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Bollywood has its day
Startled to be compared by Mayor Philippe Augier to Queen Elizabeth and Yuri Gagarin, two previous guests of the French seaside city of Deauville, Amitabh Bachchan was doubly befuddled to be at the centre of a major retrospective at one of France’s most prestigious film festivals, the Deauville Festival of Asian Cinema. He admitted, “I’m happy to note that at last commercial Indian cinema will have its day in the sun, for it’s finally getting the art-house recognition it has always deserved.”
“You’re a world-class figure,” continued Mr Augier, at the start of a party hosted by a fashion house, “and if we’ve chosen to open our retrospective with Sholay, it’s because we’ve determined it’s by far the most-watched film in the world.”
Accepting the laudatory words, Bachchan, better known for his austerity and a dislike of hyperbole, went on to note that “you are not so much honouring me, you’re also paying homage to the kind of cinema I represent, the kind of films I make, which are escapist, commercial fare, usually looked down upon by critics and festivals.”
In the past, noted Augier, the Deauville Festival of Asian Cinema had honoured the films of India, but the honours went to the art-house brand of Hindi cinema, to such films as Fire and The Godmother.
“If anything,” he noted, “Deauville’s acceptance of Amitabh Bachchan’s films is not only unprecedented, it marks the arrival on the world film scene of the mainstream Hindi cinema and consecrates the importance of such actor-directors as Amitabh Bachchan, who is very much a film ‘auteur’ in his own right,” making reference to such great French directors as Francois Truffaut and Louis Malle, who were film visionaries in the sense that they controlled almost all aspects of the writing, directing, editing, and indeed the distribution of their films, “which is also,” he said, “what Amitabh Bachchan is more or less all about.”
Which is why, noted the festival’s co-director Alain Patel, the decision to honour Amitabh Bachchan and his films at Deauville will “inevitably” result in more commercial Indian cinema in general, making its way into French distribution circuits where until now they have largely been absent. “Indian cinema has never been sufficiently acknowledged in France,” he noted, “but now with Bachchan devoting so much time to the task, things will change.”
For indeed, much of the credit for the resurrection of Indian cinema in France has largely been attributable to Amitabh Bachchan himself. He’s a frequent visitor to Paris, a city he acknowledges appreciating for the very same reasons that the French capital has become the home-away-from-home for another internationally-known movie personality, Woody Allen.
And that reason, both men would certainly be the first to admit, is that Paris is a city where not only the world’s first commercial films were shown in 1895, but also a city whose film public has always been very eclectic in its tastes, with no automatic repulsion for any kind of cinema.
It was the French who made world famous not only Woody Allen, but also comic actor-director Jerry Lewis, who, like Bachchan more recently, was also accorded major retrospectives of his work.
There are always producers and distributors around willing to invest in unusual projects, the kind that usually receive the thumbs-down in a more traditional film capital like Hollywood, where a film’s value is always inextricably intertwined with its commercial value for a mainstream US audience. Which means that Hollywood has never been as daring as the much smaller French producers and distributors who are ready to set up a company on a shoestring budget, indeed on a whim.
And that seems to be what is happening these days in Paris with Amitabh Bachchan, whose full name will certainly become better known in the country’s film publications like Cahiers du Cinema, with ‘Amitabh Bachchan’ slated, in the coming years, to become as much a household name as it has become to multitudes of film-goers in Delhi, Chennai and Mumbai.
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