What happens when a Bollywood film gives the female lead all the privileges and powers that male leads get and she does things that very few women on screen ever get to do, including making herself and others laugh while still being taken seriously? Aiyyaa (2012), a nearly […]
The Gutter’s own Beth Watkins offers a memoriam for Vinod Khanna at Beth Loves Bollywood with “Vinod Khanna: Masculinity So Adaptable.” “In the palette of fillum masculinity circa 1980 that ranges from petulant man-child to aggressive, absurd machismo to ideals-based philosophizing to starry-eyed lover, he tapped into points […]
A woman tearfully leaves her newborn in the lap of a giant statue of Shiva during a thunderstorm and keels over dead. Hindu brothers are separated when one one falls into a raging river, presumed dead, but actually rescued and raised by a thief. Boys from good homes […]
Like George Costanza, I’ve often wanted to pretend to be an architect, and an offshoot of this dream is to do some kind of major study of the architecture of evil spaces in Hindi movies. The most distinctive visual marker—physical manifestation, even—of evil in Bollywood is the villain […]
“Looking for film noir in India is to miss the point of Indian cinema altogether.”–Lalitha Gopalan, “Bombay Noir,” A Companion to Film Noir. (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2013). There’s a lot about Calcutta—the center of the Bengali film industry, metropolitan capital of the state of West Bengal, […]
Alluvium looks at Raja Nawathe’s Gumnaam, a 1965 Bollywood adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. “Gumnaam is perhaps best known in the West for its song and dance sequence ‘Jaan Pehechan Ho’ in which Laxmi Chhaya is accompanied by the rock and roll group Ted […]
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