FILM DIRECTORS
Southern Invasion

A pack of savvy filmmakers from the south infuses style and professionalism into Bollywood cinema.

By Anupama Chopra

Movie 1: Sanjay Dutt and Urmila Matondkar, with gym-chiselled bodies and bottle-blonde hair, are running hard. Escaping from arch villain, psychopathic terrorist Pinki. They manage to dupe him and get a brief reprieve. What should we do now? asks the lady. Spoofing Bollywood's hallowed tradition of having characters break anywhere, anytime into song, the hero replies, "Chalo gana gate hain (Let's sing a song)." Cut to New Zealand -- sand, seas and song.

Movie 2: It's the standard Hindi movie climax. Anil Kapoor and Milind Gunaji, with battle axes raised, are charging ferociously at each other. Some long sweaty moments later, Gunaji's body hits the ground, decapitated. It's time for a typical happy ending. Except that there isn't any. The hero is hauled off to jail and the heroine, a pregnant Tabu, poignantly chases the receding train until it disappears.

Daud and Virasat are the face of Bollywood's new south cinema. A growing band of directors, grounded in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam films, are creating innovative, irreverent, painstakingly crafted Hindi movies. Regionally rooted and influenced by Hollywood, these directors are experimenting with both content and form. Commercially successful and critically hot, they are becoming marquee brand names. The south, once synonymous with gaudy, shoddy melodramas, today spells style.

This summer, master auteur Mani Ratnam, who till now had resolutely resisted the lure of Hindi movies, yielded. Tamil cinema's No. 1 director is currently making Dil Se, a contemporary love story "in the same genre as Roja and Bombay". Priyadarshan, an unabashed techie who put style into Malayalam cinema and resurrected Anil Kapoor's career with Virasat, has two major releases coming up; and under production are an Akshaye Khanna-starrer, a big-budget Dutt-Akshay Kumar entertainer starting in December and an Amitabh Bachchan film beginning in April. Ram Gopal Varma has switched seamlessly from the high-glamour Daud to a small-budget, gritty underworld saga, called Satya.

Still others are crafting their Hindi film debuts. Padam Kumar, a cameraman turned scriptwriter turned director, is at the helm of the Rs 20 crore Sunny Deol-Aishwarya Rai project, Indian. National award winner Ahathian, is reworking his Tamil hit Kadal Kottai in Hindi for producer Boney Kapoor. Malayalam director Thampy Kannamthanam, a David Dhawan-style commercial film director, is involved with assorted star projects. Rajiv Kumar has just put the finishing touches on Raja Ko Rani Se Pyar Ho Gaya. Sangeeth Sivan is making Zor with Sunny Deol, while younger brother Santosh is scripting an ambitious period saga on Ashoka the Great.

A heavy-duty presence of the south in Bollywood is not new. But the new south cinema is dramatically different from the moolah-raking but largely pedestrian stuff of the early '80s. The high-decibel emotions, grotesquely grandiose song sequences and cheesy art decoration have been eschewed for distinctive, stylised storytelling. Mani Ratnam, who began the new southern wave with his 1993 breakthrough film Roja, has married a contemporary theme to the commercial format. The all-India success of Roja and Bombay inspired a host of other regional directors to find a national voice.

This heavily Hollywoodised generation has created a vigorous cinema of visual nuances and exuberance. These directors from the south are almost single-handedly responsible for Bollywood's song-as-set piece trend. Musical interludes today are hugely expensive (a crore-plus set was created for a fantasy song in Indian) and highly stylised orchestrations. Their flashy form has forced Bollywood directors to brush up on technique. Says film academic Ashish Rajadhyaksha: "They are definitely more innovative than their Hindi movie counterparts."

For the directors, crossing over makes perfect sense. Bollywood is a bigger market with better budgets and, according to Varma, "offers a better crew". It's a chance to go global. "Just because I'm Tamil doesn't mean I should only talk to Tamilians," says Padam Kumar. "I'm a communicator, and the more people I can communicate with, the more successful I am."

But big cinema comes with big problems. Catering to an all-India market necessarily involves diluting edges. Mani Ratnam insists there are no compromises but others aren't too sure. Padam Kumar wants to make the villain in his Sunny Deol-starrer, Champion, gay but isn't sure whether a Hindi audience will buy it. "Sure there are compromises," says Santosh Sivan, "but one hopes they eventually help the film." Says Priyadarshan: "There are 26 cultures in 26 states. You have to think like an Indian and find universal themes."
Indeed, working in the cusp of two film industries offers them an opportunity to assimilate the best of both. And Bollywood's new market configurations support the south's more high-brow, stylised products. Thanks to high ticket rates, business is now concentrated in A-class cities rather than in smaller B and C class centres. Producer Boney Kapoor estimates that the city:interior ratio is now 60:40, a reversal of the 40:60 it was 10 years ago. Also, as much as 25 per cent of a film's budget can be covered by overseas sales. Both the city and overseas audiences are heavy patronisers of what Bollywood calls the 'class film'.

Directors from the south also have the added advantage of a superfast work ethic. Films are finished within a stipulated time frame -- shooting and reshooting is almost unheard of. Says distributor Shyam Shroff: "For me, the big advantage is that they work hard on a subject and finish on time. Today, with mounting production costs and shifting star values, this counts." It also helps actors. Says Anil Kapoor, who starred in Mani Ratnam's debut film, Pallavi Anupallavi: "They are more organised so everything is more focused."

Perhaps a little too focused. So much so that sometimes technique overshadows content. But Varma views it differently: "You can accuse us of not having a story but you can't accuse us of technical over-competence."

Meanwhile the south-north osmosis is creating some piquant situations. "All my Hindi is picked up from Hindi movies," says Mani Ratnam, laughing, "So I find myself in a situation where it's my story, my visuals but I can't read the script." That is a minor problem, however. As Ahathian puts it, "Cinema needs no language. Only feelings."

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