Hotel Bruce

My relationship with Bollywood films in themselves and more specifically as the new, campy grist for the North American hipster irony mill is, at best, uneasy.

My feelings are akin to those of taking a Provincial Relative to a party where there are people to impress, but by whom one is slightly intimidated. At this party, the "PR" makes obtuse and sadly irrepressible conversation, gets slapstick drunk and becomes the object of admittedly snide but all too understandable ridicule and rolling of eyes.

Listening to the labored, inebriated breathing and babbling on the drive home, one fantasizes about shoving him or her out of the car and speeding away with nary a backward glance. But one realizes that the damage has been done, and that these feelings are petty and disloyal.

But, before all of this social malaise and cynicism brought on by Midwestern adolescence, I remember the anticipation and satisfaction of going to the movies with my older cousins in India. We would take a rickshaw through the dusty orange evening streets, freshly bathed and our hair combed like we were going to a party. The theater was always crowded with civil servants in clashing plaids and Bata flip-flops and barefoot street urchins in rags who somehow always sneaked in.

We would all enter in a rush and, as there was no courtesy lighting, we’d find our seats by touch and by habit. I remember sometimes I was carried so I wouldn’t be lost, and being held close when I wanted to run ahead. Our collective anticipation was a light, palpable ether, as though the movie was a gift we were opening. Even now the cool darkness of the theater in summer is to me that first cool darkness, mysterious and promising.

How glamorous the heroes and heroines seemed in their Western clothes, how sophisticated I found them when they bandied about stylish English greetings like, What’s happening, baby and You look lovely, darling.

And the musical sequences were all sound and sweet fury. Beautiful creatures frolicking through gardens in perpetual bloom with parasols and coy hip sways; and the innumerable costume changes. At the intermission (since most films were and still are about four hours long) we’d buy little bite-sized samosas in newspaper cones and soft drinks with endearing names like Thumbs Up and Goldspot.

On the way home, the discussion between the girls was always about the clothes and the jewelry and how actress X was the most beautiful, while the boys replayed the fight scenes.

The lack of plot, the poor production values, the Wagnerian melodrama, the ostentatious and outmoded fashion, I didn’t know about these things. I find it difficult to sit through a contemporary Bollywood film now that I do, and I wonder if it’s not because I shy away from the innocent credulity required to like a thing simply because it’s pretty.

And perhaps my discomfort comes from a lingering embarrassment—that I once thought that these things were cool. It’s as though the "PR" was an older cousin whom one had admired and now had become disenchanted. I can sometimes find solace in the idea of Bollywood films as a truly Wilde-ian conquest of style over substance, a pure fiction in which the good end happily and the bad not at all.

I’ve come to realize perhaps it’s not unthinkable that people—particularly those susceptible to fantasy and a certain naive charm—could enjoy Bollywood’s joie de vivre as ingenuously as the PR does, with or without irony.