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REDISCOVERING BOLLYWOOD'S GOLDEN AGE
It's zany, extravagant, kitschy. It's delightfully (or fabulously) cheesy (or tacky). It's mad, wild, wacky, over-thetop. Campy. Exotic. Transgressive. Liberating. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera.
Film critics always reach into the same bag of breathless adjectives when trying to sell Bollywood movies to non-- Indian audiences. If the words ring a bell, it's because you're hearing the vocabulary of cult-movie special pleading, equally handy for touting direct-to-video horror, chopsocky extravaganzas, and all-midget musical Westerns. It's the language of bad faith. We use it to hedge our bets when we're not confident that our particular obsessions will stand up to serious critical scrutiny. At the same time, we use it to praise ourselves: Aren't we special for loving this unconventional, demotic, multicultural stuff? And aren't we, well, ever so slightly superior to it?
Some years ago, when I found myself proselytizing for Hindi films in America, I too made use of this idiom, albeit with a certain queasiness about describing a great national cinema in terms cribbed from an Ed Wood user's manual. Then things changed. As Bollywood "went global" in the wake of GATT and WTO, quality suffered terribly. Seemingly overnight, the typical Hindi musical was no longer a giddy, densely layered celebration of difference like Khuda Gawah (God Is My fatness, 92) or Mr. India (87), but a blandly formulaic hymn to the values of the trasnational bourgeoisie, like Dil To Pagal Hai (The Heart Is Crazy, 97) or Dil Chahta Hal (The Heart Desires, 01), slickly produced and seasoned with just enough worldbeat exoticism to interest the affluent global audience to which it was now addressed. For the first time, Bollywood was a bore, and the rare exceptions-Mani Ratnam's excoriating political psychodrama Dil Se (From the Heart, 98) or Khalid Mohamed's burnished cri de coeur Fiza (00)-merely proved the rule. In its long-awaited moment of international recognition (or, at any rate, its acknowledgment by high-profile pastiche specialists Baz Lurhmann and Andrew Lloyd Webber), Bollywood no longer seemed worth talking about.
But as global commerce closed a door, it opened a window. Over the past several years, a number of key historical titles-- prime specimens of Bollywood's consensual Golden Age, roughly the Fifties-have become accessible on DVD. The...