Three best friends fall for the wrong women and find themselves stuck in lapdog relationships with no way out.
No stars. No masala. Yet still, this is one of the freshest and funniest films to come out of Indian cinema for a while. Is it flawless? Far from it. But what it did have was the balls to go where no Bollywood film has gone before – the lives of men being ruined by women – literally.
There has been a lot of noise from female members of the audience that the ladies are badly represented and shown as monsters. There is some truth to this, in that the highly attractive female characters are all seen to be villainous vamps, but isn’t it time that we got to see more representation of the female players of the world? It would have been helpful to have had more character development with the ladies to make them more 3-dimensional, though all three male leads are instantly likeable on the most part, and you really feel the utmost sympathy for them as they get taken for a ride by their female counterparts. The weakest link in the group was the silent, broody Rayo Bhakirta, who plays half-naked rockstar Vikrant Choudhary – he unfortunately had as much depth as his chuddis had material and his acting will need to vastly improve to save himself from becoming the next Prateik Babbar.
The film starts off slow, but grows in enjoyment once the boys find themselves in their respective relationships. The situations they find themselves in are highly plausible – a geek being used by his hot co-worker, even though she’s already in a relationship / a dopey himbo engaged to be married to a girl who forever puts him down and knows that he’ll always come back to her / a deep guitarist who continues to wait endlessly for the girl he loves to split up with her boyfriend. Let’s not kid ourselves – there are as many girls out there that use guys as vice-versa. You may see the guys in this film as stupid fools for going after such girls and sticking up with their actions for so long, but again, let’s not kid ourselves – the opposite sex can make us do some incredibly stupid things.
This is the bit where I remind my girlfriend that I love her. She’s great.
Back to the review….The music and cinematography were top-notch, but the editing sometimes came across a bit amateur. For a first-timer, the directing and script was an amazing achievement, and Luv Ranjan is definitely a name to look out for. There was some great dialogue too, though I may be one of the few that felt that the 5-minute monologue that happens half-way through the film was a tad unnecessary - it just wouldn’t happen in real life. Things are resolved a little too easily at the end, and it would have been good to see a bit more payback on the girls. But the final image is a great, realistic way to end the film (won’t say what). It’ll be interesting to see where they take the planned sequel after this.
In the new world of India where Education means Business, one man stands by his principles to offer education freely to whoever chooses to accept it, but faces opposition from the businessmen and politicians who look to benefit from it financially.
The most important element that a script should have is something to say. That element is strengthened the more it makes us look at the world and ourselves differently, and the more original the better.
For that one thing alone, I can fully support the recent films of Prakash Jha. Like Rajneeti before it, he has delved into controversial waters, but this time with the issue of reserved spaces for lower caste Indians in higher education. It’s a powerful and necessary message he delivers, and on the whole, its not completely one-sided either.
But unfortunately, just like Rajneeti, the film is overlong, the ‘villains’ are one-dimensional greedy and corrupt politicians, the dialogue is polemic and delivered unrealistically, the background score is way too heavy-handed, and melodrama, the worst of all Bollywood follies, is spread all over this like a butter with toast.
Actingwise, although the Big B does an amazing job, evoking sympathy for the upstanding principal with principle getting downtrodden by the society he is trying to help, other actors don’t fare so well. Though Saif Ali Khan and Deepika Padukone don’t really have that much to play with, Prateik has truly undone all the amazing promise he showed in Dhobi Ghat. Either he was heavily miscast or he needs to stay off the drugs.
It’s yet another example of a Bollywood film that could have been a classic, only if the filmmakers had been more diligent in editing the script down in size. As I said previously, the message is a powerful and necessary one, but the audience doesn’t need it to be shoved down their throats on every turn.
Set in 1971, East is East told the story of a Salford fish-and-chip shop owner named George Khan, who expected his family to follow his strict Pakistani Muslim ways. But his children, with an English mother and having been born and brought up in Britain, increasingly saw themselves as British and began to rebel against their father’s traditional lessons that had no place in their Western lifestyles.
