Mani Ratnam’s ‘Raavan’ is a modern reinterpretation of the ‘Ramayana.’ Ravana is a forest-dwelling Naxalite. Rama is a top cop, Sita his wife. In a fit of inspired casting, Govinda’s Hanuman is a mischievous, drunkard forest guard.

There’s a great scene with intense art direction where Sita earns Ravana’s respect by jumping off a waterfall ‘Fugitive’-style rather than letting him shoot her.

The story flips two big things about the North Indian ‘Ramayana.’ One, Rama is an asshole far beyond the sexist trial by fire, and Ravana is the noble one. Fine, Tamilians and Sri Lankans would and do believe this :) (Hanuman doesn’t burn Lanka here, and the demoness whose nose was cut off is turned into an innocent bride in the movie).

But two, Sita is inexplicably emotionally unfaithful to Rama, falling for Ravana in a sort of Stockholm syndrome and choosing to stay with him. This annoyed me to no end, as Sita is a deep cultural archetype of loyalty.

The weird thing is, Ratnam’s trying to fight sexism with sexism. His Aishwarya-Sita is fairly weak and weepy, he’s bending to the Hindi film market. And Ratnam’s audacious in doing a Hindi version — there are three in different languages — which flips the North Indian myth using two leading Bolly actors. Apparently audiences stayed away this weekend partly over this reversal.

I remember Ratnam being a better filmmaker than this, but he’s fallen to endless 360-degree shots around characters Indian serial-style, and explication for idiots. Lots of howling at the wind, bad depiction of mental illness and such. Supposedly the Tamil version is better. And let’s not talk about Ham, son of Ham. The last flick Abhishek was tolerable in was ‘Guru.’

The Sita twist felt like finding out a childhood confidante was a crack ho. It made me sad, even though both versions are just stories. Still knocks me for a loop when I think about it.

I’m waiting for the ‘Sin City Ramayana’ where Rama swears and Lakshman packs heat :)

The other key element was to… give each spice its own Indian instrument so you could know when they were calling out to Tilo. The chillies warn her with a tabla. Chandan, kala jeera, tulsi, hing and cinnamon each have their own sounds.

I’ll bet that what the spices are telling Tilo is, ‘Stop exoticizing us, wench!’ Spice-tabla-Chocolat-sex: Tilo Does Oakland.

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At this year’s Academy Awards, there was no Indian film among the wide array of contenders vying for the “Best Foreign Film” prize. Why?… none of them was Indian enough… Indian movies have to uphold some kind of traditional South Asian essence and meet some ill-defined standard of cultural “authenticity”…

Got that? Ancient tale of emperors, chariots and bows and arrows, good (Asoka, Hero). Tale of modern India (Dil Chahta Hai, Everybody Says I’m Fine), bad.

[W]esterners, now in the form of art-house filmgoers, expect the increasingly sophisticated and eminently modern filmmaking techniques and sensibilities (of Indians, Arabs, Africans, East Asians, etc. to ultimately convey subject matter that fulfills certain still-pervasive Orientalist fantasies of an imagined, exotic, and premodern Other.

The preference for the ancient was also true at UC Berkeley, where in the South Asia department you couldn’t spit without hitting an expert in Freudian interpretation of mythology, but where there were no classes available on modern India. And it’s been true for ages in literature, where there’s been little mass market to date for novels about second-gen desi subjects. Second-gen writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Monica Ali have largely been re-telling their parents’ tales. It’s interesting as a topic but repetitive as an entire oeuvre, made even worse by book covers which all feature nubile brown women with mehndi hands and first-gen authors who willingly swan with incense and sarod music at book readings.

In contrast, one of the great freedoms of the UK market is the ability to tell a second-gen tale and have it sell; Meera Syal, though better known for Bombay Dreams, wrote an excellent, chatty second-gen novel called Life Is Not All Ha Ha Hee Hee. Of course, the first thing successful British Asians want to do is branch out into the 10x larger U.S. market. There’s plenty of precedent in second-gen works by Asian-Americans, more Better Luck Tomorrow than The Joy Luck Club, more Lowbright than Ming the Merciless, but they’ve not been mass market.

