From
Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 26, Dated July 05, 2008 |
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CULTURE & SOCIETY |
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Profile |
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Breathless In
Bollywood
Navdeep Singh,
director of Manorama Six Feet Under, came back to India to make films,
but tells NISHA SUSAN that working in Bollywood
kills creativity
A SLOW-PACED AND seductive
noir film set in a fictional Rajasthani town called Lakhot, Manorama Six
Feet Under barely made a ripple when it was first released in September
2007. Nearly a year later, people are still urging it on their friends,
each convinced they are the first ones to have found it. Not surprsingly,
it is currently one of the bestselling Hindi DVDs. Its director Navdeep
Singh, however, thinks that Manorama was a competent yet unambitious debut,
daring you to make a fool of yourself by praising it. He hopes that by
alternating mainstream films with his personal projects he will be able
to finally make the movies crowding his head for years. He is making fewer
and fewer of the ad films that he is better known for and is now finishing
the script of a bigger film, Basra. A spy-thriller, it is set partly in
Iraq and explores the mysterious world of a RAW agent. In case you are
wondering, Basra is his offering to mainstream cinema.
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Photo: Deepak
Salvi |
It’s difficult not
to wonder what kind of person made Manorama Six Feet Under. This is a
man who signals the climactic revelation of the femme fatale by having
her appear in a sleeveless salwar kameez rather than the sarees you have
seen her in the rest of the film. As she hangs over the villain’s armchair
her thin, bare arms shock you — so closely are you tuned into the morality
of Lakhot’s ‘nightie’-wearing householders. In turn the scene makes you
laugh because all along you felt no moral outrage when you discovered
Satyaveer, the hero, a junior engineer, has been suspended for taking
a bribe. Or when he continues to ride around on the bike bought with his
ill-gotten gains. “I was not setting out to make an ‘issue’ film but morality
has become to us only about virginity and vegetarianism. If you are a
vegetarian virgin, nothing you do is immoral. You could be absolutely
ruthless in making money, kill someone even.” He adds, “as long as you
don’t eat the person you have killed, of course.”
Here is his pet theory: “The baniyafication
of our culture has ruined our movies. So I
can stand on my terrace and listen to families
fighting, calling each other maa-behn
gaalis. That is real but producers used to tell
me that my movie about a father-son relationship
was too westernised because the
son talked back to the father. Perhaps it does
not happen in the joint families of our mercantile
class but it certainly happens in
India.” But no sooner than he’s given it, he
retracts it, saying he’s being “rude”.
As an ad filmmaker, Navdeep is smack in
the middle of the consumerist deluge that he
worries about. “There was always rich and
poor. But now the spending is more visible.
Sooner or later someone will catch on that
walking down the street is a pair of shoes
that costs three times his income. Why not
knock out the wearer and steal the shoes?”
Singh’s enjoyment of the ridiculous is
voluptuous, like someone rolling their
tongue around a boiled sweet. Mocking himself,
he tells you about the script he had written,
and abandoned, as soon as he arrived in
Bollywood. “It had a Russian gangster, his
porn star girlfriend and the porn filmmaker
who falls in love with her. I thought I could
adapt it for India. I thought Mumbai would
be like New York but with more Indians.”
AFTER GRADUATING in Delhi, he and a
friend started an animation studio,
one of the first in the country. “We
were self-taught but did quite well. We made
logos fly,” Singh says with a straight face. At
27, he decided that he wanted to study design.
But later, on an impulse he decided to
go to film school. I was married, my wife was
pregnant and my father-in-law was very concerned.
But they say you only regret the
things you don’t do, not the things you do.
So we went.” Singh went to Pasadena, California
at the Art Centre School of Design, a
school as well-known for producing automobile
designers (including Dilip Chhabria) as
artists and filmmakers (Zack Snyder and
Tarsem Singh). For a decade he worked in
LA and in London, and returned to India to
make movies in 1999 at a time no one
would even admit to watching Hindi films.
After Satya and Hyderabad Blues many
were holding their breath wondering
whether alternative cinema had actually returned.
Singh came to Mumbai and was astonished,
like others before him, by its
insularity. “I got ad films almost immediately.
But Bollywood was suspicious and
unfriendly. All the great art movements
have come out of creative people sharing
their work, their preoccupations, and ideas.
But nobody here seems to get that.”
Today, at a time when criticising Bollywood
is almost treason, Singh radiates deep
dissatisfaction both with the industry and
the aspirational culture on which it sits. “I
hate living in cities cut off from any culture
other than Bollywood. “What I miss most
about living abroad are the
libraries and museums and
music. My children definitely
have less access to
culture or intellectual activity
than I did when I grew
up. Newer spaces like Gurgaon
are completely devoid
of anything even remotely
cultural. If we must import
from the West why not import
the best? I certainly
don’t miss McDonalds.
Why not be like China and
have great philharmonic
orchestras? Forget art, we
don’t even have pop-culture.
That’s why we have
movies like Dhoom. Where in India do we
have motorcycle gangs?”
Singh was an army brat, the resident of
many small towns and big cities. While
Lakhot inspired an uneasy loyalty in
Satyaveer, many viewers would have sympathised
with his wife’s desperation to leave.
Would you find serenity or claustrophobia
in Lakhot, you wonder while characters
stare into goldfish tanks. Singh insisted on
shooting Manorama on location horrified
at the idea of doing it on sets in Mumbai.
One of the scripts he is working on is set in
a travelling circus. His Andheri apartment
has the odd, hand-painted signs he collects
but he denies a fetish for small town life.
“Small towns just have more colour. Most
big cities look like each other.”
The absence of place in Bollywood annoys
him tremendously. “Movies are either in
New York or in Never-Never land. You look
at characters in a movie and you don’t know
who they are, where they are, where they are
from.” He compares it to regional cinema.
“Say you are watching a Tamil film. It has a
well-defined catchment area. So the location
of the characters, caste, class, everything is
very clear. The problem for Bollywood is
this. Who is its natural audience? Who
speaks Hindi? Nobody does. When I had
two minutes of Hindi as its spoken anywhere
in Rajasthan in Manorama. People complained
that it’s a dialect and that they couldn’t
understand it. So we have movies about
nowhere for people from nowhere.”
So why has he stayed put and not gone
back to LA or London? “Where else would I
get away with such mediocrity?” he responds,
leaving you to your quiet shock.
Having almost convinced you that pursuing
realism or even good cinema in Bollywood is
hopeless, he doubles back. Because, as he admits,
he keeps swinging between hope and
despair about Bollywood. “The cultural class
will start exerting their own tastes. So for a
long time no one watched Bollywood or
thought it was kitschy, cool fun. After a while
you get sick of kitschy, cool fun and you look
for meaning. And so we start making movies
we want to see. I hope.” The white heat and
shadows of Lakhot hides many private jokes
but Navdeep Singh’s amusement with the
world’s vagaries is far more obvious. •
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