Out of India, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN considers the current Indian and Bollywood Cinema.

INDIA WAS bashed at the Cannes Film Festival. Journalists and others agreed that the country’s presence at the festival was sadly confined to glamour and the red carpet. India could not participate where it really mattered: the festival’s two most important segments, Competition and A Certain Regard. For a country that clinched the Festival’s Grand Prize in 1946 with Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar and the Best Human Document Award ten years later with Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, the slide seems awful. Besides, India has had eminent people on the Cannes jury, and they included Ritwick Ghatak, Mrinal Sen and Mira Nair.

Amitabh Bachchans, Amit Khannas and Bobby Bedis may talk about India’s increasing role at Cannes, but they forget that the country’s last movie in Competition was Shaji N. Karun’s Swaham in 1994. All these men have little to say when you ask them about this vacuum.

I have been to Cannes for 16 years, and despite its carnival of stars, cavalcade of cars, bottles of Champagne and magic of melodious mood, the festival remains essentially committed to what it was first set up for in 1939: a place for great auteurs, where budget or box-office has little say. Indian cinema, hijacked by Bollywood, must remember that getting into Cannes requires much more than stars and style.


Sometimes I feel Bollywood is so intimately linked with some stars that their performance, or luck, or ill luck has a strong bearing on a film’s box-office bonanza. I personally believe Amitabh Bachchan is being flogged so hard that he has begun to appear jaded and uninspiring. Take, for instance, Bachchan’s Eklavya – The Royal Guard (Vidhu Vinod Chopra) or Nishabd (Ram Gopal Varma). Both flopped miserably, seemingly because of Bachchan, who looked utterly tired, even bored. I cannot understand why he allows himself to work two or three shifts a day. Must he continue to do this at his age, risking whatever little reputation he still enjoys?

Overall, this year has been bad for Bollywood with Nikhil Advani’s Salaam-e-Ishq, Suneel Darshan’s Shakalaka Boom Boom, Milan Luthria’s Hattrick, and Vikram Bhatt’s Red and Life Mein Kabhi Kabhi all adding liberally to the bloodbath.

I saw several other movies this year. Reema Kagti’s Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd, Madhur Bhandarkar’s Traffic Signal and Sagar Ballary’s Bheja Fry had weak scripts, performances, and were eminently forgettable.

The only Bollywood film I liked without serious reservations was Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday, a hard-hitting docu-drama that looks at the 1993 Mumbai blasts in an unflinching, uncompromising manner. With an excellent star cast led by Kay Kay Menon, Black Friday is a work to be cherished. I wish Bollywood would make a serious attempt at producing films like this.

I also liked Rahul Dholakia’s Parzania; mainly for its brilliant acting cast led by Naseeruddin Shah and Sarika. She is absolutely marvelous, an actress I hope to see much more of in coming years.


Apoorva Lakhia’s Shootout at Lokhandwala across 125 minutes, takes us into the ruthless world of two gangsters, Maya and Dilip. Based on a real incident in the early 1990s, the movie zeroes in on a six-hour shootout in the Mumbai suburb, where five ‘goondas’ – who lived a life of kidnapping and extortion – pay the ultimate price. Emerging victorious out of this is police officer A.A. Khan, who helped Lakhia re-enact the scene. Lakhia has an impressive CV. He studied cinema at New York, worked as an assistant to no less than Woody Allen, and part produced a Wall Street Journal television series on India entitled Emerging Powers. Lakhia also assisted Ang Lee helm The Ice Storm. But does anybody remember Lakhia’s Ek Ajnabee and Mumbai Se Aaya Mera Dost? I am afraid not many do, and let us hope that Shootout turns out to be more attractive to audiences.


Sanjay Khanduri’s debut film Ek Chalis Ki Last Local is a dark thriller that tells us how a call centre executive with a measly Rs. 70 on him fails to catch the last local train home. When he does get on to the next morning’s first local, he is richer by Rs. 25 million. Khanduri follows the man between the two trains, a mere 150 minutes, waiting to get a glimpse of this run with Neha Dhupia and Abhay Deol.


Dev Anand’s 1961 tearjerker Hum Dono is now in colour, the second following Mughal-e-Azam. Some movies are best seen in black and white, some could gain in colour. I was unsure about Mughal-e-Azam, but let us see how Hum Dono, a classic story of a mistaken identity, reflects in its new avatar.