It’s been a 100 years but India’s greatest and most original contribution to cinema – the film song – has decisively penetrated the most influential film industry – Hollywood. If popular art is an unacknowledged precursor to social shifts this might just be the most buoyant thing to happen to that famously hopeful unicorn – India’s soft power. A mainstream Hollywood film –“ Mirror, Mirror” with Julia Roberts as the evil stepmother of Snow White no less – culminates with a ‘filmy’ number, Lily Collins singing “I believe in love” and Sean Bean remains alive at the end of the film! Nothing will ever be the same. This will not immediately translate into homages and remakes but I predict the increasing influence of India in Hollywood films will be dated from this day. The sort of sentimental and lengthy films that mainstream Hollywood prefers today when Indians are going in for darker themes and shorter films is an inversion that has not been noticed. This is just the most hilarious and awkward merging of genres I have ever seen… and Tarsem Singh continues to make crap films that look gorgeous. But that song at the end is the end of the beginning; India has won, and the outrageous, implausible, contributes- nothing- to- the- narrative warble has now come to be accepted as a valid aesthetic and creative choice .
Tarsem Singh dug this particular song out of his childhood memory of the ‘70s when an Iranian singer did a cover version that was an inexplicable rage. It is the sort of tune that young people love and their parents grimace over… a reaction that continued at the test screenings of the film. It almost got scrapped by the studio but Singh is a very persuasive man and he kept it in. The story of how they located the original artist, Nina Hart, is much more interesting than any magic mirror but that is another story. Read it here… it is worth it
What I find remarkable however is the creative choice the director made to end a film. The Princess is about to make a speech after the Triumph over Evil and instead she launches into what is a Hindi film song – you cannot say it is anything else. It has wavy hand movements and back up dwarves and odd noises and twirling, a lot of twirling… all the people magically learn the moves to keep in tune, as in India, and Sean Bean looks completely flummoxed as to what is happening, which just might be the most scary thing you will see. The problem here is that Tarsem is not Tarantino and he simply does not have the batshit crazy confidence in himself to cut loose and go over the top which is actually the only way to do these songs… if you accept even for a nano-second they are implausible and preposterous you are dead. Lily Collins would never get a lead in an Indian film – heroine’s best friend would be her slot – but she is game enough, and delivers with vim. Singh, in trying to tone down the camp only accentuates how absurd these songs and their situations actually are. Still, the very fact that a die-hard staple of the Western fairy tale canon got a revisionist twist via an Indian film song is actually quite noteworthy. It is not the Disney song number, this is another species altogether, and I suspect it will prove to be an invasive species, crowding out the original members of the habitat.
An American originally writes and records this song. An Iranian singer does a cover version that gives her a lot of fame, before she seems to be erased socially. An Indian boy living in Punjab in the 1970s remembers it and tests it out years later on his niece who loves it, while he is mangling a movie he is directing on Greek mythology. It ends up as the finale of a German fairy tale, sung by the daughter of Phil Collins, who however has never sung before. You can’t make this stuff up! It is as good as a masala film. Whether that is good for films in general remains to be seen, but the incredible Indian film song has forced its way into respectability and acceptance. India always wins … because it endures… and because it ignores anything it doesn’t like to hear while enduring. A century of relentless criticism against the film song was unheeded because audiences liked it enough and cinematic grammar be damned. Now the foot is in the door and curious things are liable to happen.
Rohit Arya is the Editor of The Leadership Review, and a corporate trainer. He has been a cultural critic for two decades. Rohit is the author of 5 books and been published in 5 European languages. He is an Author, Yogi, Polymath.
Creative Aye 