FILM COLUMN: DHOBI GHAT/MUMBAI DIARIES
Aamir Khan's Latest Film Shines at Toronto International Film Festival
Two years after Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire began its award-winning romp, including a Best Picture nod at the 2009 Academy Awards and an Audience Choice Award at the 2008 Toronto Film Fest, the influential cinematic showcase is awaiting the next production involving the South Asian subcontinent to blow its audience’s collective minds away. While it is does not profess to be a Slumdog Millionaire or even a true Bollywood masala flick, for that matter, Kiran Rao’s Dhobi Ghat may well be that “next Indian film” audiences rave about at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival.
For those who do not know, Kiran Rao is the wife of Bollywood superstar actor turned trendy independent producer Aamir Khan, who is fresh off of his latest production of Peepli [Live]. Coincidentally, Aamir plays the lead role in Kiran’s Dhobi Ghat.
Serving as Kiran’s directorial debut, Dhobi Ghat premiered at the 35th Toronto Film Fest on September 10th, with the film’s entire cast, including Monica Dogra, Prateik Babar and Kriti Malhotra, attending the screening at the Elgin Garden Theatres. The etymology of the title is rather simple: “Dhobi Ghat” is an actual locale in Mumbai, itself a landmark and open-air thoroughfare.
Drawing rave reviews for its solid artistic sense and ability to stay true to the spirit of independent cinema, Dhobi Ghat, which was also written by Kiran, is set in Mumbai during monsoon season and tells the tale of a love triangle involving Arun (Aamir), Shai (Monica), and Munna (Prateik).
Among those bowled over by Dhobi Ghat was the film festival’s co-director, Cameron Bailey, who lauded the production for raising the bar for Hindi cinema in avoiding all the traditional bells and whistles of Bollywood masala flicks.
“Dhobi Ghat is really not a masala move. It has no songs, no dancing. It’s really an independent film — a story that’s a love letter to Mumbai. It’s very much about the people of Mumbai,” Bailey told an Indian news reporting agency. “And it has Aamir Khan in a role of an artist that you often don’t see him in — he has done a terrific job. The film’s three intertwined stories really give you the feel, the texture of Mumbai today.”
Perhaps Dhobi Ghat is more like Slumdog Millionaire than anyone would let on, what with neither film qualifying as a traditional masala film catering to mainstream Bollywood audiences. Yet, according to Bailey, Dhobi Ghat is something Slumdog Millionaire is not, beyond the obvious — the former is a full-fledged Indian production while the latter is a British film telling a tale of two brothers in India.
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“It is a film of great ambition. It is doing things that we don’t see in Indian cinema very often,” Bailey told the Indian media. “Then you have Aamir Khan, who I think is really one of the national treasures of India, in the lead role. All these things combined made it a movie we had to have here.”
The movie that was on display on the first Friday of TIFF was produced with merely a $1 million budget, Aamir had informed the press, which was half the budget that the 3 Idiots and Lagaan star had allocated for Peepli [Live].
For Aamir, he is certainly making quite the name for himself as a leading source of qualitative independent cinema in the epicenter of India’s most recognized film industry. It is a name now associated with a sudden shift in film-making, causing a ripple effect far beyond Bollywood and setting a new standard for what to expect from Indian films catering to global audiences.
“These are not the kinds of films that will appeal to hardcore Bollywood fans,” Aamir told The Hollywood Reporter about the low-budget, high-quality films with fresh talent he is now putting out as an independent producer. “As a creative person, I do what I love. I’m making films for small, selective audiences.”
Irrespective of whether audiences for Aamir’s fans are actually “small” (his productions of Ghajini and 3 Idiots were among the highest grossing films in Bollywood history, while Peepli [Live] reportedly earned four times its budget in box office receipts), the Lagaan star takes his role as one of Indian cinema’s most influential personalities quite seriously.
“Cinema’s primary responsibility is to entertain and engage the audience — a social responsibility in itself which Indian filmmakers have been shouldering quite well for the past seventy or eighty-odd years,” Aamir told Buzzine. “As an entertainer, my primary responsibility is to the person who has worked hard all month and uses part of his monthly salary to buy a ticket to my film. He should get his money’s worth. Along with that, whenever the opportunity arises to give a platform to a social issue, I am happy to do that.”
The happiness apparently was shared several times over with Dhobi Ghat, which earned a strong stamp of approval from the 3 Idiots star.
“I love the film. When I saw it in July in Mumbai, I fell in love with it. It is very beautifully done,” Aamir told the press about his sentiments of Dhobi Ghat and its premiere at TIFF. “It’s very provocative, romantic. It really captures the feel of Mumbai — the things I love about the city, the vibrancy of the place, the feel of its streets and the people…and it all happens in the monsoon season so you get the texture of the rain and how it feels to be there at that time of the year.”
Certainly Aamir must be quite happy this time of year; this is the second consecutive major North American film festival at which the influential Khan has made a strong showing with his production. Earlier this year, Peeple [Live] captivated audiences at Sundance, and now Dhobi Ghat appears to have successfully debuted at TIFF.
Sure, Dhobi Ghat will most likely not take American audiences by storm in the same manner Slumdog Millionaire did weeks after it stole hearts at TIFF in 2008, yet the film is certainly bound to gain far greater attention than the last Indian film to perform well in Toronto — the award-winning Laxmikant Shetgaonkar film, The Man Beyond the Bridge.
Other Indian entries into TIFF include Sidharth Srinivasan’s Soul of Sand, Sarah McCarthy’s The Sound of Mumbai: A Musical, Anurag Kashyap’s That Girl in Yellow Boots, and Aamir Bashir’s Autumn.
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