5 years on, the sequel West is West follows a reformed George back to Pakistan, in order to convince his youngest son Sajid of the importance of knowing your roots, but unexpectedly faces some life lessons of his own as soon as the plane hits the motherland.
What attracted you to East is East as a project?
Quite simply the fact that it was my story. Despite having absolutely nothing in common with the characters – I’m not even English, let alone Pakistani – that man George Khan was 100% my father… other than being Jewish(!) We even had a circumcision collision in my family (laughs). Actually, what attracted me to both East is East and West is West is the exact same thing – it is everybody’s story.
There’s been a great deal of economic migration in the past few decades and it’s a story that people all across the world recognise as theirs. Recently, at the Q&A at the Toronto film festival, a woman said “Did you base this film on a book I just finished reading yesterday?” which was The Biography of Obama written by his half-sister. And I said “Not at all!” She said, “Well its identical, it’s the same story.”
It’s everybody’s story, that’s the bottom line. I guess I knew it was an important universal story that everyone would relate to, and ultimately, that’s what filmmaking is about. For me at any rate, it’s speaking to people about people, about the human experience, and trying to enrich people’s lives by having a view of what other people go through and are concerned with, that some way transects with their own experience.
What were the different themes you wanted to explore in the sequel?
The thing that has mostly informed the difference is the actual 10-year time-lapse between the two films. In these intervening years, the writer has matured – he’s become almost a generation older, he now has children of his own. With East is East, his mindset and outlook was much closer to the Sajid, the protagonist that represents him in the film. He was still very angry with his father in East is East. He still had a lot of issues to sort out.
But after 10 years, he was able to see things much more from his father’s point of view. And that’s the fundamental difference – that this film has George repenting. It’s very sympathetic to George. It makes him realise what he did wrong. It’s not just a son angry with his father, portraying him as a strong, patriarchal, tyrannical figure. He’s much more mellowed in West is West, and that gives such a deep humanity and heart to the film and such a 360 degree view of that change and growth in the character.
So that’s mainly the difference between the two. It starts off being the coming-of-age of a young boy, but ends up a film about the coming-of-age of an older man.
So it’s a much much richer film than East is East, it’s still got the laughs, its still incredibly uplifting, its still enlightening, but it’s highly emotionally moving. Grown men sit at these screenings and cry. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. That couldn’t have been said of East is East.
How do you break away from the stereotypical expectations of a ‘British-Asian’ film, such as terrorism and arranged marriages?
The reason that you’ll find there’s a different director on this film goes to the heart of that question. The first director, Damien O’ Donnell did a great job on East is East and we gave him the option to direct the sequel. However, his take on it was very different from Ayub’s (screenwriter) and mine. Basically, he felt that it should be a lot more about the arranged marriage of Munir (George’s loyal son). He felt that it all boiled down to “What is the definition of a sequel?” And his view was that a sequel has to make good on the promise of the first film. And because the first film was very centred and plot-driven by the issue of arranged marriages, he felt that this one should be based on that central premise as well.
Ayub and I really took exception to that. We just felt that it is a theme of Asian films, British-Asian films in particular, that is done to death – it’s a cliché. And it was already dealt with in East is East. We absolutely didn’t want to repeat it, and because of that, we had to part company with the director. We did so amicably. We simply realised that it couldn’t work – you can’t have a director directing a film he doesn’t believe in.
Ayub and I really stuck to our guns and felt that it had to be much more than that. It had to be about roots, and it had to be about the father – son relationship and that was the core of the film.
The thing that has really shocked me since the film has come out is – we’ve had two particular critics – one from The Guardian and the other wrote a piece in The Times the other day. And both of them are, in my mind, guilty of the most appalling bigotry in a sense. In the case of The Guardian, the critic had quite a positive view of the film, but he said the fatal flaw of it was that it didn’t address all that has happened in the world since 9/11, or the problems faced by Muslims in Britain today.
And I just thought, “How are you holding down this job mate?” The film was set in 1976 for starters, so why on earth, and how on earth would one dream of bringing in 9/11? Secondly, it’s utterly irrelevant to a personal story that has its heart and mind in the core of humanity and the human experience. And thirdly, why do you look at brown-skinned people and immediately think about terrorism and 9/11 anyway? What the hell has it got to do with it?
