Bollywood For Beginners: Part 2
Note: This series was originally posted to my Bollywood blogspot blog and represents the cumulation of the wisdom of a decade or so spent in the Bollywood trenches. It would have last been edited in about 2014.
Bollywood for Beginners 2:
What makes a Bollywood film?
Early on in cinematic history, the American film industry coalesced around a style that valued realism and which used the camera in an unobtrusive manner. Thousands of miles away, the film industry in Mumbai discovered that a stylized form of drama which incorporated music into the narrative worked best with Indian audiences. The vast difference between the cinematic “languages” of popular Indian film and the Western style is probably the cause of much of the mockery of Bollywood in Western popular culture. If a viewer doesn’t know how to read the story cues that lead up to the first song in a film, then that viewer might understandably be confused when the lead characters begin to dance. And if a viewer doesn’t understand the mythic resonance of the archetypical characters, then that viewer might not be able to make sense of certain plot events. Learning to make sense of the very different film language of Bollywood is the biggest hurdle for Westerners watching popular Indian cinema and, unfortunately, it’s one that can’t be papered over with subtitles.
The style used in the majority of popular Indian film, including Bollywood, is called masala after the mixture of spices used in cooking. If masala in cooking is a mixture of cloves, cumin, nutmeg, peppercorns and other things, filmi masala is a mixture of drama, romance, comedy, family values, music, sex, and violence. Comedy scenes break up a dark mood; violence makes the romance seem sweeter.
When masala is done well, the director conducts the emotions of the audience like they were a symphony orchestra but a bad masala mix can spoil the mood faster than a fart at a formal banquet. And it’s not just the tone but the structure of the narrative itself in popular Indian film is very different. Instead of a film conceived in three acts, popular Indian film is structured into two free-form acts separated by an intermission. Instead of the narrative being driven by the beats of this strict three act format, the structure in popular Indian film is rooted in religious stories and folk theater. There are expected story beats and character archetypes and if the director doesn’t have a good reason for ignoring them, the audience will swiftly get restless. Waiting too long to have the first song, forgetting the interval, letting the comedy subplot drag, not clearly identifying the villain or heroine, putting in too many fight scenes in the second half, blowing the item song too early… masala is not an easy style of film to master.
Another very visible marker of popular Indian film is stylized acting, which Western viewers usually feel is too loud and over-the-top. This stylized form of acting is rooted in traditional theater and while we in the West are unused to seeing it in films today, it can still be found in older Hollywood films, opera, and in Shakespeare performances. It’s acting that can cut through the noise in a crowded theater; acting that can touch an audience watching the film projected on a sheet in the middle of their village; acting that can engage viewers who may not understand the language the film is made in, whether those viewers are in a village in the hinterlands or second generation Indians in London. It’s not that Indian actors never learned “good” acting (i.e. subtle acting) but what engages a rowdy audience whistling at the screen in Lucknow is just very different from what engages a handful of critics in an empty, silent theater in New York.
Music and the placement of songs into the narrative are another distinctive marker of popular Indian films. These films are not “musicals” the way we know them in the West, a separate genre of film where the story is told through music sung" by the actors. A film may only have one song or it may have eight or something in between. The songs may advance the narrative or they may be there for atmosphere. Each filmmaker has a different style of working with songs and music but they are an essential part of the film.
However, actors and actresses are not expected to sing their own songs, that task is handled by what are called playback singers. Playback singers can be just as well known as the actors and because their roles are off camera, their careers can span decades, far longer than the actors and actresses they sing for. For example, the much loved playback singer Lata Mangeshkar was still singing for 20-something actresses well into her 80s. Playback singers are not meant to deceive the audience that the actor or actress is singing, as in Singing in the Rain. Audiences accept that an actor may have three different “voices” in three different songs in the same way that Western audiences accept that a Kinks song may start playing out of nowhere in a Wes Anderson film. What seems normal in film is all a question of what you are used to.