Bollywood’s latest star is an expected one: Keir Starmer. The British prime minister has flown to Mumbai with the largest trade delegation ever and unlike previous slightly dodgy ones from the 1700s that went for spices and tea, he’s gone to Yash Raj Films – one of Bollywood’s biggest studios, with the hope of creating a new genre: BollyBrit.
Singing, dancing, the stiff upper lip. Never before in cinema history have these combined. And for good reason.
That’s why, when Starmer initially announced that three new Bollywood productions would be shot in the UK, film-makers here in Mumbai shrugged, assuming it was just about location. Just another trio among the hundreds made every year in India.
Given the general hassles of shooting in any Indian location (people staring, infrastructure nightmares, bribes et al), locations in the UK have doubled up for India many a time, as some sort of brilliant reverse colonial joke.
Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill’s birthplace, became a girls’ college in north India (in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham). The same film featured Waddesdon Manor in Aylesbury as a rich Delhi man’s private home and Paddington has many a time become an Indian train station. The great irony that the Mumbai train station, originally English-built as Victoria terminus, was replaced by a London train station to look more like modern India, is enough to drive any postcolonial observer mad.
Sadly, unlike Indian food, Bollywood stories, beyond the extravagant Punjabi wedding dancing sequences, haven’t permeated into mainstream UK stories, except among British Asians. So it is very possible that as I write this, a primary school in Margate is doubling up as a Mumbai tax office in a noir-musical-comedy-action-thriller-mystery-horror-romcom, unknown to British cinephiles.
However, this isn’t about location any more.
Starmer is in Mumbai along with representatives of key British entertainment companies, including BFI, Pinewood Studios, and the British Film Commission, to discuss collaborations that could possibly go beyond locations and create a genre mashup. It shouldn’t be long before two very different cinematic styles come together – one reserved, witty, quiet, real, researched, and the other melodramatic, talky, implausible, geographically vague.
It is what the world is waiting for. The days of waffling about with Slumdog Millionaire, Merchant Ivory, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, where the cultures brush gently and respectfully, in a recognised genre, are over. BollyBrit’s purpose is not to satisfy but confound. Too many viewers ask: “How did they make this?” It is time to ask: “What is it?”
What screenplays of mass entertainment Bollywood films do very well, is have you suspend disbelief to a point where you don’t believe this is a movie. That’s a sort of artistic nirvana one needs to aspire to. For example, a film that starts out as a spy thriller, might become a mythology lesson, digress into a superhero CGI spectacle, and end with a patriotic song, all the while advertised as a whodunnit.
British films, in contrast, are about one thing. For example, Bill Nighy in a typical prestige drama set in war-ravaged post Edwardian London, mumbling Pinter-esque subtext to his unrequited love to Helen Mirren, is a kind of film where you know they’ve suppressed feelings for 50 years, and it’ll end in a Brief Encounter sort of way, with a sad unspoken parting. Why not suddenly have a whole chorus show up in the climax, of gen Z Indian Instagram influencers, plus Ed Sheeran, singing “She loves you, you idiot”. The principals could sing, “We didn’t know” and many costume changes, a romance and musical could ensue. Clarity helps. I can’t wait.
