India’s flop show at Cannes

I am back in London after a week at the Cannes Film Festival. For the last 10 years the festival has seemed very much like a transplantation to the French Riviera of the Marriot Hotel, Juhu, Mumbai’s lobby and bar.

This time it was a little different. There were some of the usual suspects and certainly some had brought their film and ideas to sell, but the great Indian circus, a sort of Kumbh of Cannes, had thinned out. Even the Indian media circus seemed to have discovered that a party thrown in a hired villa by Indo-capitalist ‘A’ doesn’t mean that the Prince of Monaco’s position as premier host has been superseded. Or the fact that starlet ‘B’ is photographed for the Indian papers doesn’t mean she is in line for an Oscar. They are on holidays which they have paid for. The purpose for being at Cannes is to impress not the French, the Americans or the International press and audiences, but to boost the ‘share-price’ of the individual or company in the Indian vanity stock-market.

In the Indian pavilion — most countries pitch a tent by the sands on the Croisette, which is a bay half the size of our Mumbai Walkeshwar-to-Nariman Point ‘Back Bay’, at the south of Cannes on the Mediterranean — there were at least two discussions on why there were no Indian films at Cannes.

For years there have been no Indian entries. French selection juries don’t want to know. The speakers and audiences at these earnestly debated and naively confounded seminars thought it may be a case of not appreciating Indian culture. They thought it may be due to a lack of self-promotion. They thought it may be that the Indian government wasn’t pushing hard enough.

Indian films represent Indian culture as McDonald’s lamb-burgers represent Indian food. Indians promote themselves as hard as Lady Di used to and the Indian government pushing anything would make it roll backwards. No, the answer to why we don’t get picked is because our films are at best locked in a myth of nationalism and sublimated religion from which none escape and, at worst, trapped in crass imitations of Western plots, clothes, scenes, ill-conceived imitations and bad-taste pastiche. It amuses the Indian public and turns over the crores? Great! But what are Cannes juries after?

Taste and see. The Palm D’Or — the biggest prize — was won this year by Entre les Murs (The Class), a film made with real pupils and teachers and no actors, following them for a year and making narrative out of the life and activity of an inner-city French school. Can you see any Indian producer getting his or her head around such an idea? Would one get five seconds with anyone in Bollywood to outline it? Dream on. And move on.

The opening film of the Festival was called Blindness. It was an adaptation of Nobel laureate Jose Saramago’s novel in which humans, all but one character, lose their sight. This is not some sentimental tear-jerker or a test of the audience’s credulity. It is an allegory in the science-fiction-reality category, with chilling and subtle political overtones for our times. Bring on the item numbers with scantily clad gipsy dances choreographed in perennially imitative Travolta style to liven up the message? Er… perhaps not.

Then there was Linha de Passe, a film about four brothers in a Portuguese slum. It’s grim, real, moving and truly convincing. And no, one of them doesn’t become a cop and the other a playboy and they don’t all celebrate the triumph of the poor boy over the rich girl in the end.

Should one dare to mention Dance with Bashir, a devastating animated feature about the massacre at the Shabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon? The Palestinians, the victims, don’t win. Now how does one get a Shah Rukh into that one?

The author is a London-based scriptwriter