So that really shocked me, quite profoundly I have to say. I can’t tell you how proud I am of this film that has a very positive view of Pakistan and its people. And shows the beauty of the region and the dignity – the simple goodness of the people. I think Basheera (George’s first wife, spectacularly played by Ila Arun, who he left in Pakistan shortly afer marrying her) as a character just rips your heart open.
This film has nothing to do with politics and nothing to do with religion. It is such an important statement, and such an important step that we all have to take forward. When you think that Pakistan has just been ripped apart by the most devastating natural disaster and in the midst of that, instead of the whole world rallying to help 20 million people who have been affected by this – if you add up the tsunami, Haiti and Hurricane Katrina, you don’t get as many people as 20 million – the world has fallen far short of its objectives in terms of raising money to help them. You had people right across the world asking “Why should we help them when they harbour terrorists?” We lose our dignity as human beings when we start thinking that way.
I think film is terribly important in terms of moving the world forward politically with a small p. I think there is no greater act of generosity than an audience member opening themselves for two hours to see the world from another person’s point of view. And if we did that all the time, then there would be no wars in this world.
Before East is East, you didn’t really have a mainstream film in the UK that dealt with Asian themes. Once the film enjoyed a good successful run, it proved the distributors and exhibitors that they should consider films similar to it. It paved the way for films like Bend It Like Beckham and others to follow shortly afterwards. It does make a difference, and it is important we should support West is West for that reason.
How does a film such as East is East with British Asian themes succeed without word of mouth? What does a film need to reach an international audience?
Here is the reality. I’ve been around as a producer for around 15 years now. It is a totally different world to what it was when I started out. In those days, you could open a film on 60 screens and then, if it was as good as East is East, it reached people, and they then talked about it, and word spread – there was the patience in the exhibitors to actually nurture that film, to give it time to grow, to give that word-of-mouth time to spread. The whole definition of ‘ word-of-mouth’ is that people tell people, and then it takes time for them to go, and then it grows in that way.
Nowadays, we simply don’t have that luxury. So we’re not opening in 60 screens and growing the film. We’re opening on 200 screens from the off, and its make-or-break. Because these exhibitors simply read the box office results of the first weekend, and they will immediately decide whether they will pull the film off of that screen and put an American film in its place. All they’re interested in now is money. They don’t have the time anymore, and I guess the financial crisis doesn’t help things. Still, they could say “Let’s give this film a bit of patience, because actually it had a 96% score in its test screening. It will grow. We just need to give it time.” But no, it’s all about the money.
The worst scenario here is that the film doesn’t do well enough to maintain to keep all of those screens, and by the time that word-of-mouth finally spreads and everyone wants to go to the cinema to see it, they find that its now off. So I suppose the only thing one can do is to get out there early and know that it’s a supportive act to go out early – not just to go see it, but go see it early. And then word-of-mouth spreads, more and more people see it, and that’s what makes the difference in terms of future films.
If I were speaking to the films minister, I would say that it’s utterly crucial that we have a film quota in Britain for British independent films – that they need protection. In other areas of business you have that, but in terms of British film, they have zero protection, and zero champions really. Our own critics are very self-hating of our own films. They refer to small British films. They go into ecstasy and adulation for American films.
What’s the news on the potential third instalment?
It might possibly be called ‘East is West’, but we’re listening out for other suggestions. I can tell you for sure it will be set back in the UK. Ayub and I have started talking about the plot. Personally, with the seeds of change in George now, I would love to see him actually physically having to grapple with what its like to be tolerant. I’d love him to have to shake the hand of Nazir’s gay boyfriend, for example (Nazir is George’s eldest son who shocks the family when he comes out on his wedding day at the beginning of the first film) or take in Meenah’s (George’s only daughter) possibly illegitimate child – this is just my imagination for now!
Still, there is a lot of scope for what George could experience. Despite us thinking he has changed, it would be a different matter for him to be confronted by the things that most offend him and having to deal with them. So there could be a lot of interesting comedy in those kinds of encounters. It would be interesting to see some of the Pakistani characters coming to England too.
