Bollywod Blitzkrieg: Is Hollywood going Bollywood? 
By Subhash K. Jha, November 13, 2006 - 07:32 IST
Unique love scenes in films are like scoops of eternity…never to be lost. Never to be collected in a clasp… only in a gasp.
When I watched the sumptuous sensuality of Rob Marshall's Memoirs Of A Geisha it became progressively
clear that international cinema careens more and more towards Oriental expressions of emotions, specially
love.
Watch that last elegiac moment of stolen tenderness between Ziyi Zhang and Ken Watanabe where he tells her he
has loved her ever since he saw her as a little girl. It could be a moment out of Yash Chopra's way-ahead-of-times
Lamhe…
Or it could be that heart-stopping moment in Black where the blind and deaf Michelle asks her teacher to
make her feel like a woman. Such complexities of expression tend to transpose the rites of love-making away from
a level of eroticism to a plane of spiritualism.
As the ultra-romantic Gulzar says, "Love starts with the physical and then moves beyond the body." Hindi cinema has
been doing that quite regularly. My favourite love scene would have to be the 'More piya' raas-leela song
sequence in Sanjay Bhansali's Devdas. The way the camera caressed the contours of the divine-erotic love
lyric, the splash of water, the swish of the veil being pulled off and the impact of the camera as it heaved and
swayed like a boat in a turbulent emotion….they all added to Shah Rukh and Aishwarya's sensuous presence.
This was a far more electrifying moment of love than the over-rated Dilip Kumar-Madhubala 'like-feather-like-song'
frolic in Mughal-e-Azam…. I find a similar aura of tense romanticism in recent Hollywood films. Check out the
looks—oh , those smouldering looks!—which Joaquin Phoenix throws at Reese Witherspoon in Walk The
Line….Or that great on-screen chemistry that Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni share in Fun With Dick & Jane.
Didn't Dick and Jane remind you of our own Bunty and Babli? Didn't Abhishek Bachchan in Bluff Master
remind you of Will Smith in Hitch? And didn't Abhishek in Dus remind you of Will Smith in Bad
Boys?
Didn't Nana Patekar and John Abraham in Taxi No 9211 remind you of Jamie Fox and Tom Cruise in
Collateral? And doesn't the over-hyped Telugu star Siddharth in Rakeysh Mehra's extraordinary Rang De
Basanti remind you of the tycoon's son in Arthur Miller's All My Sons where the conscience-stricken
son shoots himself dead after he discovers his dad had been selling those faulty spare parts to the army aircrafts that
killed a soldier.
Familiar terrain…Though Rakeysh has no clue about All My Sons. This healthy give-and-take of ideas between
Bollywood and Hollywood has now come to a place where cinema from the two disparate worlds can have the same
face.
Is Hollywood becoming more and more like Indian cinema? …This is the thought that raced through my mind while
watching Memoirs of a Geisha. The mounting of the story could be Muzaffar Ali's Umrao Jaan, the
sumptuous colours were from Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas, the poetic lyricism seemed derived from
Kamal Amrohi's Pakeezah and the raw hurting realism about gender equations came from Madhur
Bhandarkar's Chandni Bar.
One sees all of these in the exquisite literary adaptation that's Memoirs Of A Geisha. This isn't the first time in
recent movie-viewing experiences that we have come away with the feeling that Hollywood is getting more and more
Oriental in its depiction of family values and in understanding the layerings that linger in the search of family ties.
I had seen moments in that excellent biopic on the life of blues singer Ray Charles which could've been straight out of
Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Black…These had to do with the responses of the blind young protagonist trying to
come to terms with his blindness.
A mother in distress about her handicapped child's future or a sister grappling with her sibling's illness ..isn't that what
Black and 15 Park Avenue were about? Now watch Toni Colette and Cameron Diaz do the sister
angst in In Her Shoes…. More than ever , the West seems to value those very emotions that Indian cinema
seemed to be losing out on.
For a while now Indian filmmakers had become almost apologetic about displaying our cultural roots on screen. No
more. We as a nation producing the largest number of films can gush at Geisha because we know that story
of a little girl who was kidnapped into a brothel and groomed into growing up to be a poised sex worker. J.P. Dutta
calls her Umrao Jaan. And it's no coincidence that the poetic tawaif is played by the international face
of Indian cinema.
Rob Marshall Saab, Aapki kya 'Rai' hai?
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Bollywood Blitzkrieg: Sensually Sexual
