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

RENOWNED Indian auteur-director Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s latest film, Naalu Pennungal (Four Women), has been short listed among 20 movies to compete for the prestigious L’Age d’Or (Golden Age) Award at the Belgian Film Archives. The movies would be archived.

Four Women has been chosen for this prize “in view of the authenticity, peculiarity of purpose and novelty of treatment of the work”.

The award is named after Luis Bunuel’s 1930 controversial classic, Golden Age. Over the years, some of the giants of cinema, including Bunuel and Ingmar Bergman, have been honoured. Adoor now joins this gallery of greats.

Making films that are intimate, personal and real, Adoor struggles and survives amid big banners. In a quite, soft-spoken way, he has made his point, yet again, to tell the world that Indian cinema is much more than just Bollywood.


The Indian entertainment business loses billion every year to pirates. This was revealed at Frames in Mumbai that was recently organised by Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. Television loses 68 billion, while movies 9 million. Nearly 900,000 jobs are lost because of piracy in an industry that hires five million people.

Small cinemas in small towns and villages copy a film on a disk long after the shows are over for the day, some times with the connivance of theatre owners, who are out to make a fast buck.

What is the solution? I would suppose reduction of the window period between a theatrical and video release. Otherwise, audiences tend to lose interest in a movie. Also, efforts by companies like Moser Baer to introduce inexpensive film DVDs have already made a difference. Ultimately, people must say no to pirated software.


Deauville, a quaint twin town on the French Normandy coast once famous for the Allied landings during World War II, is now known for its movie festivals.

There are two here: one all exclusive Asian event in March and another entirely American experience in September. The Deauville Asian Film Festival, now in its 10th edition, poses an interesting line-up of movies in its three major sections: Competition, Action Asia and Panorama. Apart from these there are a number of tributes and retrospectives to men such as South Korea’s Im Kwon-Taek, Japan’s Koji Yakusho and China’s Jiang Wen among others.

India’s renowned auteur-director Adoor Gopalakrishnan is at Deauville with his latest work, Four Women. The film has made a grand tour of the festival circuit – Toronto, Nantes, Warsaw, Rotterdam, Miami and so on – and is now set to wow Deauville’s French citizens. A movie based in Kerala between the early 1940s and the 1960s, Four Women is a touching document of what women from different social strata faced, and continue facing. Based on the Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai’s literary work, Adoor’s film is gripping to say the least.


Paramount’s comedy, The Love Guru, helmed by Mike Myers, has displeased at least two Hindu groups. To open on June 20, the work stars Ben Kingsley, and Jessica Alba and the real life new age guru, Deepak Chopra. The groups are angry that The Love Guru makes fun of Hinduism. I say, have people lost their sense of humour?


Subhas Ghai’s latest Black and White disappointed me. Although the director warned us not to expect a Kisna or a Khalnayak, Black and White merely reveals all that is wrong with Bollywood. Ghai’s film is poorly scripted, and there are several scenes or sequences that are far removed from the realm of possibility. Newcomer Anurag Sinha is an Afghan human bomb, Numair, who sneaks into New Delhi to blow up the Red Fort on India’s Independence Day. Fine so far, but he also sneaks into Professor of Urdu, Rajan Mathur’s (Anil Kapoor) home and worms his way into his wife Roma’s (Shefali Chaya) heart. Eventually, hardcore extremism yields to soft-core emotion, and this changeover is hardly convincing. But then that is what Bollywood is all about. Take it or leave it.