One thing’s for sure – Ayub will still write the story from his own life experience and I know that there is still a great deal of depth and journey of what happened to his mother and to his father. The other thing is that Ayub can only really commit to writing the third chapter after seeing how West is West goes, as quite clearly, if it does not get the support that we hope it will get, obviously we can’t go for a third part just for the sake of it.
I’m immensely proud to have made this film. I think it will make a huge difference to people’s mindsets, and to the way people relate to each other. There is such a resistance in this world. There is such an easy, immediate way of pointing the finger and saying ‘that is the enemy’ or being reductive about the world we live in. It really has to be counter-acted and fought against, and films like this do that. Hopefully we’ll have the chance to get a good long run and reach a lot of people and it will make a difference.
It’s a wonderful film, its brilliantly acted, its beautifully shot, its very funny, very entertaining, and its very uplifting… But the most important reason why you need to get out there this weekend – it really is make-or-break.
A photographer from New York comes to India to take snapshots of the real Mumbai, but finds herself besotted when she has a one night stand with a successful but selfish artist. Things become more complicated when she strikes up an unlikely friendship with a clothes washer, who begins to fall for her himself.
As an Aamir Khan production, there was already a high level of expectation for this film. As his first film working with his wife, writer/director Kiran Rao, there was also a sense of curiosity amongst some. But unfortunately, the results are mixed and will divide audiences like Marmite (or in filmic terms,Black Swan).
You have to give full credit to the director for breaking the barriers of Bollywood, giving viewers a film that is highly unconventional, and also very well shot. Black and white photos are interspersed with home video/documentary-like camcorder footage as the story floats between our four leads. Rarely does it feel disjointed, even as it takes us from the parties of high society where drugs and wine flow freely, to the streets and slums, where the rat-killers dwell and those same drugs are sold.
Nonetheless, like many a pretentious arthouse film before it, it often attempts to come across smart and revolutionary, but instead just feels as if its vanished up its own a-hole (there’s an old woman who lives next to Aamir Khan’s artist who stays quiet throughout the entire film – not once is it explained what happened to make her that way, and if this was some subtle comment on the helplessness of human nature, it was completely lost on me). Taking a huge amount of influence from the films of Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, Somewhere), this will most likely appeal to fans of ‘observational drama’, but since I don’t fall into this category, the film was wasted on me as a reviewer.
Actingwise everybody does a good job, but I’m afraid to say, despite being a great admirer of her band Shaair and Funk, Monica Dogra wasn’t hugely impressive to carry the film as the lead. In contrast however, Prateik Babbar has done a role to make his mother proud, and is definitely a name to look out for in the future, offering the role of the clothes washer the right balance of sincerity, fragility and immediately grabs the audience’s affections. The same can be said for Kriti Malhotra, the village girl whose Mumbai diary tapes that Aamir Khan finds and obsesses over. Nonetheless, her story hardly relates to anything else going on, and there’s simply nothing that the subplot offers to the story.
So to encapsulate in short, the film has nothing to say, none of the characters learn anything from their actions, and we feel nothing even resembling sympathy for the selfish and self-obsessed artist and his American stalker with a camera. Nonetheless, though some viewers may leave the theatre with the thought “What the hell was that?”, it seems there is an audience for this, and other films like it. There have been highly positive reviews for it – even a couple of friends of mine enjoyed it for offering something new to Bollywood.
But make yourself a promise before watching this film: that you don’t just like it for being rebellious against the system, you don’t just like it for being an Aamir Khan production, and you don’t just like it because the critics dictate that you should. There’s a slew of both Bollywood and Hollywood films (There Will Be Blood, A Serious Man) that are coming out nowadays met by critical acclaim, but that literally do nothing for the viewer. Films need to stop being praised just for having a big name like The Coen Brothers or Aamir Khan attached, and its wrong for filmmakers to continually fool the audience into thinking that if they don’t enjoy the film, it’s because they’re not intelligent enough to understand the subtle intricacies behind it.
