Kitsch na kaho

MARQUEE

Ever so often, when I tire of Kurosawa-and-Kieslowski discussions over Old Monk and Coke, when the film-festival circuit starts to grate on my nerves and my eyes roll at the sight of unshaven jhola-carriers sitting outside Siri Fort Auditorium saying things like "mid-70s Godard was ultimate avant-garde political commentary, yaar", at such times I turn to Zee Cinema, Set Max and Star Gold to renew acquaintance with old favourites from my misspent childhood "" Bollywood movies from that most vilified of decades, the 1980s.

Between 1978-79 (when the last of Amitabh's seriously good films from his first phase as a superstar were made) and 1988-89 (when QSQT and Maine Pyaar Kiya tentatively heralded a new era in mainstream Hindi cinema) lies a decade that can make even the most ardent Bollywood loyalist shudder in embarrassment. This was, variously, an era that stood for ""

Bloated multi-starrers churned out by producers who couldn't get AB to sign on the dotted line and overcompensated by populating their movies with random permutations of Dharmendra/Jeetendra/ Rajesh Khanna/Shatrughan Sinha/Vinod Khanna/ Mithun. Naturally all the effort went into the cast assemblage, and none on the script.

Garish costumes and giant tablas that featured in song sequences.

The classic compartmentalisation of action, drama, romance, comedy and what-have-you, each film divided into convenient little blocks to ensure "a complete package". Even if this meant Shakti Kapoor, Kadar Khan and Johnny Lever buffooning about in sideshows that had nothing to do with the main story.

The quality of Hindi film music nosediving to the extent that it became commonplace for people to fast-forward songs when watching films on their spanking new video cassette players.

Govinda and Neelam.

Hell, things got so bad at one point that for a couple of years, Anil Kapoor was the closest thing Bollywood had to a number one male star!

And yet, as an urban middle-class Indian who was weaned on those films, and for whom those inanities formed a crucial corpus of childhood associations, I can't help feeling that maybe it wasn't that bad after all.

Trawling the Indian blogosphere, that bastion of opinionated writers or wannabe-writers, I'm regularly surprised at how many of the best, most intelligent bloggers of my generation feel the same fondness, even possessiveness about those old films as I do.

A lot of this is probably blind nostalgia (you can never really turn your back on something that meant a lot to you as a child) but I think some of it has to do with the ingenuousness of those movies. They were upfront and naïve all at once, very clear about the audiences they were targeting, and rarely pretentious.

Watching them, you got the sense that they knew how corny they were "" a self-knowledge that's missing from today's Bollywood, where the most superficial advances are held up as signs of radical improvement over the past.

Today, a new wave of assertive directors have picked up international filmmaking techniques and have access to better technology; they speak with quiet confidence about competing with films made anywhere in the world. The young stars of today are more style-savvy and worldly-wise; costumes have improved; the music-video look has become ubiquitous.

A lot of these developments are genuinely for the good, but do they add up to momentous change? I don't know, I'm too busy surfing the past. There's The Burning Train, with Dharmendra in a silver-foil suit; here's Kaala Patthar, where Amitabh and Shatrughan Sinha turn smouldering machismo into an art-form; here's Mithun dance-dancing.

Okay, so it isn't with-it but it's from my time and thanks to satellite TV I'm rediscovering it all.

(jaiarjun@yahoo.com )