Foreign films - subtitled, not dubbed - are showing to quiet and attentive audiences in India.
One of the least expected — and most gladdening — press releases I’ve received in recent weeks came from Bharatbala Productions and began with this sentence:
“We have taken the initiative to bring good international cinema to India. As part of this, we are theatrically releasing the 2007 Oscar-winner The Lives of Others in Delhi.”
At first glance this information might not seem worth more than a shrug, but to appreciate it fully you have to know that the Oscar won by The Lives of Others was in the foreign-language film category — it’s a German film, distributed by Bharatbala in its original form with subtitles, rather than in a poorly dubbed version. This is good news on par with Moser Baer making available DVDs of films by directors such as Jim Jarmusch and François Truffaut.
Of course, the press release was also a reminder that for an Indian multiplex audience, the category “international cinema” wouldn’t necessarily include Hollywood films — those are so much a part of our viewing culture that we no longer think of them as international. (For a north Indian audience, a Tamil movie — even one as high-profile as Dashavataram — would be more “foreign” than an American summer blockbuster anyway.)
I couldn’t watch The Lives of Others in the hall (I caught it on DVD subsequently) but I heard about the enthusiastic responses it generated even from viewers who weren’t too interested in world cinema. Friends tell me about the pin-drop silences in the screenings they went for (no ostentatious yawning or ululating sounds, none of the murmurs of protest that typically arise when a clueless viewer realises he has stumbled into a foreign-language film) and the applause at the end. At least one friend who used to flaunt his “I watch movies only for entertainment, and no subtitles please” badge like a war-medal admitted that he was deeply moved by this film and was now hoping to see more like it.
This might seem puzzling if you read a quick synopsis of The Lives of Others. Set in the socialist regime of East Germany in 1984, it’s about a Stasi police captain assigned to monitor the activities of a playwright and his mistress, who are suspected of potential dissidence. Not the kind of film, you’d think, that would rouse an Indian audience bred on mainstream movies with familiar themes and settings.
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But despite the particulars of its time, place and political scenario, this is a story with universal resonance, highlighted by the personal change that takes place in the police captain Wiesler as he gradually becomes drawn into the lives of the people he is spying on. As he starts to question the nature of his work, the film heads towards a moving climax — a much more restrained version of the ending of Schindler’s List, which was also about a man finding his own humanity in a claustrophobic, soul-destroying situation.
Incidentally, The Lives of Others won the Oscar over Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, which was widely regarded as a more imaginative, cinematically richer work. The comparison is probably unfair, for the two films are very different in their approach to a similar subject. While Pan’s Labyrinth made allegorical use of a fairy tale to comment on Franco’s Spain, the narrative of The Lives of Others is grimly realist.
But considering the two films, it occurred to me that for all their differences, they could both find substantial audiences in India. What’s needed is word-of-mouth publicity and the right kind of ground-level marketing. Did I mention that the Delhi release of The Lives of Others was promoted on a Facebook Events page? In the age of social networking, nothing is truly elitist any more.