lights of Bengali cinema, was not available for early viewing.)
“India Now,” anchored by four strong films, two independent and two Bollywood, begins with a jolt of communal violence. “Parzania,” based on a true story of a Parsi boy who disappeared during the riots in the western state of Gujarat, is an accomplished, evenhanded drama about a still-raw national wound. (More than 1,000 people were killed when Hindu mobs attacked Muslims and other non-Hindus.)
A nostalgia for Gandhian ideals hovers over “Parzania,” which begins with a schoolroom lesson about the “great secular democracy of India” and ends with the anguished testimony of the lost boy’s mother (a wonderful, understated Sarika) calling the government to account: We were middle-class people waiting for the police to protect us, she says; isn’t it the government’s duty to provide safety and security for its citizens?
Rahul Dholakia, a Gujarati now living in Los Angeles, directed “Parzania,” an independent production mainly in English. Perhaps only a nonresident Indian could have made this movie, which has been cleared for release in Gujarat but not yet been shown because of threatened violence by Hindu extremists.
Sisterhood is transforming and, well, powerful in Nagesh Kukunoor’s “Dor,” a feminist buddy film about the unlikely bond between a self-assured Muslim woman and a shy, oppressed Hindu widow. The plot sounds like pure Bollywood hokum, but this is another technically accomplished indie, well acted and well told. (The Muslim woman needs the Hindu to sign papers pardoning her husband, who is accused of murdering the Hindu woman’s husband in Saudi Arabia, where the two men were working.)
With two nuanced lead performances (by Gul Panag and Ayesha Takia) and two visually potent locations (the green mountains of Himachal Pradesh and the Rajasthan desert, a screen natural), “Dor” is a social drama that wears its heavy themes lightly. In one lovely sequence the women and their sidekick dance among the sand dunes, in part a burlesque of Bollywood, in part a recognition of the reliable pleasure it brings to these characters’ lives.
“Khosla Ka Ghosla,” an urban and urbane Bollywood comedy about the middle class fighting to enjoy its privileges, is a change of scene and pace. Here is the modern Indian family in flux: the daughter with her short hair and Western clothes; the good engineer son, Cherry (“Hi,
Bill Gates,” he’s often greeted), with his spectacles and a job waiting in America; the girlfriend who, gasp, lives alone in the big city; the father, who doesn’t consider decency a sliding scale.
Along with “Khosla Ka Ghosla,” “Omkara,” the other Bollywood selection in “India Now,” bears witness both to the variety and vitality of the commercial cinema. In the hands of the director Vishal Bhardwaj, this adaptation of “Othello” makes Bollywood seem like a natural home for Shakespearean tragedy.
The Othello character, Omkara, is a half-caste gangster general (Ajay Devgan in a physically commanding performance) and his Desdemona, Dolly, is admired for her light skin. (Their union, one character says, will be “like milk in a coal pot.”) Set in Uttar Pradesh, the dusty Indian heartland, this movie lovers’ movie, with its striking widescreen compositions, folk-inflected score (that detours briefly into “I Just Called to Say I Love You”) and languorous pacing, can count among its influences everything from
Sergio Leone and
Sam Peckinpah to “Sholay” (1975), the great Bollywood western.
Each selection in “India Now” has its interests and pleasures, whether a performance (Kay Kay Menon in “Shoonya”), outstanding cinematography (“Maati Maay”), a loose comic energy (“The Bong Connection”) or a commitment to social justice (the Manipuri documentary “A Cry in the Dark”). Mr. Siegel of MoMA said the museum was considering mounting Indian film series with some regularity, perhaps yearly. Here’s hoping it does.
“India Now” runs tomorrow through April 30 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, (212) 708-9400; schedule at moma.org.
