A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers report reckoned that India’s media and entertainment industry will be worth $22.5 billion by 2011. Thus Indian audiences were treated to more movies from Hollywood than ever before. What they never got a chance to see were a slew of not so well-known movies that people watched, discussed, hated or loved all over the world but which did not necessarily make it to the top of the revenue charts.

Many of the best completely passed India by. Less than 90 foreign films were released in 2007 in this country as compared to 421 movies released in the US last year. Moreover, many of the India releases were in fact 2006 movies that had finally wound their way to Indian halls. Worse, many of the films had bombed at box offices worldwide. A number of great films were deliberately left out. Pity is many Indians have just not had the chance to experience the other great world of cinema outside the chartbuster dimension. And we are not talking about the world of exclusive art-house or experimental films.

For instance, we never got to see the Coen Brothers’ crowning glory — one that is supposed to bag a slew of awards this year — No Country for Old Men. This is said to be a gritty, knuckle-clutching movie about a man who discovers a stash of money, heroin and dead bodies, and thereby stumbles into a nightmarish series of events.

The Coen Brothers — Joel and Ethan — belong to the other side of American cinema that we rarely get to see. The brothers have written, produced and directed a number of tremendous movies chronicling the life and times of Americans. The Big Lebowski, a film about a long-haired, laidback, feckless but quintessentially good guy American who is more concerned about his carpet than the tumult around him, is one of the movies that defined American cinema in the 1990s. That was typically Coen Brothers. They, along with a handful of other directors, have created legendary American characters including the exasperating but ultimately endearing cool “dude” in The Big Lebowski.

The Coen Brothers have been around for many years now, debuting with their 1984 smashing thriller called Blood Simple. Since then they have made a number of films (Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, etc.) which stand out because of their amazing characterisation.

Inland Empire, released in the US in 2006 and in other parts of the world, including Iran, in 2007, never made it to India. Shot on a Sony handycam, the film has been acclaimed as one of the best works of the legendary David Lynch, many of whose movies are about the workings of the mind and the surreal world of Hollywood. These would include Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001). Lynch has made classics like The Straight Story (1999), an incredibly simple but awesome movie about an old man who chooses to drive across the country in an old lawnmower, and Wild at Heart (1999), which is about this seemingly un-reformable bad character and a woman who cannot help loving him.

Jim Jarmusch is another American director who comes to mind. He too has tossed up new ideas and visions with movies such as Stranger than Paradise (1984), Dead Man (1995), Coffee & Cigarettes (2003) and Broken Flowers (2005). Directors like these never seem to make it to Indian screens.

Also, very much part of mainstream American cinema are directors like the 83-year-old Sidney Lumet, of Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico fame, who released a masterpiece last year titled Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead starring Philip Seymour Hoffman (who stars in Capote) and Ethan Hawke. The movie is about two brothers who believe they can start afresh by robbing their father’s jewellery store. For Beatles fans, I am told, there is a wonderful film called Across the Universe by Julie Taymor; then there is La Vie en Rose, a 2006 French release about the legendary Parisian singer known as the “Little Sparrow”.

The other movies on my wish-list include the supposedly classy film Eastern Empire, directed by the Hollywood veteran David Cronenberg, who had made the History of Violence (2005). Eastern Empire is said to be a hypnotic film about a London organised crime family. There were also a number of European movies released by the big studios. One that has received much acclaim is British filmmaker Joe Wright’s Atonement, a story about how a lie told by a 13-year-old devastates the love of two people.

There are a whole bunch of other films we never got to see that have kept the critics gushing in the West. One film I did manage to view was the outstanding Lives of Others, a 2006 German production by debutante filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, which saw worldwide release only last year. This movie, which is destined to take its place among the all-time classics, is about a secret policeman during the communist era who is ordered to keep tabs on a playwright suspected of being a traitor. Things do not go according to plans only because the man ordered to do the surveillance has his own ideas about morality. The haunting story shows how profoundly even the smallest cog in a system matters.

To be fair, the Hollywood distributors are bringing more and more good films into India. Thanks to Hollywood’s new attention, we got to see the latest works of the much acclaimed Hollywood whiz-kid Christopher Nolan (age 37). His film, The Prestige (a 2006 production), made it to Indian theatres last year. Nolan of course is pretty mainstream having directed classics such as Batman Begins (2005) and Memento (2000), among others.

Babel was the other big movie — the latest work of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (age 44), who was born in Mexico City, earned acclaim there with his very first film Amores perros (2000) and moved to Hollywood where he made the powerful 21 Grams (2003), a movie about a heart transplant patient who tracks down the widow of his heart donor. These are powerful filmmakers with very distinctive styles. Inarritu has made his technique of disjointed scenes gradually coalescing into a meaningful plot something of an art form.

One huge problem in India is the relatively small number of exhibitors ready to show foreign films. In Delhi, a city of 12 million-plus, there are less than 10 movie complexes or halls that screen foreign films. The situation is not better in most other cities. Not surprisingly, many of the 80-odd Hollywood releases aimed at India would have had a tough time finding a slot. Moreover, many of the better films get the “Arty” label and are bumped off from halls in at best a week. For instance, je t’aime Paris (2006), a collage of short films on that city, made a brief (seven day) appearance in one Delhi hall and vanished before one could get around to seeing it.

Is limited auditoriums the reason why Hollywood distributors cannot bring some of the better films to India? At first thought this might seem true but it is not. If this was indeed the case, then distributors should be bringing in only their top revenue-earners or the A-graders with the most potential. But fact is every major distributor, from Sony pictures to United Artistes, brings in a mix of A-grade movies along with certified B-grade disasters. This is marketing basics — you mix your product offering. Marketing types are saddled with maximising revenues for a range of products, from the very bad stuff to the really good.

Thus exhibitors like PVR cinemas and Adlabs would get a mix of movies they must accept. One Spider Man 3 with three other egregious B-graders, and so on. It’s all about balancing the books.

Sadly, cinema is part product, part art. New beginnings, new ideas and a wholly different way of portraying realities constitute the artistic part. Unfortunately, movie marketing decrees that there are movies that make money and those that do not. Indian cinema watchers deserve better. The movie-going public in India, as in the West, is not one heterogeneous block but a group with different tastes and needs. Clearly, what is required is a different business model for foreign film exhibition in this country. The solution might lie not so much in cinema super-marts, but perhaps in specialist exhibitors, who would negotiate a better choice of movies, much like specialist booksellers and wine stores.

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