'Bollywood/ Hollywood is not a Bollywood film' Deepa Mehta's new venture has the hybrid sensibility of India and the West

Aseem Chhabra

Two years ago, having given up all her hopes to shoot Water in India, a depressed and dejected Deepa Mehta returned to her home in Toronto.

She had stayed in India for six months after the film's shoot was shut down by the right-wing Hindutva groups. When it looked absolutely impossible, she decided to quit.

"I had tried everything, but then I felt that I was trying to prove something out of stubbornness," Mehta says, from Toronto. "It took me four or five months to recover from the fallout. It was a personal film. I wasn't the director for hire. I had written the script and put in a lot of my energy and resources into the project. So it was a very emotional time period."

Her sense of humour and her ability to laugh kept her going through the tough period. That became the seed for her new film Bollywood/ Hollywood, a lighthearted comic take on the Indian-Canadian community in Toronto and its one solid connection with the motherland, the Hindi movies churned out by the Bollywood film industry.

Born in Amritsar, 52-year old Mehta grew up surrounded by Bollywood cinema, especially since her father was a film exhibitor. "I love Bollywood films," she says. "I find them so entertaining. They are so unabashedly what they are. They are my staple diet here in Canada."

"I do not have patience for some of them. But mostly, I find them to be great fun. I loved Lagaan. It's an amazing film. Dil Chahta Hai was so intelligent. And I loved the heightened drama and the spectacle of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas."

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Over the years in Canada, Mehta has heard people comment that Bollywood films are often remakes of Hollywood blockbusters.

"I find that so charming," she says. "But I thought maybe we should do it the other way round. Take something from Hollywood, a Cinderella story, or say Pretty Woman and impose on it Bollywood conventions, like the melodrama, the music and crying mothers, and see if a hybrid is possible."

She emphasises that Bollywood/ Hollywood is not a Bollywood film. It is a Canadian film inspired and infused with Bollywood and Hollywood traditions, she says.

Bollywood/ Hollywood stars Rahul Khanna, Lisa Ray, Moushumi Chatterjee and the late Dina Pathak. Khanna stars as Rahul Seth, a dotcom entrepreneur and scion of an Indian-Canadian family. Given his family's obsession with his marriage plan, Seth makes a deal with Sue (Ray), an attractive Spanish woman he meets at a bar: he will pay her a large sum of money if she pretends to be his fiancee. Two hours later, with a heady mix of Bollywood-inspired songs, melodramatic moments, ghosts, talking portraits and even an Indian drag queen, Seth realises that Sue is actually of Indian origin and, to no one's surprise, he is in love with her.

Mehta had Khanna in mind when she created the Rahul Seth character. "I kept saying to myself that the only person who could play the role was Rahul Khanna," she says, about the actor who had previously starred in Mehta's Earth. She says the same about Moushumi Chatterjee, who was originally scheduled to play a role in Water.

For the role of Seth's Shakespeare-quoting grandmother, Mehta thought about Pathak. "I had to find someone who had the grasp of English language, so that the quotes would sound right."

The toughest task for Mehta was to find a young actress to play the role of Sue. There are several Bollywood actresses who dress in Western clothing, but Mehta was looking for someone with "a lot of West in her; someone whose body language is Western."

"I was trying to find an actress who could straddle both the worlds, who would know how to cross her legs in a bar," she says. Mehta finally settled for Ray, a model in India, who has acted in only one film, Vikram Bhatt's Kasoor. It also helped the fact that Ray grew up in Canada until she was 16. Her father is Indian and her mother Polish.

Although Mehta has lived in Toronto for nearly 24 years, she finds herself living what she describes as a "hybrid life", someone who is connected to the Indian-Canadian community and yet, has the ability to distance herself and be objective.

"Everything in the film is rooted in reality," she says. "There is no question about the big homes. Or even that people wake up on weekends to watch Indian cable programs. I know of homes where they have televisions in each room constantly playing Bollywood films. At weddings and parties, people dance to films songs which they play on their television screens."

In addition to Mehta's film, the past year has seen two other women filmmakers from the Indian Diaspora take up projects inspired by Bollywood. Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding) and Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham) have taken elements of Bollywood and absorbed them into their original storylines. The coincidences do not end there. All three films have the same distributor in India, iDream Productions (Bollywood/Hollywood is scheduled to open in India in late December). The new films have turned out the biggest box-office hits for each of the filmmakers.

"Every culture wants to identify with the motherland," Mehta says, trying to examine this phenomenon. "Bollywood is our most obvious and accessible way to identify with India. It is immediate and you can touch it. Three years ago with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, so many Taiwanese and Chinese in the Diaspora were suddenly being catapulted into Hong Kong films. Now Bollywood has become fashionable in the West.

"We have always loved Bollywood. But until recently, it wasn't politically correct to say so," she adds, "Now, there is no shame in admitting it."

While she is promoting Bollywood/Hollywood, Mehta has already jumped on to another project. On November 18, she started shooting Republic Of Love, a romantic film based on novel by the Pulitzer Prize winning author, Carol Shields. The film stars Canadian actor Bruce Greenwood and Amelia Fox, an English actress who recently appeared in Roman Polanski's The Pianist.

She refers to Republic Of Love as her "white film," adding that she feels good to be busy. "Especially if you enjoy what you are doing. I was just telling a friend that I had such a great experience making Bollywood/Hollywood that I don't even remember when I started that film."

And what about Water? "I still hope I can make it," she says, sounding hopeful. "I haven't given up on it yet. But I want to make in the right climate."