What is it about
Paris? The common mistake is to believe that Paris’s
culture and image simply endures and the myriad
love stories within are but reflections of that
urban myth – but those who know better know
that the myth is one that must be sustained and
nurtured. The film Paris je t’aime
is such an effort, one that should be seen as
a cause rather than an effect of the Parisian
myth. The most common remark made by viewers after
Paris was, "What a great film! Why
can’t we make films like that in India?"
inevitably followed by a dismissive shrug meaning,
"The fact is, we just can’t."
The fact is we can. Let me get one thing straight
first : I love Bollywood (or the Mumbai Film Industry,
for those who take themselves too seriously).
Love it in the same way I love Paris the city,
for its reality and its fantasy, rationally and
irrationally.
 Paris
is a collection of narrativaly and stylistically
different films made by a score of directors and
crew and actors from different nations, including
our own adopted NRI filmmaker Gurinder Chaddha.
It wasn’t handed out to a bunch of French
directors and crew and actors, and therein lies
the trick : by giving itself to the world, Paris
has taken in the world. By contrast, Bollywood
is still a terrifyingly selfish, hermetic industry.
For example we have half a dozen male superheroes
who lord it over the box office, followed by a
herd of half-baked boys (approximately 99.9% of
all leading men are related to the industry);
we have an equal number of female bombshells to
play damsel, followed by a gaggle of insecure
girls clad in a few square centimetres of cloth
(there is a kind of democracy here: hotness supercedes
the gene pool). The fundamental problem is not
nepotism/favoritism, however, but cinematic philosophy.
Everything else, including the above -isms, stems
from the prevailing cinematic philosophy. Even
if we fixed the –isms it would be merely
cosmetic, since the basic cinematic philosophy
would remain.
The fundamental mistake being made is the idea
that Bollywood is a fixed mode of filmmaking,
that there is only 'the Bollywood way' and any
other way that deviates from that path becomes
by definition un-Indian. People conveniently forget
that cinema is the world’s biggest and most
visible bazaar : styles, techniques, technology,
trends, moods, even actors and directors and producers,
everything that feeds into film is constantly
traded across cultures because it strengthens
the art and refreshes it. For Bollywood to close
its doors to the outside influences would be more
than simply chauvinistic – it would be a
criminal suffocation of one of the major creative
sources.
Cinema is about the exploration of possibilities.
The creation of a cinematic work is about opening
up the field of possibilities as wide as possible,
not about restricting it to a perceived permutation
of elements and running the work through the formula
machine. Paris is a film that exemplifies the
philosophy of a Cinema of Possibilities, regardless
of whatever flaws there might be in the work.
Bollywood, ironically, often rips off entire foreign
films or full sequences within and ‘Indianises’
them. Doesn’t that already smack of 'un-Indian'
influences? Numerous young talents I know have
stories to tell that are dismissed as 'non-commercial'
or 'un-Indian' by ‘those who know better’,
and find themselves forced to re-shape them into
'commercial, pan-Indian, marketable' stories.
These stories are original, and come from their
India, the India they know and live, and maybe
that’s what some producers don’t want
to recognise in their quest for the elusive hit.
Bollywood’s attempts to force a pan-Indian
definition on an India that is increasingly and
healthily growing into a sum of equal parts is
as gross as its prevailing cinematic philosophy
of making the maximum amount of money with the
minimum amount of (original) work, of bending
the structures of a medium that is fundamentally
artistic to a raw and unsympathetic business model.
 This
can change. Must it? Will it? That is not for
someone like me to decide. All I see is that everyone
I know walks into a Bollywood film and adjusts
their standards down in order to enjoy the film.
Why should that be? The pace of development of
technical talent is undeniable, but must be equally
matched by the development of authentic and new
ideas and forms, new voices and expressions, new
actors and actresses – not necessarily to
replace the current system, but to make its place
either within or alongside it. A new soul can’t
speak with an old voice, and we know that most
of Bollywood is still out of synch with the way
India is developing. Some filmmakers are attempting
new ways of cinematic expression, but too few.
The more Indian cultures become corporatised,
globalised, urbanised, etc., the more valiant
and ferocious our efforts must be to carry Bollywood
forward, to make it one of the guiding lights
of our way of life rather than a nostalgic museum
piece, a cinematic Taj Mahal. There is a dynamic
place for Bollywood in our future, one in which
we embrace a Cinema of Possibilities as an open
bazaar of wonder rather than a black market run
by DVD thieves and petty power/money dynamics.
To hark back to one of the original titans of
our cinema, who himself openly assimilated elements
and influences from foreign cinema and yet created
his own stories with his own voice, Raj Kapoor
called us 'the dream merchants'. The only way
merchants can prosper further is by trading with
each other as much as with their clients. We must
re-open a Spice Route of cinema, and one day even
Paris may come to us for a helping of dreams of
love with the words, “Bombay, je t’aime…”
Sanjay Lafont is half-French and half-Punjabi,
a trained actor and writer. He has lived in Pakistan,
France, the USA and grew up in Delhi. He has written
the crossover film Hari Om and has just
finished creating his first short film, One
Coffee Story.
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