"Nouveau" cinema

So I went to watch "Salaam Namaste", Yash Raj's latest film directed by 26-year-old Siddharth Anand. A great job for a newcomer. There's talent in Bollywood, no doubt about it. But if I have to see one more NRI film shot in Calgary, Melbourne or New York, and one more pumped up red hero passing for the regular tanned Indian, I'll scream. I'll admit there were very funny episodes. The dialogues are a hit in this film and the story is not bad. But the trouble comes with the packaging. The whole shiny and smooth but supposedly down-to-earth mode is getting suffocating. The small moments of deep emotion get glossed over by the patina of luxury and hipness.

It doesn't help that two days before I watched Hrishikesh Mukherji's "Abhimaan", a film from 1973, where there are funny moments, silly events and deeply troubling issues about the human ego, without ever falling into either slobbering sentimentality or slapstick comedy. The film simply takes you through a journey into a couple's life: its sweetness, its bitterness, its difficulties and glimmers of happiness. There were commercial imperatives even then, but you somehow get the feeling that Mukherji was first sharing a story rather than giving the audience what they want.

The product I saw yesterday was first the effort of a young man trying to prove how original and sleek he can be, which he managed to do, at the expense of a story's soul.