Doing the Can Can

Bachchan has a walk-on part in The Great Gatsby,the opening film for which director Baz Luhrmann is already getting slammed: too gaudy,too plastic,too everything. Thats as maybe,but something about the F Scott Fitzgerald classic,which has already been filmed once before,is eminently suited to the Cannes film festival where the worlds media,paparazzi,photographers,serious film critics,film magnates,producers,distributors,buyers and sellers all gather for 10 frenetic days in May. Other international film festivals have equal prestige,particularly the one in Berlin which kickstarts the year in early February,but Cannes with its mix of unabashed glamour and fierce focus on great cinema is special.

And as the fest wears on this time around,a whole host of

Indian faces will be present. India is the guest country this year,and the centenary celebrations of Indian cinema will continue on the Croisette. Cannes regular Anurag Kashyap is back at the Directors Fortnight with his Ugly (last year,Gangs Of Wasseypur,parts one and two,were screened in the same segment on a drizzly day: those of us in the long line without umbrellas got nice and damp,but the film generated enough ambient heat to keep us in good spirits). Ritesh Batras Dabba (one of the best scripts Ive read in a while) will be at the Critics Week. And the other film which should get people talking is Amit Kumars Monsoon Shootout (if it has the same zing like his terrific short Bypass,that is). The just-released Bombay Talkies,in which Kashyap and his three co-directors Karan Johar,Dibakar Banerjee and Zoya Akhtar have artfully pushed mainstream boundaries,will be a gala screening. Which means film plus party plus beautiful people,a very Cannes thing.

Expectedly,theres been snark. After 100 years,is this all India gets to show at one of the,if not the,glitziest film festival on the planet? What,no film in competition? Tchcha. Statistically,the India head count is not very impressive,but the grumblers forget a crucial fact: India had dropped off the Cannes map almost completely in between,because the kind of films that a global audience likes had stopped being made. There was no flirting with form and style and content. The resurgence began about five years back,and around about then is when commerce and art have begun talking to each other in Indian cinema,especially Bollywood.

Cannes has always had an India connection,even if tenuous and intermittent,right from the 1946 (the year the festival began) win for best feature for Chetan Anands Neecha Nagar. But its been strongly auteur-driven,especially those that the French loved. Satyajit Ray,Mrinal Sen,Adoor Gopalakrishnan,Shaji Karun (whose Piravi found a rousing reception at the festival),Mani Kaul,MS Sathyu, Aribam Shyam Sharma were all presented at the festival,and made their way globally alongside the fervent French embrace. India was the flavour for several years when the maestros were consistently at the top of their game. And then came the slide.

The return came with Vikramaditya Motwanes super coming-of-age feature,Udaan in 2010. Theres been a slow and steady gain since then. Sitting at the smoothly-run India pavilion last year,Kashyap had talked animatedly of his under-production Ugly: exactly a year later,here he is,back at Cannes again,almost as if he was planning on being ready just in time. Clearly,Kashyap is an early twigger-on to the Cannes secret: films that begin here with a bang generally gather no moss as they roll along other prestige points. They only gather more buzz,and that buzz,more often than not,widens awareness and viewership for new-age,non-song-and-dance Indian cinema in uncharted territories.

And thats why being at the Festival de Cannes is important: it is not just about your film getting screened at a tiny seaside town in the south of France. It is about the world that can be yours,potentially. And that is good enough,to be going on with.

As also how the mainstream in Bollywood at Cannes has come to mean something more than just a show-and-tell extravaganza. The gala screening in 2002 was the baroque,creaky Devdas. In 2013,it is the fresh very-local-but-universal Bombay Talkies.