Here is an example of a Bollywood film with great cinematography and directing, amazing sound, impressive acting overall and the balls to try something different. But the script? The writing? Fail. And the blame for this doesn’t fully fall on Kiran Rao’s brave debut, but Aamir Khan – more as a film producer with over 20 years in the industry than as a supportive husband – should have guided her more strongly and steered the film down a more palatable path. Even if she’d have beaten him at home with a wooden stick.
TechnicallyBollywood.com loves to hear your views. Discussion is highly encouraged.
WARNING: This review contains spoilers. TechnicallyBollywood.com explores the technical successes and failures of Bollywood films. You may not want to read it until you have seen the film. Read the informative review of the film as featured on Bollyspice.
STORY
An everyday girl attempts to fight the corrupt legal system of India to prove that the son of a Minister murdered her sister.
A ballsy reporter stakes her reputation on bringing justice to the case.
CONCEPT
Writer/Director Rajkumar Gupta has a lot of guts for making a film like this – based on factual events, led by two heroines, no romance, no lip-synced songs, and no dushm-dushm, this is hardly your typical Bollywood fare. Nonetheless, what could have been dismissed as another arthouse film has deservedly been making a lot of noise, and finding an audience particularly amongst the female proportion of the South Asian diaspora, who still find it difficult to find a role model amongst the Sheilas and Munnis of the Bollywood world.
Justice has always been a strong concept in Bollywood, with the whole population looking to find ways to minimise corruption and to move forward in the world as the next leading superpower. With the injustice our main character goes through, as every witness she depends on to put her sister’s murderer away for good either gets bribed or threatened, we feel her pain and frustration, and not once does it feel implausible. The good, the bad – everyone has a price. I’d not felt my blood boil this bad since watching The Legend of Bhagat Singh back in 2002.
So full kudos to Mr Gupta for taking risks to fulfil an ambition all filmmakers carry – for viewers to view themselves with a wish to make the world a better place. Whether this will equate to the box office of such mindless entertainment as Dabanng is anyone’s guess, but not likely. I can only hope to stand corrected.
TONE
No arguments on the tone of the film. From start to end, there was the perfect mix of drama and thrills, almost never veering off into unrequired romance, action and comedy. The few exceptions were highly welcome regardless – the middle finger protest scene was one of my favourites in particular, as were some of Mukherji’s vulgar-if-amazing comebacks.
STRUCTURE
Despite the strong concept, a machine is only as good as its parts, and NOKJ made a few flaws in other departments. As discussed in my previous blog, conventional story has a hero who wants something, but needs to defeat the obstacles in his way. In NOKJ, there are two heroines who want justice but a corrupt system is in their way.
Unlike Hollywood, two or even three heroes are a common occurrence in India, but the typical structure would follow each of their stories together, such as Dil Chahta Hain or Ram Lakhan. This film however, feels like the story of the victim’s sister ends just as the reporter’s fight for justice begins, straight after the intermission. This is highly unconventional in film structure, but not to say impossible – if only the individual stories were strong enough to carry themselves.
The reason why the first half of the film is so much better than the second half is because we feel our blood boil watching the perpetrators of the murder getting away with it, as the antagonists make Balan’s case increasingly more difficult to win, switching evidence and buying off witnesses. But Rani Mukherji’s reporter hardly has any stakes or obstacles at all. She begs to take the story she non-chalantly dismissed 5 years ago and gets it.
Her life is not at risk, her reputation is never at risk of being tainted – literally nothing gets in her way. Her goal seems to be to convince Vidya Balan’s victim to not give up the fight, but the reason we don’t feel as strongly as we should about this plight, is that Mukherji has enough to put away the Minister’s son even without Balan’s intervention.
Regarding the far superior first-half, the film starts off amazingly with a high-powered club scene, where our victim Jessica gets murdered, and it’s heartbreaking to see Vidya Balan’s short memories with her sister as she goes about fighting for justice (especially so in the final flashback which pushes Balan to finally take action). But again, as soon as we get to the courtroom, Balan remains a passive character, driving none of the story in a weak courtroom drama – seeing two lawyers play tennis with the two phrases “Objection your honour” and “You are lying” is hardly dramatic. Maybe if she intervened in some way, this problem could have been rectified.
