'Lagaan' bowls British audience over

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, JULY 11. Bollywood has arrived here - and in style, not self-consciously dressed up as ``art'' but as unapolegtic mainstream Hindi cinema in its own terms, tortuously long and at times incomprehensible to a foreign audience.

Mr. Aamir Khan's Lagaan has become the first commercial Hindi film not only to get what one critic described as the ``nearest thing to a full mainstream release that any Bollywood picture has yet achieved'' but to figure in the British Top Ten. A few more weeks of it and Lagaan might well qualify as this summer's next most potent symbol of multiculturalism after the Indian chicken tikka masala.

Bollywood films here are now as commonplace as ``Roop Saree'' stores in Southall and Bradford, but until Lagaan came along central London was still a rather no-go zone for curry romances from Mumbai. But thanks to Sony, which is distributing the film, some of the most fastidious theatres in Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square - London's Mecca of entertainment - have thrown their doors open to Lagaan, and audiences are flocking to it. There are reports of queues running round the block, and people returning home disappointed. It has come to London after raking in an estimated £ 300,000 in other parts of Britain, and its promoters expect it to join the big league of such Asian box office hits as Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon.

``Indian film to bowl Britain over'', said a headline in The Times terming Lagaan as Bollywood's biggest push yet in gaining acceptability from a wider audience in Britain. It has got favourable reviews in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and on Radio 4, the most cerebral of BBC's radio channels. So, what is it that makes Lagaan tick? First, there is the British connection: half of its cast is British. And then there's cricket which, on a good day, is still a very English sport. A crucial cricket match between the natives and the ``babus'' of the raj is the highlight of the film and despite its predictable outcome cricket lovers are raving about it.

Critics have hailed it as the most expensive Hindi film, with a budget of nearly £ 4 million. The fact that it was made in one continuous schedule and the sound was recorded simultaneously has been described as a sign of Hindi commercial cinema trying to break out of its traditionally ad hoc style of film-making.

But some have been put off by its length - over three-and-a-half hours long, and a joke doing the rounds is that it is so long that people are having to carry their coffee makers with them.

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Section  : International
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