The exoticism line is porous, of course, and desis draw from their culture’s most intense palettes regularly. Peacocks and payals are gorgeous when judiciously applied, and any desi could be forgiven for admiring a royal, nose-ringed nariz evocative of Mughal miniature. It gets annoying mainly when lit and film treats culture as a tourist backdrop, a Potemkin village with the thinnest faciæ of stereotype, when desi actors are told their look is not ‘Indian enough,’ when directors ask for the Peter Sellers / Gunga Din caricature of a desi accent rather than the real one, like Apu on The Simpsons and the dad’s accent in Harold and Kumar. That’s just insulting.

The great irony is that the most ‘authentic’ desis, those raised in India, are often bored with their own palettes and lack of cultural diversity. They’re simultaneously impervious to charges of selling out and, with the cosmopolitan ones, more interested in outmarrying than desis raised in the U.S. It’s the grass-is-greener effect: in London, you can sell burgers as Authentically American! while in the U.S., wine proclaims itself D.O. status. (Granted that nobody sells Tasty English food! per se.)

Can’t we all just get along? Can’t we all just agree to consign mehndi to weddings, mangos to dinner plates and the words exotic and spicy to the seventh circle of hell?

I support fledgling filmmakers and all, but the novelty has long since worn off, and I’m aching to see a smart, original film in this genre. Something like Srinivas Krishna’s Masala, but less misanthropic, more polished. A film where arranged marriage, bad desi accents, visa jokes and variations on ABCDs/desi/spices in the title are absolutely verboten. Something with a dark emotional palette, Talvin rather than the mathlete rap, Buddha Bar rather than Gerrard Street; the soft-edged precision of a ta note ringing in darkness, a teental jam in a wine-filtered room; a layered flirtation, slowly undone.

Filmmaker, seduce me. I’m waiting for the desi Almodóvar.

The print I saw had subtitles, and it was literately subtitled, someone poetic had done them — they translated the humor, not transliterated. It was the first Hindi film to premiere at Cannes. It’s the most expensive Hindi flick to date, $13M, or in purchasing power, the equivalent of a $40M period piece in the U.S. It was operatic in parts, epic in parts — a childhood to death theme, like Gladiator. The director flirted with the audience, holding back Aish’s face for several minutes, showing her from behind only, and when he first splashed her upon the screen in extreme closeup it was like your first, breath-impeding glimpse of Marlene Dietrich, her moon-like face overpowering the screen, not color, not black and white, but delicately tinted rose. The story is from a turn of the century Bengali novel, the music classically inspired, as in ‘Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam.’ It wanted badly to be a big film, and it was.

You know the feeling when an auteur bursts in, the electricity of recognizing a work of love, the excitement of a beautiful new relationship? Sanjay Leela Bhansali is in his own league cinematically. Like Spielberg/Lucas, he’s mostly visual, the dialogue is poetic and the plots run of the mill Bollywood; there are false moments like the opening scene, there’s little romantic chemistry between the leads. The villains are cardboard and vaudeville, the music turns ominous, the man twirls a bushy mustache, the shrew flashes jealous eyes. But the pacing is taut and the visuals unbeatable.

Aishwarya is only aesthetic to me, the plastic beauty queen; but I fell in love for three hours in HDDCS, he wrung unexpected pathos from her marble eyes, and there are still scenes from that film (the subtle flirtation in ‘Aankhon Ki Gustakhiyan’) that are touchstones for me. The film ended with an instant, none-too-modest ‘A SANJAY LEELA BHANSALI FILM,’ and he never has hooked up with that musical wizard, A.R. Rahman, who tends to inhabit his commissions; but you forgive him the conceit, it hardly is.

And, of course, the themes… a childhood love; the purity of sheltering someone within you; being driven to drink by an unworkable, self-destructive romantic obsession; finding your second love, healthier but pale in comparison; leaving your family, leaving all bridges in flames. Material enough to find yourself in the story, it’s the everyman tragedy in high relief.

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