Which brings me to two possible solutions: the writer could have either combined the stories of Vidya Balan and Rani Mukherji, having the reporter as the main character whose ambition is to bring her sister’s murderer to justice, even if it means sacrificing her reputation, or alternatively, keep it the way that it is, but have the passive reporter play the main character from the start, building a sense of duty through the film as she discovers increasingly more about this case she previously shut her eyes to, through flashbacks. The former would hardly be ‘based on a true story’ but the latter still could. But this isn’t the point.
The truth is, sometimes the writer has to take artistic licence on true stories, or even novel adaptations, to make the film better for the audience – take the early Harry Potter films, for an example of how NOT to adapt. I believe the problem here was that the writer decided to stick too closely to the truth, which can play havoc on script elements such as structure and characterisation.
CHARACTERISATION
Mr Gupta has done an amazing job on writing the ballsy reporter character of Rani Mukherji – possibly the foulest-mouthed woman ever to be put on Indian celluloid. Nonetheless, she gives a refreshing representation of the new, independent women of India, who don’t need a husband to make them feel complete or contain life-ridden guilt for one-night stands.
Vidya Balan’s character on the other hand is terribly plain. We hardly learn anything about who she is, other than being the sister of the victim, so cannot go any further than feeling sympathy for her. We learn that she has not had a boyfriend since her sister’s death, but this means nothing if she never had a boyfriend before then – which again is something we just don’t learn.
The difficulty comes in knowing whose story it is we’re actually following. Judging by the trailer above, it is the reporter’s story and her quest for justice, but we hardly see any of Mukherji in the first half. Balan’s story is stronger, with more at stake and more emotion, yet she keeps pretty inactive on the whole and almost completely disappears in the second half.
Another required element in film characterisation is change. The main character needs to go through some kind of change where she is a different person to the woman she was at the start of the film. Unfortunately, neither character changes that much at all. Balan fights for justice from the very beginning, gives up, then lights a candle, but she never takes any huge action out of the ordinary at any point.
In the same way, Mukherji’s character continues to be the same (if impressively three-dimensional) reporter taking risks in the name of justice. The way she initially rejects Balan’s story doesn’t make her highly sympathetic for the audience, and there’s not a huge push for us to root for her when she eventually decides the story will be worth her while. Maybe it just seemed implausible that after 3 years it took Balan’s story a split second to attract her attention – there are hundreds of stories about corruption in India every day, why would this one be any more important for an insensitive reporter like Mukherji? What this story generally needed was a more personal reason for Mukherji’s character to get involved.
In terms of other characters, Mr Gupta has done well in keeping them three-dimensional on the whole, with a few exceptions such as the badly-acted parts of the club’s owners, and the minimal, unrequired but laugh-out-loud comic part of the Minister’s wife. Even the politicians are far from filmi in this, with the director taking a brave choice to steer clear of shouty, weird facial-tick villains, for a Minister who only wants one thing – to keep his son out of jail. The parents of the victim, though weakly acted are well-written, shown to be helpless so far as to keep face by allowing the parents of the boy who killed their daughter and offering them tea.
Possibly by focussing on just one of the heroine’s stories, with the other acting as a subplot, may have strengthened the dimensions of other supporting characters.
VERDICT
Noone Killed Jessica (NOKJ) is the most accomplished Bollywood film I have seen since 3 Idiots. It has a great message to send to the Indian public, and despite its flaws is definitely worth a watch. Whether the Bollywood-watching audience agree is another question.
TechnicallyBollywood.com loves to hear your views. Discussion is highly encouraged.
For my next article, I will be analysing the successes and failures of Bollywood films in 2010, beginning with what was my favourite film of 2010, the little-known gem Udaan – one of the new batch low-budget flicks from Mumbai that caused waves around the film circuit. Not perfect by any means, but definitely worth a watch. The trailer for it is below.
The box office results for Bollywood films in 2010 according to Wikipedia currently stands as follows:
Of course, a lot of these films had droves of audiences attending cinemas with great expectations of great soundtracks, trusted actors and seductive marketing, only to leave the halls with huge disappointment. For this reason, I’ve created the poll on the sidebar (→) to feedback to me what you believe was the best Bollywood film of 2010. If there’s any I might have missed that you intended to vote for, please leave me a message and I’ll get the poll updated.
