Bollywood has come a long way. All Indians are aware of that and after recently celebrating 100 years of hindi cinema, things just tend to get overwhelming as we look back to all the periods, phases and eras of this epic journey. However, one thing which is an inevitable part of this sojourn is following a specific style, a pattern, an algorithm. It’s always been about the trends in this world of glamour. That is probably one of the main reasons why we have divided them into such cliché sounding categories. Golden era was all about weeping women and their struggles with the world. Middle age cinema had various parts where actors adopted certain styles. We knew it was an action movie when we saw Amitabh Bacchan on the posters. Similarly Shahrukh Khan to romance, Govinda and Salman Khan to comedy, Sunny Deol to patriotic movies, each categorized into certain genres. Since then there have been so many other categories ranging from young love, childhood sweethearts, tragic endings to woman power and candy floss movies. But the thing that intrigues more is that when Bollywood is compared to world cinema, we follow a broader and generalized trend there too.
I had once asked a Korean friend of mine about her views of hindi cinema and she said that it has a lot of songs and dance and drama which makes it very extravagant and overwhelming because they don’t understand the songs and it also extends the movie unnecessarily. At first, her comment bugged me and I wanted to say something but later on, that actually made me think andwhen I put myself in her shoes and looked at it as an outsider, to actually made sense. Because, usually films are short, focusing mainly on the plot which brings out the acting skills of the cast. Yes it’s true that hindi films, a lot of times misses content and a proper story line due to which it becomes difficult for it to do well in the international market.
However, we often tend to forget how much this can prove to be advantageous to a film in general. Indian films have a lot of factors on which they can hit hard on the box office like songs, dance, rhythms, new faces, brand actors, famous directors and of course, the storyline. Therefore, even if one fails to reach the audience, the other overshadows the rest and it somehow manages to runs successfully. I know this might portray a very strategic image and it may seem that cimema is losing its true essence. But we often tend to forget that demand is everything these days and people go for a movie to have a good time and not decipher if it matches with the cinema technicalities. According to me, a good movie is something that reaches out to the people in whatever way that it can. It should be as simple as that.
– Anwesha Rath.
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