Indian wisdom

All fish, flesh and fowl appeared at the 17th Alexandria Film Festival. Nor was that all. Mohamed El-Assyouti tracked down jury head Jaya Bachchan, and spoke with director François Gérard about bargain basement filmmaking
Indian wisdom
Actress Jaya Bachchan, wife of India's leading film star Amitabh Bachchan, headed the Alexandria Film Festival jury this year
As a child, Jaya Bachchan enjoyed children's films. Soon she graduated to William Wyler's Roman Holiday (1953), Cecil B DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) and J Lee Thompson's The Guns of Navarone (1961). Later still she became an avid fan of Bergman and Fellini.
She is one of few actresses who has consistently rejected female glamour, opting instead for the more credible image of "the girl next door." Since starring in Satyajit Ray's Mahanagar (The Big City 1963), she has come to be recognised as a rare champion of naturalistic performance on the Indian screen. She participates only in serious films, and boasts of collaborating with, among other high-brow Indian directors, Govind Nihlani and Karem Johar. Her next project is a film by Shaji Karun.
Jaya cherishes the work of other intellectually minded film-makers like Shyam Benagal, Adoor Gopalkrishnan, Rituparna Ghosh, Aditya Chuprr, Prya Darshan, J P Dutta and Aparna Sen. Occasionally, she might lose herself in a light-hearted fairy tale likePretty Woman, though she has never considered playing such a role herself. To her, cinema goes beyond entertainment. In India, she contends, the cinema has acted to highlight similarities and downplay differences among classes and ethnicities.
Out of over 800 films made in India every year, the greatest hits, she explains, are the 50 or so Hindi-speaking ones, Hindi being understood by 90 per cent of the linguistically diverse population. The more dialogue-based the drama, however, the less accessible it becomes, she believes.
More generally Indian cinema, Jaya explains, emphasises dancing and singing, two genres that remain universally understood, at some level. It is through reaching out across languages and cultures that the industry has contributed to abolishing the caste system, which survives only in small, remote and underdeveloped villages. India's Hindus, Christians, Muslims and Sikhs are tolerant of each other's beliefs, and the minorities have seldom complained about their representation in film, Jaya insists, though she refuses to comment on the representation of Pakistanis. "It's not nice to hurt other people. Besides, films on the Kashmir problem represent the point of view of their makers."
She is optimistic that, in time, differences will be forgotten and shared humanity recognised. She is impressed with the way in which stereotypes of different social classes, castes and religions have given birth to less stereotypical prototypes in Indian cinema. She is pleased, too, that in Indian films violence is far less of a draw for audiences than romance, song and dance, which fare well among the cinema's mostly 14-28 year- old audience members.
Jaya regrets the fact that old Indian films were more progressive in their characterisation of women than today's fare. They depicted single mothers, widows' love stories and abused women in a non- judgmental way. In most contemporary films, by contrast, female characters exist to sing, dance and chase men. Yet filmmakers have defiantly continued to tackle such issues. Recently, she participated in Khaled Mohamed's Fiza, which starred popular actors Hrithik Roshan and Karishma Kapoor and openly treated female issues. As a spectator she enjoyed seeing Zubeida and Lajja , both recent hits which also had dispossessed women as their main characters.
She regrets, too, the fact that the erosion of family values witnessed in Indian society is not reflected in contemporary films. Traditionally, she explains, Indian cinema's trademark theme was the importance of blood relationships among characters, the epic sweep of each film usually relying on a strong bond between two direct relations. And even though the tradition lives on, it fails to take account of real- life social developments.
Japanese and French corporations have recently acquired shares in Hollywood, and big American production companies are trying to move into Bollywood, too. Jaya sees this as an opportunity for the Indian film market in the UK, the US and the Middle East to grow. With up to 400 copies of individual films showing all over India, the local industry is unlikely to suffer. In some areas, indeed, screenings start half an hour apart to allow for the transportation of each reel from one theatre to the next, as they would both be screening the same copy.
As Jaya sees it, any intervention into Bollywood would not be effective. "Let them try to squeeze Brad Pitt into a Bollywood production," she challenges. "It would have no effect."
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