True Romantics from Bollywood

October 31st, 2007 by admin

If you are looking for the old fashioned romantic movies or musicals you should look for Indian film industry (also others than Hindustani films, for instance Tamil and Telugu).  It makes several (thousands) of these every year. Yet the biggest and best known section of this industry is Bollywood film-city in the wings of Mumbai(formerly Bombay), where the most of the Hindustani films are made. Typically Bollywood film posters use Roman alphabets (so called Roman Urdu), because all the audience (also from Middle-East etc.) does not have command in Devanagari script.

The heroines are beautiful and the heroes handsome. There are catchy hit-songs to dance with and the stories are old-fashionably sweet. And if you don't like hot sex, they may please you as it is quite chaste genre. Yet for one used to the western freedom, it may be also disappointing, as there is hardly even kissing scenes, although the dances may be quite provocative. The stories are often inspired by the rich Indian mythology, which is less familiar to the western audience.

The key part of this film genre are music (Filmi) and dance scenes that appear more or less often. They maybe situated in totally different enviroment and be dreamlike, happening in the magical world of lovers. So called "item numbers", cathy songs performed provacitively by sexy actresses, are ofthen even more loosely connected whit the film.

There are special film music musician that perform the pieces and usually actors and actresses just do lip-sync. That is why the singers voice maybe quite different from talking voice. Dance is usually in Bollywood style mixing classical Indian and popular (western) dance genres and creating its own particular and unique form.

This world of cinema has its own stars, at the moment most well known is Shah Rukh Khan, who has been the "King of Bollywood" for a while, the old master being Amitabh Bachchan (since 1969, in 12 films year 2007). The Female stars are more varied including couple of former miss India's, especially Aishwarya Rai (future daughter in law of A. Bachchan), who was the female star in last decades biggest historical tragedy Devdas(2002) with Mr. Khan of course. The film was India's nominee that year for the Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Foreign Language Film.

My own favourite is talented comedic actress Rani Mukerji, who  has also been seen in more dramatic roles. Yet it is much more difficult to name one big star as there are for examble Kareena Kapoor, Preity Zinta, Kajol... (Since 1999 all best actresses of the Filmfare (Indian Movie Awards) have gone to these five).

Bollywood is very fond of remakes, for example the massive and expensive version of Devdas was third on according the same book. 2006 huge hit action Don (starred by Khan) was also (2.) remake of 1970s hit film (at the time starring Amitabh Bachchan). As usual both films have also been remade in several other South Asian languages. But the current goes also to the other direction as the hugely popular romantic Saathiya (2002), was a remake of a Tamil film and many others have been inspired by Hollywood hits.

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