bollywood superstars as Aishwarya Rai.Descending the Indian consulate’s grand staircase Tuesday amid a swirl of handlers and photographers, Ms. Das insisted that her starring roles in two films at Tribeca this year — one Pakistani, one Indian — make her less a de facto ambassador of South Asian cinema than the beneficiary of an unlikely coincidence. Still, she said, “I hope the notions will change and you’ll see that Indian cinema means a lot more” than Bollywood song and dance.Or that “Pakistani cinema” means anything, really. “Ramchand Pakistani” director Mehreen Jabbar describes her country’s film industry as “a very inferior cousin of Bollywood” that has lost its once-popular movie halls to the DVD black market and its most talented filmmakers to television. But her poignant film, which tells the true story of a boy detained for years in an Indian jail after accidentally crossing the border, has a good chance of touching native and foreign audiences the way the recent Pakistani production “In the Name of God” did. The participation of Ms. Das, who plays a disconsolate Dalit (untouchable) separated from her son and husband, should help attract interest outside the country. If it does, Pakistan’s film industry may start to experience something akin to momentum.Ms. Jabbar’s and Mr. Sivan’s films both have an international provenance, which doesn’t dilute them so much as add robustness. “Ramchand Pakistani” was shot in Pakistan and funded almost entirely with Pakistani money, but Ms. Jabbar — who splits her time between Karachi and Brooklyn — used an Indian composer and, for certain parts of the film, secured the cooperation of the Indian government. Merchant Ivory has, of course, long been considered the Orient-Express of production companies, and “Before the Rains” was made in the label’s typical spirit of highbrow international cooperation.Although he acknowledged Merchant Ivory’s conservative pedigree, Rahul Bose, who plays a pro-British foreman in “Before the Rains,” said he considers the film the best kind of modern Indian film.“All this crap about crossover cinema — ‘Let’s have an Indian bride and an American guy come looking for her’ — it’s utter nonsense,” he said, referring to a subgenre best exemplified by the 2004 vehicle for Ms. Rai, “Bride & Prejudice.” “[‘Before the Rains’] is really the best example of a collaborative effort between East and West: the rigor and stringency of American writing, the almost anal attention to detail by the producers — India is a more savoir faire kind of a place. You have actors from both sides. You have a production designer who’s won awards in India, and he’ll be collaborating with a guy in Los Angeles who’s been doing Indian music.”And then, of course, there’s Mr. Sivan, a respected cinematographer who made his directorial breakthrough nine years ago with “The Terrorist,” an intimate portrait of a Tamil girl planning to blowing herself up. Mr. Bose said that Mr. Sivan (who, it should be mentioned, also shot “Bride & Prejudice”) brought an “extrovertedness” and an “exuberance” to “Before the Rains” that David Lean, for example, would have suppressed. And Mr. Sivan’s camera caresses the verdant hills of Kerala so as to make them pregnant with metaphor, and a visceral sense of violation floods his images of trees being hacked down to build a road.“It’s a very good time for Indian cinema,” Mr. Sivan said. Although he enjoys a good Bollywood romp, he said he feels gratified that “singing and dancing” have lately become less of a prerequisite and noted that cheaper technologies are allowing new independent filmmakers to emerge.Mr. Bose agreed that “huge revolutions” are under way in Indian cinema and pointed to the growth of a sophisticated urban market and the proliferation of exhibition spaces hungry for new product. The huge majority of these films are not in English, he emphasized, and have nothing to do with the polished work of the diaspora filmmakers known in the West.“Mira Nair is a brand. Deepa Mehta is becoming a brand,” Mr. Bose said. “You can’t say that’s cinema coming out of India.”Asked if he would provide some examples, Mr. Bose said: “Absolutely … Oh, that you would have seen? No.”

Goodbye, Bollywood Boulevard

Goodbye, Bollywood Boulevard

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