Bollywood in Bangkok

Amitabh Bachchan is in Bangkok ahead of next month's International Indian Film Academy Weekend

KONG RITHDEE

Then entered the man himself - 66, black-haired, white-bearded, 190cm, in heavily-tinted glasses, leaner and more handsome than Al Pacino, to whom he is sometimes compared - and the ease and eloquence with which Bachchan handled the brief interview confirmed that he's not a deity, but a courteous, intelligent man. The immortality of his stardom is guaranteed, but what is most striking about Bachchan is his mortal elegance. He's serious without being rigid, formal but never aloof. He's aware of all those adjectives people arbitrarily attach to his name, and he both acknowledges and ignores them. In short, he is better than a god. He's a pro.

"It's been 40 years for me in this business, and it's been very eventful," Bachchan said of his acting career, which took-off in the late 1960s.

"The road has been bumpy, but I've also been on smooth highways. That's part of life. You need to go up and come down and then find the way to get back up again."

Bachchan was in town as an ambassador for the International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) and the IIFA Weekend, which runs in Bangkok from June 6 to 8 - a combination of Indian cinema showcase, fashion show, business forum and awards ceremony that promises a galaxy of Bollywood superstars. IIFA has previously been held in London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Johannesberg, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.

On June 6, at Paragon Cineplex, Bachchan will be at the world premiere of his new movie, Sarkar Raj, a political thriller that also stars his son Abishek Bachchan and his daughter-in-law, Aishwarya Rai.

"We want to take Indian cinema to as many places as possible," said Bachchan. "Thailand and India have shared a long history of cultures. There are also many Indians who live here, and since you enjoy our cinema, an event like this is an opportunity to find a bridge."

The bridge, it seems, has always been here. Take a walk into the alleys of Bangkok's Phahurat and you'll still find fresh, as well as faded, posters for Hindi movies with Bachchan's stern face splashed across them.

He appeared in his first film in 1969, and has hardly stopped. His tally is around 180 movies and counting. And despite the fact that his name hardly rings a bell with young Thai movie-goers breast-fed on a Hollywood diet, most Thais in their mid-thirties grew up watching vibrant Bollywood movies starring Bachchan, Shashid Kapur, Rajesh Khanna and Hema Malini. It is fair to say that Bollywood cinema - a term that refers only to Hindi-language films, though India also produces films in other regional languages, like Telugu and Tamil - was once mainstream popular culture here, before shifting tastes and the growing dominance of Hollywood pushed it into the niche of sub-cultural curiosity.

But if there's a lesson we can learn from our limited exposure to Indian movies, it's the fact that Indian stars have to work much harder than their counterparts in other parts of the world. In the cosmology of Indian cinema, Bachchan and his peers have to act, sing, dance, play good guys, baddies, the cool and the clowns. They tackle everything from action to comedy, from drama to melodrama, from Western to thriller.

"Initially, I think Indian cinema was looked upon as being of a low standard," said Bachchan. "I'm sure there's still a certain portion of audiences in the West that still do. A lot of people have not been able to reconcile themselves to the fact that there's a lot of song and dance in all our films. But music is an important ingredient in the life of an Indian, and it's reflected in our cinema. And Indian cinema has never really moved away from the song and dance routines. It's a celebration of life and it's a part of nature.

"What I'm happy about and very proud of is that despite all the criticism from the West of the nature of our films, we have not succumbed to it. We still have the song and dance - and let me tell you," he shifts his voice down a tone, "that is now what's being recognised as unique, even in the West."

By sticking to the roots of its artistic expression, Indian cinema has entrenched itself as a parallel universe that operates as part of the everyday consciousness of the domestic mass. Bachchan believes, however, that as a society evolves, the cinema that serves it has to evolve, too. Bollywood makes over 800 movies a year, and they're consumed with a passion by the urban middle-classes as well as the rural populace that still makes up the majority of the country. Hollywood cannot penetrate India as effectively as it has in most territories, but Bachchan stresses that it is the pride and responsibility of Indian film-makers to be aware of the competition and to continue loyally serving its own audience.

"India is referred to as a developing nation, a Third World nation," said the actor. "That's fine, so we're developing. We have been ruled by different people for a thousand years, but we're independent now and if we want to catch up with the rest of the world we cannot develop according to a natural progression. We have to make a quantum jump - we have to leap-frog - otherwise we'll get left behind. When we leap-frog, there will be a vacuum, I think what we're doing now is trying to contend with the vacuum but at the same time to be responsible for making progress to catch up with the developed nations.

"When the average Indian is exposed to television - to what's going on in the world - they naturally want to see their own culture in the same light. Why would they go to see an Indian film if it can't match what's coming out of Hollywood? They want the same kind of quality. That's important, and that's why the quality of Indian cinema has improved over the years."

Last February, the Berlin International Film Festival screened Om Shanti Om, a time-warping Bollywood film starring Shahrukh Khan and Deepika Padukone (both of whom are expected to show up for the IIFA Weekend), and the selection of that film showed a level of recognition for contemporary Indian cinema. Meanwhile, the trailer of Sarkar Raj plays like a slick Hollywood thriller, with characters in dark suits brooding in shadows as political and religious forces hum with menace outside their windows.

Bachchan admits that the changing sensibilities of young people, especially the speed at which things are done, have affected the way a movie expresses itself today. What would have been described in a thick paragraph of dialogue in a 1970s Indian film - or worse, as in the Bhagavad Gita, when Orachun aimed his crossbow at the enemy but spent the entire length of the book listening to Krishna's lecture before actually releasing the arrow - could be said in just two words in today's movie, for example "That's cool," or "That's bad."

Still there's such an amazing "eloquence of brevity" in those sentences, the actor said, and in the spirit of a professional who refuses to get hung up over his own "legend", Bachchan tries to recognise the essence of the past as well as the future of Indian cinema.

"I've had the good fortune of working through a wonderful four decades of cinema," he said. "Sometimes I miss the fluidity and the poetry of old Indian films, but at the same time I'm engrossed by the rapidity and speed of modern films."

Then he recalled an incident years ago, when he was sightseeing around the Sacre'-Coeur Basilica in Montmarte, Paris, when a stranger started singing a song from one of his popular films to attract his attention. "I turned to look. The man didn't look like an Indian, and he didn't look French either," said Bachchan. "He was from Africa, and at that moment, I realised that Indian cinema has the power to reach out to people, to go beyond India."

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