India Has Serious Films on the Human Condition
- And Village Pump Chainsaw Massacres
Not the type who goes for lush romance or lavish musical numbers? Good news. That may be the stuff that inspired Bombay Dreams, but Indian cinema has also given us frank depictions of the human condition - as well as ancient monsters menacing horny teenagers.
The seventh annual South Asian Film Festival concludes today with four offerings at the NFB Mediatheque. Among them is Cricket ... and the Meaning of Life, in which Ontario filmmaker Sanjay Talreja re-examines his Indian heritage as he watches his old country's national sport take root in a group of Toronto boys.
"The air we breathe in India is movies and cricket," says Talreja, but the movies aren't strictly spectacles. Talreja recalls growing up going to film festivals in Mumbai and - though documentaries per se are only now emerging there - being exposed to works featuring an eye-pleasing aesthetic but also "having something to say."
Talreja's 51-minute film, screening at 4:30 p.m. and also airing Aug. 22 on Newsworld, takes the viewer through his personal history and a history of the game - with stirring exhortations about its moral lessons along the way - before following the Toronto team on a road trip to Trinidad, home of some fearsome bowlers and batsmen indeed.
Talreja advises that India's cinema servings include "very humanistic films examining the complexity of human society." He singles out for praise 2002's Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, a story about class, sexism and religious warfare - all the things the musicals avoid.
He derides much of those "sexist, patriarchal, simple-minded" offerings as appealing here mostly to "children of middle-class, conservative Indian parents. For them it's about nostalgia." For Pete Tombs, however, old-time crowd-pleasers are exactly what he's keen on. The British author is behind The Bollywood Horror Collection, DVDs offering seminal sub-continental scare-fests.
As explained in a documentary (online at tinyurl.com/eawxb), U.S. fright features - especially Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddy Krueger - inspired a wave of imitators in India. In them, as Tombs says over the phone, "a bunch of kids go out into the country, find or wake an evil monster and in the end they defeat it."
A top entry is 1984's Purana Mandir, in which an Indian dad has good cause to protect his daughters: thanks to a curse, they'll die if they get pregnant - and the baby will become a horrible monster. Needless to say, much blood is shed (with musical numbers!). Another is 1990's Bandh Darwaza, in which a vampire is thwarted at one point not by a crucifix but by a Hindu aum symbol.
Both movies are in the first edition of Bollywood Horror Collection, out next month. No plans in the works for a musical. Pity.
Published by the Toronto Star