A Hindi Film Wins An Oscar

Among all the films that were up for the Best Picture Oscar this year,perhaps none had been as critically acclaimed as Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.It was a foregone conclusion that it would win the Best Foreign Film Oscar, andthe only question was whether it would repeat Life Is Beautiful’s feat and getthe Big One too. Well, it did not, but it did very creditably, winning threestatuettes in addition to the Best Foreign Film one.

I watched CTHD in Delhi some hours before theOscar ceremonies kicked off in Los Angeles. And this is what I felt when thefilm ended: It’s a Hindi film. (Before you start chucking the rotten tomatoes,let me get in 30 words of clarification. I love Hindi films as much as I doHollywood ones. And when I say Hindi films, I mean a particular sensibility, thefilm could very well be in Tamil or English) And, other than the superbtechnological finesse, CTHD is not a particularly great Hindi filmeither: a good one, but not great. After all, no Hindi film allows its pace toflag between the action scenes so characters can make vague Kahlil Gibran-ishphilosophical statements.

Butin most aspects, CTHD follows the grand Hindi film tradition. Forinstance, cheerful disdain for plot logic. Like the usual Hindi film, CTHDabounds with scenes where characters appear at the right place at the right timewhen they had no way of knowing the address. In a flashback, the girl Jen chasesa desert bandit and has a long fight with him, which the bandit wins. Yet Jenhas been learning the mysterious Wu Dan martial arts from Jade Fox since she was10. So how come she, well-versed (even if not as adept as she is now) in Wu Dan,gets beaten up by a mere bandit? Or does her Wu Dan work only when she has wallsto jump over and bamboo forests to float in? Then again, when Chow Yun Fat getsthe poison dart in his neck, Jen knows the antidote and has to get theingredients and prepare it as fast as possible. But instead of flying, walkingon water and jumping over four-story houses (all of which she can do at will),she runs like a mere mortal and comes back riding a horse. All Hindi filmbuffs will instantly recognise this sort of convenient amnesia that leads todesired emotional climaxes.

And,judging from the ecstatic US reviews of CTHD ("High art meets highspirits in a rapturously romantic epic that really kicks butt" (RichardCorliss, Time); "A waking dream of truly operatic dimensions" (film.com)),one gets the sense that Western critics, who would have villified a Brian dePalma film if such things happened there, think: hey, man, this is like themystical Orient, man, this is about guys who are like deep into zen and nirvanaand satori, it's post-modern ethno-transcendental uber-truths of the awakenedmind.

Intruth, it is simply the Asian story-telling tradition which has peaked in Hindiand Tamil and Hong Kong martial arts films, where the rules are exhilaratinglysimple: let’s not quibble about plot details and continuity as long as you canhave a string of exciting scenes where people declaim enthusiastically againstone another (in Hindi films, this is called "dialaag") or beating oneanother to an inch of their lives. Manmohan Desai, that most unabashed of dreammerchants, once said that his films are fundamentally a collection of "itemscenes", set pieces which people come again and again to watch. In the sameway, CTHD is a series of stunning action sequences stuck together withmakeshift logic and a thin and awkward story line.

WhatCTHD has, which Indian films don't have, is access to the latesttechnology, which only Hollywood can provide. People flying, and jumping up fourstories? Gimme a break, heroes in Hindi and Tamil films have been doing this fordecades, it's just that we don't have the technology (and the money) to make itlook so dazzling, both life-like and out-of-this-world simultaneously.

WhenAng Lee makes his heroes and heroines defy gravity and fight each other inmid-air, the Western audience (and the westernised Indian) thinks this is someheavy-duty magical intellectualism: in other words, ART. Any Hindi film buff cantell those critics in Sight and Sound and salon.com that it's no such thing: thedirector makes his characters fly because he has no respect for reality, becausehe wants to create a grand fantasy for his audience. I remember Manmohan Desaisaying once: What's film got to do with reality? I tell my script writers: havemen on horseback chasing one another on roofs of skyscrapers, who gives a damnhow they got there?

ThisWestern response to commercial films made by Asian directors is nothing new.John Woo, who spent years making Hong Kong martial arts films with flying heroesand revolvers with inexhaustible bullets, is currently making them on a biggerand technologically more advanced scale in Hollywood and Western criticsconstantly call him "the master" etc (Anyone who has seen and enjoyedWoo’s Travolta-Cage starrer Face/Off with its preposterous Hindi film plot,should never say a word about the implausibility of a Rakesh Roshan film.). In Elizabeth,Shekhar Kapur unabashedly made a Hindi film, with crescendos every five minutes,zero regard for facts, and overwrought photography and editing. And the Westerncritic thought it was pushing the envelope of the possible (or some such stuff).

Someyears ago, David Lynch’s Wild At Heart won the Golden Palm at Cannes.Amazing but true: it is a B-grade Hindi film, including the hero and heroinehaving a theme song for their love (Elvis’ Love Me Tender), and whenNicholas Cage comes back from prison, and gets beaten up, he crawls and staggerstowards the heroine's house singing this song, and the heroine respondsand they go into a tearful warbling clinch, end of film. Any Hindi film buffwould have laughed David Lynch off the screen: he can't even make a good Hindifilm (which Woo and Lee and Kapur undoubtedly can, and do). And the man gets theGolden Palm because the over-intellectual jury can’t cope with a differentmode of story-telling.

ImagineSubhash Ghai or Mani Rathnam with the money and technology that the Hollywoodsystem offers. Imagine Deewaar starring Russell Crowe and Brad Pitt, withevery sequence done with all the expertise that Hollywood has on call. For theCartesian Western audiences, deprived of the high melodrama that Hollywood filmsdished out in the 1930s and 40s (Grand Hotel, Gone With The Wind),it’ll be like the opening up of a whole new fantastical world! We have thesigns everywhere, the rapturous applause that greets a screening of Dil Seat the Berlin Film Festival, Time magazine going ga-ga over Iruvar,Aditya Chopra films running to packed houses in New Jersey, and now, thecritical and popular success of Crouching Tiger in the USA. By the way, CrouchingTiger was not even among the top five grossers last year in Hong Kong, wheregreat Hindi films are made all the time in Mandarin.

Forthe Hong Kong audience, it was just another film. For Kenneth Turan of LosAngeles Times, "with its gift for showing things that can't be described,Crouching Tiger's blend of the magical, the mythical and the romantic fills aneed in us we might not even realise we had." He needs to see Amar AkbarAnthony.