A truly global cinema

Bollywood is not the only film industry looking for inspirations elsewhere; 
Hollywood follows suit, writes Shakuntala Rao

OUR filmmakers have long been critiqued for adapting, copying and cloning movie scripts and ideas, mostly from Hollywood and European film factories. Has this been a fair criticism of Bollywood, one can ask, as film industries around the world globalise? As American films become more international, and international films become more American, the question of who’s emulating whom becomes moot.

A slew of films is about to hit American movie theatres which have found inspirations, and storylines, elsewhere. The most anticipated is the remake of a little Swedish flick Let the Right One In (Lat den ratte komma in), a dark and wistful love story about friendship between two lonely kids, who also happen to be vampires. The film ended up grossing more than $21 million in global box-office revenues, a first for a film from Sweden. End of 2010, Overture Films will release the English version, Let Me In, starring Hollywood ‘It’ kids of the moment, Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Road) and Chloe Mortez (The Amityville Horror). Also in the works are several remakes from originals in Chinese, French and Korean.

Recent reports have suggested that Indian director Sanjay Puran Singh Chauhan has been approached by an American film studio to remake his film, Lahore. This is part of a long history of cross-pollination of ideas among filmmakers.

Japanese director Akira Kurosawa paid homage to American Westerns with Seven Samurai, which John Sturges returned to American soil with the remake The Magnificent Seven. The French gangster film Le Samourai was heavily influenced by American gangster films of the 1940s, and in turn was remade by Hong Kong director John Woo, who was influenced by American director Quentin Tarantino. The remakes’ success depends on whether the translation adds something to the original, or if the filmmakers were simply borrowing because they were too lazy to come up with original premises on their own. There’s an appealing friction in Kurosawa’s idea of the iconomic American cowboy dressed in a kimono, wielding a sword; the appropriation deepens our understanding of the role of renegade peacekeeper across cultures. Put the samurai back in a pair of chaps, though, and the film might feel like a pale imitation of the original.

Both Hollywood and Bollywood filmmakers have to realise that the success of cloning an idea is to add something new to the mix; audiences tend to turn away if they sense that remakes are nothing but indicators of an industry’s creative bankruptcy. You can’t take an idea and apply it in a way that leads to muddled, navel-gazing snoozers as we have seen recently, both in Hollywood with remakes of The Invisible (based on the original Dutch version, Spoorloos) and The Invisible (based on the Swedish film, Den Osynlige) and in Bollywood with films like The Killer inspired by The Collateral and Main Aisa Hi Hoon by I am Sam.

Mumbai directors go even further. They adapt American and European movies with quiet, moody atmosphere and stomp the life out of them with Godzilla-like clumsiness. The most egregious example might be the remake of the Hollywood thriller Memento. In the original, the ending is horrifying, yet bloodless. In the Bollywood remake, Ghajini, starring the tattooed and buffed Aamir Khan, the villain becomes a local gunda, and the hero and his girlfriend wind up singing a few songs, robbing the viewers of any lingering sense of dread. The contrast in sensibility is often most stark in the way the action is resolved, or, in the case of American and European films, left unresolved. When Hollywood films never feel the need to wrap up their stories with a bow, Bollywood directors usually can’t help themselves from slapping a huge smiley face over the closing credits.

Hollywood, Bollywood and filmmakers around the world will continue to be mutually inspired but the key is to present something fresh, to have the audience reflect, interact with the story, draw their own conclusions, not just copy an idea, sit back and let the music tell you what to feel and the dialogue tell you what to think.

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