Bollywood knocking best of Hollywood for a six!
HOLLYWOOD is facing a challenge from the East as colourful
Indian-language films start to knock American blockbusters
out of the box office charts.
British cinemagoers have lifted a record five "Bollywood"
films into the weekly top ten lists this year.
Multiplex cinemas are queueing up to show Hum Saath Saath
Hain, the latest hit from the Bombay-based film industry,
which flew straight into the UK top ten at No 9, even
though it was showing on only 28 screens. The three-hour
musical melodrama grossed £110,026, an opening
week take that pushed the new Steve Martin comedy The
Out-of-Towners and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace out of the top ten.
Britain has become the largest market for Hindi films
outside India and the audiences are no longer drawn only from the three
million-strong Asian community. Westernised themes and better production
standards are drawing white cinemagoers to see films that have transfixed
Asian audiences for years.
Last week there were nine Bollywood films showing at cinemas
in the Greater London area. The 14-screen Cineworld at Feltham in
West London devotes five screens to Bollywood films and Hum Saath Saath Hain and
Dil Kya Kare are out-performing Fight Club and The Blair Witch Project. Imran Chaudry, manager of the Cineworld, said: "We started
showing Bollywood films a year ago and the response has been great.
Hum Saath Saath Hain was selling out two 350-seat screens at the weekend." The
audiences are largely made up of Asian families, drawn from the
surrounding communities of Southall and Hounslow, but that is beginning
to change, according to Mr Chaudry. "Asians are bringing their white
friends," he said, "but they need to be reassured that there are
subtitles. Hum Saath Saath Hain is a good film for all families because it has a
strong cast and a strong story." Bollywood churns out 1,000 films a year, ranging from
romantic comedies to action dramas.
Singing, dancing and a happy ending remain
the touchstones for a successful film, but the industry is now
looking to tailor its films to its new Western audience. Shekhar Kapur, the director, blazed the trail when he made
the award- winning Elizabeth, starring Cate Blanchett. He described it
as "a Bollywood interpretation of a very orthodox English
subject". He is now working with Lord Lloyd-Webber on a Bollywood-themed
musical. Hum Saath, a gentle tale of the romantic troubles within one
family, was dismissed as "sugary" by Hindi critics, but it is tipped
to become the biggest-grossing Bollywood film outside India and
already has taken $1.6 million in the United States. Saif Ali Khan, the film's
star, is expected to be mobbed by 15,000 fans when he appears at the
Mega Mela festival at the NEC in Birmingham today.
Nearly 40,000 people are expected at the Mega Mela, a
three-day festival of modern and traditional Asian culture, which
began yesterday. Cookery competitions and catwalk displays compete
with stalls from John Lewis and Jaguar for attention.
Hum Saath Saath Hain is the latest success for its UK distributor, Eros
International, which has enjoyed box office hits with Taal
and Dil Se. Eros fought a 15-year battle to convince multiplex cinemas
to screen Asian films, but now the cinemas are going to the
distributors to ask for more.
Male stars, such as Akshaye Khanna and Govinda, are
attracting women to cinemas, while new female stars, such as Preity Zinta, are
pushing at the still-rigid boundaries of Bollywood with a spice of
sensuality and independence.
Jyoti Deshpande, marketing vice-president of Eros
International, said: "It [Bollywood] has crept up in the box offices
without the industry realising, but now cineplexes see it as a way to
get families back into the cinema. Bollywood action films don't work so
well with British audiences, but romantic films do. The Hum Saath Saath Hain
story is treated in a modern way so that teenage audiences can
empathise with the characters, too."
Eros is now helping Bollywood companies to write screenplays
that will appeal to the growing British audience. Ms Deshpande said:
"You are seeing more references to London in the scripts and you will
get British-Asian characters introduced and scenes filmed in
London." That said, Bollywood films require rolling landscapes as a
backdrop and Scotland has become a popular location.
There will not be too many concessions to Western audiences,
however, Ms Depshande said. "Three-hour films will test their level
of patience and we don't want to lose the current audience. Erotic
scenes are still out. We want people to discover Bollywood the way they took
to arthouse French films in the 1960s."
Eros is already looking beyond cinema to digital television.
It has launched, in conjunction with BSkyB, Bollywood 4U, a 24-hour
film channel, which attracted 12,000 subscribers in its first
month.
BY ADAM SHERWIN
The Times
November 20 1999