In Defense of the 1980's Bollywood (Or Why Some of Us Love Bappi-da)

The Answer is simple: some of us grew up in the 1980's with Bappida's music, and Mithunda's dance. But that will not make a blog posting, hence let me redundantly elaborate.

A few years ago, I had watched a French movie "Le Fils" (The Son) made in 2002. Now I must confess that I like watching weird, boring, slow movies with subtitles that put emphasis on otherwise neglected, and apparently useless aspects, such as script, acting and storyline. I could even happily watch Abbas Kiarostami's "Taste of Cherry" (condemned by a Hollywood genius as "The film is such a lifeless drone that we experience it only as a movie"), a boring, mundane movie where nothing much happens, just like in real life. (It may be noted that Iranian moviemakers make some of the most boring and slowest movies, which are also, at the same time, ripe with minimalism and subtlety, if one cares for such things. It is probably only in Iranian movies that you can see , for example, a person banned from making movies for 20 years watching Khatami giving a speech on Freedom of Speech on TV, or two women wondering why they have been sacked from job and concluding that they have no clue, but the Mullahs who terminated their service must know why it was done, them being the scholarly people. Of course, some of them, like Bahman Ghobadi, also add humour to their movies depicting harsh realities of daily life.)

I'm sure, most of you are not interested in such boring stuff; but if you do, then visiting the Cannes Film Festival website could be a good idea. (And it is not being very snobbish either; our own Chetan Anand's "Neecha Nagar" won at Cannes way back in 1946).

The central character in Le Fils (which also, incidentally, won at Cannes) was played by Olivier Gourmet (who did it too!), who does not contain the essentials to be a star: no stunning looks, not dashing or handsome...nothing. Instead, he possessed something non-essential: acting capability.

What more impressed me, however, was an interview of his that was included in the DVD. In it he said that our adolescent years are the most formative years of our life, and people should pay more attention to people of that age.

Iranian terrorist Abbas Kiarostami (well, not exactly a terrorist, but a master filmmaker, about whom Jean Luc Godard said, "Film begins with D. W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami", and leading figure of Iranian New Wave cinema, under whom others, such as Jafar Panahi, trained) also echoed exactly the same sentiment as Gourmet's in an interview I watched. I do not remember where I watched it, and when.