Final results will be published by the end of next week.
Happy new year everyone!
TechnicallyBollywood.com loves to hear your views. Discussion is highly encouraged.
IT’S NO COINCIDENCE THAT TWO OF THE FOUR HIGHEST GROSSING HOLLYWOOD FILMS IN INDIA WERE MADE BY JAMES CAMERON. Granted the success of both Avatar and Titanic were helped by local marketing, promotions and regional dubbing, but what many have failed to notice is how well the scripts for both films follow the Bollywood formula.
And what is the Bollywood formula, you ask? There’s the usual archetypes of hero, heroine, villains etc - we’ll go into this in a future article but what we’ll focus on for now is structure. Most people would say there is no structure to Bollywood, but they would be wrong.
Here is the given structure for a typical 90-minute Hollywood film, the hero’s journey pitched against the running time:
Hollywood Structure
We won’t go into a full explanation of film structure – if you want to learn more about this, I fully recommend you take a look at The Script Lab’s highly informative piece on The Eight Sequences of Screenwriting. All we need to know for this article is that there is a hero who has a goal, but needs to get over several obstacles to achieve it.
Back to Bollywood. Commercial films from India are often twice the length of Hollywood films, so people often think the same rules do not apply to both. Again wrong. To prevent flabby-second-act-syndrome, they often extend to 5, 7, even 9 act structures, such as Lagaan. Films like Dil Chahta Hai involve multiple stories, which could have been individual films in their own right, but instead tie together to a fulfilling conclusion and successfully sum up to a 3-hour running time. And then there are the most common Bollywood films that could be described as two films in one, separated by the obligatory intermission!
Bollywood Structure
So one thing we can notice immediately is that both James Cameron already fulfil the length requirements for a Bollywood film, with Avatar coming in at 162 minutes and Titanic a staggering 194 minutes. The Indian public like to see their films epic, both in scale as well as in length, with their appetite for entertainment stemming from the predecessors of film, such as theatrical reenactments from religious texts like the Mahabharat. Lets leave the history of Bollywood for a future article too(!)
The way that this method works is that the hero is given two goals – one which he achieves by the midpoint which gives rise to a second goal/dramatic question for the second half of the film. For the most effective Bollywood films, these goals are interlinked.
For example:
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge First Half – Will Raj win Simran’s heart?
Second Half – Will Raj win Simran’s parents’ hearts and get their permission to marry Simran?
Kuch Kuch Hota Hain First Half – Will Rahul win Tina’s heart?
Second Half – Will Rahul win Anjali’s heart?
My Name Is Khan First Half – Will Rizwan win Mandira’s heart? Second Half – Will Rizwan clear his name so he can win Mandira back?
By analysis, we can show how James Cameron has managed to crack the same formula:
Titanic First Half – Will Jack win Rose’s heart? Second Half – Will Jack and Rose escape the iceberg?
Avatar First Half – Will Jake win Neytiri’s heart? Second Half – Will Jake save Pandora for the Naviis and win back Neytiri’s trust?
The first half of a Bollywood film is almost always a love story – as the strongest theme to run through a film, it almost always draws a crowd, and its something both James Cameron and, say, Karan Johar, do masterfully. Even regarding characterisation, Cameron manages to include a treacherous villain who sets out to destroy the love story. Granted Cameron’s films have more action, and Johar’s films have more song and dance, but at the end of the day they both equate to very exciting visuals.
So to put it as simple as a cooking recipe……
Ingredients for a successful Bollywood film:
Star actors
Intense marketing
A great soundtrack
A crowd-pleasing romance
Exciting and epic spectacle and visuals
A strong structure – whichever rules it chooses
Other than not casting star actors, James Cameron has ticked each of these boxes and broken Indian box office records twice for Hollywood films. The other two films in the top four are (the appalling) Spiderman 3 and 2012, both of which also share common ingredients. Coincidence? I think not.
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