Hidden Tiger

Aishwarya Rai and Mallika Sherawat are on the red carpet at the Cannes film festival this month. Shekhar Kapur will be directing the sequel to Elizabeth. And Hollywood films like Marigold with Salman Khan in the lead are slated for release early next year.

These three developments exemplify in their own ways the quest, still elusive, for crossing over to the international mainstream. Rai may have graced the covers of international newsmagazines but she still remains in search of a mainstream Hollywood film. Although the buzz is that she is India's best bet to cross over and become an international star like China's Zhang Ziyi – with whom she shared a cover in a recent issue of The Beijing Review – she is still not quite there. Her presence at Cannes has much to do with product endorsements than cinema.

Kapur has gone much further than any other homegrown directorial talent in hitting the international scene with his period films. Elizabeth was nominated for seven Oscars, including best picture and best actress. It lost out to a vastly better made Shakespeare in Love. Yet, imagine what a difference even one Oscar would have made to his crossover status.

Hollywood, for its part, also senses a huge opportunity in introducing our films to a broader American audience, although economics is the driver here. Films with cheaper Indian stars and facilities may be the next big outsourcing opportunity. Even software techies have started funding films in this genre like My Bollywood Bride. In this milieu, the studios plan to release globally Indian films like The Rising to leverage their combined audience strengths.

There is also hope for our independent filmmakers. What is not adequately appreciated is that there has always been a constituency for such cinema. But it has to be tapped. Barring Aparajito, Satyajit Ray's films did well internationally. Kummatty by the late director from Kerala, Aravindan, ran for a year in Japan. His counterpart Adoor Gopalakrishnan is as comfortable in the Cannes and Berlin circuit as any international director. In their own ways, they have broken through.

Thanks to co-production deals, countries like France are now playing a vital role in showcasing our cinematic talent – as it did for Iranian cinema earlier. The co-producers for Gopalakrishnan's film Nizhalkkuthu include Artcam International, Paris, with the support of several French government agencies and ministries, Hubert Bals Foundation, Montecinemaverita Foundation and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the Swiss Federal Department for Foreign Affairs! The French also co-produced fellow Keralite Shaji Karun's Vanaprastham.

However, all this talk of going mainstream doesn't register with the rest of the Hindi film industry. Going global is defined by the boundaries of the non-resident Indian (NRI) diaspora. The flurry of film releases and film award functions held abroad is targeted solely at this broader Indian community from Louisiana to Ludhiana; this limited footprint sharply circumscribes any pretensions of crossing over to the other side.

Why? Unlike the tastes of an international audience, for instance, the NRI one is very much like the one back home. This naturally translates into megabucks for Hindi film producers who spin their blockbuster dreams with such an audience in mind. The music, too, reaches this far-flung community as fast as it reaches domestic markets. If tapping the NRI territory is the only aim, Bollywood is making huge waves internationally – but these films cannot become another, say, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

With easy NRI pickings, there is naturally no great pressure for upgrading product quality as the themes reinforce the status quo and prevalent social mores. The song-and-dance routines integral to the classic Indian film formula continue; there is a big constituency for them. The industry is in no mood to change any of this despite critical observations from international directors like Iran's Mohsen Makhmalbaf that such songs and dances don't portray the real India. "Do you see women dancing in the streets?" he asks.

Paradoxically, while the diaspora defines the limits of our global possibilities, filmmakers from the diaspora like Mira Nair and Gurinder Chadha have crossed over rather effortlessly. Monsoon Wedding, Bend It Like Beckham, Vanity Fair and Bride and Prejudice have had a good run with western audiences. Manoj Night Shyamalan is very much mainstream. Vijay Singh, based in France, has made One Dollar Curry. Maybe these directors can work the system better being insiders, as it were. But the fact is that they made successful films with local themes and the best technical resources.

Incidentally, Rai's moves towards international stardom also begin with such NRI directors. Chadha's Bride and Prejudice is indeed her maiden international debut although speculation is rife regarding her talks with Roland Joffe and Michael Douglas. For a crossover probability, the fact that she is hitching her wagon to NRI filmmakers indeed tells a story of its own. Besides Chadha, Rai is also keen to work with the more established Nair in her forthcoming film Homebody/Kabul for HBO. Kapur, for his part, hovers on the brink. And the rest of the industry? Frankly, it couldn't give a damn.