‘RRR’ strikes a chord with global audiences

THE time to juxtapose the various regional film industries with those in South India has come.

Especially when South Indian films not only feed into the Hindi film industry through remakes or dubbed films, but when Hollywood film-makers are acknowledging their importance.

RRR and its song, Naatu Naatu, have struck a chord with foreign audiences and with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars.

I wish there was a category for choreography as well at the Oscars, for, I think, that has created the magic that

Naatu Naatu has become known for.

We had Richard Attenborough’s

Gandhi and, later, Danny Boyle’s

Slumdog Millionaire, both of which made it big at the Oscars.

We were thrilled about it. But they were not the products of any of the Indian film industries. They merely had India-related stories.

Quite a few other film-makers tried for nominations at the Oscars.

The earlier one was Mehboob Khan’s

Mother India. They probably did not identify with a woman refusing to compromise herself, even while her kids were starving.

It was the post-World War II era and there were stories about women known to compromise for as little as a pack of cigarettes.

The film RRR and its music, especially Naatu Naatu, and the way it is choreographed, caught the fancy of people all over the world. The song became a new anthem for dance lovers.

Hollywood dance-based musicals with the likes of Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Gene Kelly, and later films such as Sound Of Music, Fiddler On The Roof, Cabaret, Grease, Saturday Night Fever and Chicago are rare now.

Naatu Naatu probably reminded dance lovers of the Fred Astaire days. This one was a kind of a tap dance at a fast pace with much more energy.

So, if the regional films from the South – in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam – have sustained over the decades and, at many times, their themes are also loved by the audience when remade or dubbed in Hindi, why have the other regional language films not been able to penetrate the audience in other regions?

Take for example, Punjabi films. Earlier, the few Punjabi films that were produced from time to time were made by mostly regular Hindi film-makers.

Now the scene is totally different. Many producers have made Hindi films with a heavy leaning towards the usage of Punjabi dialogue and Punjabi music, but they don’t make films especially for the Punjabi-speaking audience.

The Gujarati film industry always belonged, save for a rare few, to the non-Gujarati film-makers from Mumbai.

With the new generation and technical advances, Gujarati films are in the process of reviving. Some new investors were roped in. So far so good, but the roping in of a backer has now turned into a racket.

The nouveau riche and glamour struck are shown rosy pictures all the way until a film’s release.

Once a film is complete, a fivescreen premiere is organised in Mumbai, instead of Ahmedabad, followed by a party.

The Bhojpuri film industry has a somewhat similar story as Gujarati and Punjabi films.

The backers of these films are mostly prospect hunters.

There came a phase when the Hindi films that Mumbai produced were beyond the comprehension of the audience in other states.

There was a time when the Hindi film-makers tried to imitate the Western culture and even took to shooting their films abroad.

Then there are Bengali films. They have their own audience and rarely, if ever, go beyond the state.

Yes, there was a time when many Bengali producers and actors were active in Mumbai, and often re-made Bengali films in Hindi.

The major drawbacks with these regional films is that they have no or limited market outside of their own state.

The other factor is that people in these states understand and follow Hindi films as much as their own regional films.

As such, they end up competing with Hindi films.

In the South, the exploitation of movie goers is controlled as there is a restriction on admission rates charged.

In other regions, they pay as much as they would for Hindi mainstream films.

The main reason is that when one regional film works, the scene gets crowded and production activities mushroom suddenly leading to oversupply much beyond demand. |