Pirates vs cheats

MARQUEE

A few months ago, following a blog post I wrote about some DVDs freshly purchased from Delhi's underground Palika Bazaar, I received a comment about the evils of piracy.

It wasn't a shrill, preachy comment but an introspective and balanced one that made some good points: among them the fact that the film industry (including low-profile directors and producers, who are pressed for financial aid at the best of times) lose vast amounts of money to piracy. It made me feel a bit guilty about my own little contribution to encouraging the underground trade.

Unfortunately, those moral qualms are in danger of dispersing altogether, thanks to some of my recent experiences with legitimately purchased DVDs. Call me a babe-in-the-woods but I never knew until a few days ago that the films we get here on official discs (the ones priced at Rs 499/599 and found at Planet M, Music World etc) are randomly censored.

The reason it's taken me so long to discover this is that the films I'd been buying were mostly Hollywood oldies "" the likes of Sunset Boulevard, The Grapes of Wrath, Mary Poppins "" none of which contained anything that might be deemed objectionable by our certificate-suppliers.

A couple of days ago, however, I bought the DVD of Francois Ozon's Swimming Pool, which I'd seen before at a film festival. This a very atmospheric film about (among other things) the solitude of the writing process and the conflict between illusion and reality; it stars Charlotte Rampling as a middle-aged writer who slowly becomes obsessed with a young girl at the villa where she's staying.

It also features quite a few nude scenes, at least two of which are vital to an understanding of the characters. It took me no longer than a few minutes' viewing to discover that these scenes had been nicely filtered out "" strongly affecting the film's continuity, its mood and even, to an extent, its sense.

Subsequently, a friend informed me that his officially purchased DVDs of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs have bits cut out from the more violent scenes.

This is worse than disgusting; if the authorities are so bent on playing moral guardians, they should at least stop trying to put out crumbs for the non-mainstream/world cinema audience.

Stick to old films and the occasional Hollywood summer blockbuster that's G/PG-rated and sanitised in the first place. (It's a strange morality that allows you to watch only Jerry Bruckheimer movies all day long, but what do I know.)

Nor is the censorship of sex and violence the only problem. On my Swimming Pool DVD, the portions of the film that were in French didn't have subtitles, and there were no options to enable them on the "special features" menu.

It threw me back to a day many years ago when I excitedly bought an impressively packaged videocassette of The Godfather Part II, rushed home and found there were no subtitles for the flashback sequences (with the dialogue mostly in Italian).

It's all very well to bleat on about the film industry losing money to piracy "" this is true on its own terms "" but not including subtitles (or audio options, or promised special features) on an "approved" DVD priced at Rs 600 is a blatant case of cheating the customer. Why blame the genuine movie-lover for cheering the pirates on?

(jaiarjun@gmail.com)