The Hindu Business Line : No home run

What's common between Deepa Mehta's Water, and Mira Nair's The Namesake? The obvious connect is of course that the two Indian filmmakers who've made the West their home, are now the country's foremost representatives (Shekhar Kapur seems to have vanished from the scene) in film communities abroad.

The other is that neither of their films, which released almost back to back in the past month, really cracked the home box office: The third part of Deepa's trilogy, after Fire and Earth, fared worse than Mira's adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's novel. Water did exceedingly well overseas, and got Western film critics waxing eloquent. The Namesake has also been getting rave reviews from the same fraternity, and is also all set to do well commercially in the West.

So what's the deal here? Are we, all of a sudden, more critical of our filmmakers who find success abroad? It isn't as if their (Deepa and Mira) other films haven't done well here: Monsoon Wedding's glorious run began right here, in Mira's own backyard — she still counts New Delhi as one of her homes, though she spends a large part of her time in New York.

Deepa's Fire was a box-office success, even if Earth didn't do as well, and over the last year, she has become almost as well known as her Indian counterpart, perhaps more in some circles, when Water was among the top five foreign films vying for an Oscar. It didn't win, but in the run-up, Deepa was all over newsprint and TV shows.

Exotic fare

A closer appraisal of the movies makes it clear why the movies have fared the way they have. It's much simpler to sell exotic India to audiences who have no idea what Indian cinema is all about. Those viewers who are completely clueless will gasp and shake their heads and say, oh really, is this what they did to their widows in Indiiiyah? Those others, who have only heard about the standard song-and-dance melodramas, will be impressed with these films that have no naach gaana, fabulous cinematography, and real people.

And even those who are a little more aware, both of our cinema as well as the films of the two women, will not know that the Sri Lankan terrain, where Water has been shot, is very different from a Benaras village on the Ganga. Or, even if they spot a coconut tree on the skyline, they wouldn't really care: India, Sri Lanka, what's the difference?

Back home too, audience expectations are different in different segments: ticket-paying viewers looking to be entertained are not interested in events that happened so many years ago. Widows are still treated worse than dirt, so what is Deepa doing which is so radical? We are uncomfortable when we are confronted by social inequities and plain inhuman injustice. Why would we want to watch the pain a little girl has to go through, when her old husband dies, and she is sent to the vidhwa- ashram to be exploited by the old woman who runs the place? No loud music, no maar-dhaar, no sex; kya yaar?

For shouting out...

The chief reason that makes Deepa's film a powerful watch — its devastating quietude, far more effective than a thousand thunderous dialogue — is not something which will appeal to the generalist. And she could have done with a better pair of lead actors (neither Lisa Ray, nor John Abraham look as if they belong to the 1930s, to pre-Independent India), even if the little Sri Lankan girl who plays Chuhiya is quite wonderful, as is Seema Biswas.

Mira's film's triumph, on the other hand, is her lead actors. Both Irrfan Khan and Tabu look as if they could have inhabited the Calcutta of the 1970s, as well as inhabiting their characters. Irrfan's Ashoke Ganguli is superb; he is pitch-perfect (very hard for non-Bengalis, or at least non-Bengali speakers to get all the inflections right, especially when they are speaking accented English).

Tabu falters once in a while, but she is actress enough to make us gloss over her little lapses. (Mira was in talks with Konkona Sen Sharma but she was already committed to her mother's 15, Park Avenue; there was also some conversation with Rani Mukherjee, but that didn't work out either).

They look like a couple, and we find ourselves being gentled into accompanying them in their journey in faraway America, which takes them from being newly-married in a New York walkway to being young parents in the suburbs, and then on to minding their children who are Indian because their parents are Indian, but American because they were born in America.

Gogol, Ashoke and Ashima's son, takes on the legacy that his father has left behind. As he begins to discover who he really is, he understands what his baba, now dead, meant when he named him Gogol, and called him by that name, even when his `school or proper' name was Nikhil. Kal Penn plays Gogol/Nikhil with such ease that you know he has passed the milestones his screen character has: Penn has been doing some good Indian-American roles for some time, but this is the real biggie.

Again, it is a quiet film, even if the quality of its silences is very different from Deepa's. And again, it hasn't had people flocking to it. It comes down to a class/mass thing. The Namesake is too refined for it to be a massy let's-all-go-to-the-movies affair.

Commercially, we still look to big tentpole movies, with the big stars, over-the-top storylines and situations, to pull off a big box-office score. And that's the biggest irony, because the really big stars are now looking to the moviemakers who can make different stories to get them out of the image trap.

Provoking Aishwarya

Take, for example, Aishwarya Rai's performance in last week's Provoked. The Jag Mundhra film is based on the real-life story of Kiranjit Ahluwalia who was charged with first-degree murder (of her husband; after ten years of constant abuse and use, she sets him alight as he is sleeping). The UK-based woman's story had created a major sensation, and started debates on domestic violence in one of the most so-called liberal societies. In the end, she was acquitted.

Aishwarya has never been so far away from her beauty-queen, I'm-on-the-ramp-even-when-I'm-acting stiff self. She doesn't dissolve her persona completely (amongst our leading ladies, only Tabu and Konkona have the ability to do, on their good days), but in bits and pieces, she brings the battered-but-brave Kiran to life.

Let's wait and see how it fares from today onwards.