Why I love Bollywood

I'm a Bollywood-loving white guy. I want to make it clear that I'm not some hipster whose ironic or camp "appreciation" is really a form of mockery--I truly enjoy Bollywood movies, and what's more I find myself unexpectedly moved by them.

The enjoyment part shouldn't be hard for me to explain: Bollywood movies are full of song and dance and spectacle, sweeping emotions and sweeping music, timeless dilemmas of love versus duty that aren't always resolved in the way that a Western viewer might expect. (That's the lovely Rekha from Umrao Jaan (1981) in the photo.)

Another thing that makes Bollywood so delightful is its recombination of influences. In a single film--heck, a single dance number--elements from Hollywood musicals, kathak dance, MTV, and the Ramayana may be mixed together with joyful heedlessness. The latest buzzword is "mash-ups"; Bollywood has been doing them for decades. Bollywood soundtracks were "world music" before the term was invented, drawing sounds and rhythms from Indian classical and folk music, flamenco, disco, African and Caribbean music, surf guitar, and European classical music. Salman Rushdie wrote that his work "celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs." It's a perfect description of Bollywood.

So there's little mystery about why I find Bollywood movies so pleasurable. What's harder to come to terms with is why I find key scenes in certain films so emotionally affecting. This is a commercial cinema whose manipulative effects are highly calculated, as the analytical part of my brain is all too aware. And yet, when I watch my favorite films for the tenth time I can still find a lump forming in my throat. It's forced me to confront the fact that underneath my sophisticated, cynical exterior lies (as Captain Renault from Casablanca would say) a rank sentimentalist.

My analytical brain gets overwhelmed, I think, partly because of Bollywood's unabashed emotionalism. Hunky Bollywood leading men and gorgeous leading women are unashamed to weep copiously at key plot moments, and their visible distress can set me off too. Also, certain Bollywood actors have a powerful appeal that makes their filmic dilemmas that much more intense for affected viewers like me. But maybe it's better not to question too deeply, and just accept that many Bollywood films can, against my better judgment, reduce me to an emotional wreck. And in fact if I'm truthful with myself that's a key reason I return to them again and again.

I have to confess, though, that one thing that gives Bollywood films such power for me is the aesthetic strangeness of the music and words. If the equivalent lyrics were sung in English to standard pop instrumentation, I'd probably find it all a bit much. Of course I realize that saying I enjoy the "aesthetic strangeness" of another culture's cinema puts me in the middle of a political minefield. But I'm not so much talking about the picturesque appeal of the exotic (although I do think saris are just about the most attractive garments ever created). Rather, it's a certain distance enforced by lack of both familiarity with the language and lived experience with the cultural references. I feel something similar (though to a lesser degree) when I listen to Italian opera, or watch French films. It's like the old Gene Kelly line from An American In Paris: "Back home everyone said that I didn't have any talent. They might be saying the same thing over here, but it sounds better in French." Well, lines like "When you're close this world is naught / Destroyed in your love, a triumph sought" ("Mere Hath Mein" from Fanaa (2005)) sound better in Urdu.

Look for more film reviews and recommendations to be posted here soon.