Yesterday's Bollywood movie was actually Mollywood (Malayalan studios as opposed to Bombay (Mumbai) studios) but still the vibrant, musical, dancing and mayhem of Bollywood. The movie was Bah Bah Ba and pretty much chaos in terms of plot following for me but I still enjoyed it very much. It was basically about revenge by the poor of the rich. It was labelled a comedy and there were certainly funny lines and odd Indian humour but did not have me laughing out loud although the Indian audience did laugh out loud. Some may have been lost in translation of course because I was relying on the English sub-titles.
The screening was practically full in a screen holding about 50 people and I was the only non-Indian face. I got quite a few "looks" and "double takes" from the audience as they passed my seat at the front as everybody walked passed me as they came in and Indian audiences are always late arrivers and at the interval there was again plenty of people staring at me and giving backward glances.
The film only came out in Britain yesterday but I noted that reviews in the Indian press have not been good. But then nobody in the press liked War 2 which I loved a few months back and went to see twice because I enjoyed the music and dance sequences so much. (It wasn't about war at all in the conventional meaning of the word in case you are jumping to conclusions that I liked a war film because I don't and didn't).
It sounds like quite the experience, from standing out in the crowd to the film itself.
ReplyDeleteYes, Indian films are always a bit of an experience including an interval in the middle which no other movies have. Everybody goes out and they buy more refreshments and then drift back in when they are ready, often after the second half has started. The atmosphere is always friendly. The first time I went to one I found that the adverts were specifically for the Indian audience like sari and jewellery shops in East London and these adverts were not sub-titled. I began to panic that the whole film was not going to be sub-titled in English but when it started it was sub-titled in English as well as another Indian language, one set along the bottom of screen and one along the top and, of course, the language of the film, making three in all. I say to the English cinema goers that I meet in the café that they don't know what they are missing because these movies are great entertainment but they say, no, not for them.
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