New Ash, Old Wave

This year8217;s International Film Festival of India, the post mortems agree, was more of the same thing. There was the waning attendance o...

This year8217;s International Film Festival of India, the post mortems agree, was more of the same thing. There was the waning attendance of the stars, both international and home grown, the absence of the really exciting, the really edgy films and the lack of imagination that has become a surefire regular at the government-managed show. And then the growing Bollywoodisation of it all 8212; Chokher Bali8217;s Aishwarya Rai was Diva of this show. But if Rai8217;s vaulting star power drew attention to the stunted sameness at IFFI, at another site she is fast becoming an emblem of Bollywood8217;s change. Be it Rai8217;s visibility at the Film Festival That Counts or simply the column inches she now presides over in the international press, she is said to be the face of the new Bollywood knocking at the world8217;s door. A Bollywood increasingly freed of the tyranny of the cliche. Modern Bollywood, which experiments with unconventional plots and bound scripts. New Wave Bollywood. Wish it were true.

Unfortunately, Aishwarya Rai8217;s luminosity on the world stage may speak of nothing more substantial than, well, her luminosity. The New Bollywood that she supposedly announces to the world is as yet too fragmented and too incoherent to come together in any kind of a wave. The new filmmakers are in a tizzy of their own making. They seem to have little or no time for the introspection, deliberation, or just plain thinking, required to register more than the fleeting impression. The subversion of the formula has become the new formula. Don8217;t put any songs, put in the underworld, some unashamed sex and dollops of urban angst to taste. Where are the surprising ideas, or the ideas with the force and expanse that can straddle audiences and touch them, make them pause and perhaps even rearrange their ways of seeing? Where are the radical new ways of training the lens at the world that flowed out of the cinematic waves that lapped up against shores abroad 8212; be it Italian Neo Realism or the French New Wave 8212; or even the Indian New Wave that was born and died a few decades ago?

No, let8217;s wait before we give Bollywood a new name. And let8217;s hope that the shifting of the IFFI to the sun 8217;n8217; sand of Goa inaugurates some overdue effort to nurture a film culture. That it doesn8217;t announce an escape to film tourism.