Dancing with the Kumars..

[KiwiCoromandel]

Bollywood might be coming of age - this year's Indian Film Festival includes blood and guts galore, psychological thrillers, political dramas and a new-fangled romance with a high-action twist - yet one thing hasn't changed.

Indian film directors still love a song-and-dance routine, no matter what the genre or how incongruous the musical interlude might seem.

Take Ek Ajnabee, a Bollywood adaptation of the thriller Man on Fire, last remade in 2004 with Denzel Washington. The storyline, here transplanted to Bangkok, revolves around a burnt-out alcoholic army commando (played by Indian superstar Amitabh Bachchan) hired to protect an eight-year-old girl. When the girl, who has worked her way into her unemotional bodyguard's heart, is kidnapped and reportedly killed, the veteran swears to avenge her death and sets out to track down her kidnappers.

It unfolds like your standard gritty crime drama - that is, until the hero's detective work takes him via the Narcissist Discotheque, where even he is forced to wait four minutes while the movie's electro-techno title song is played out in choreographed mass moves on the dance floor. Once the song wraps, the bodyguard immediately sniffs out a villain and shoots him straight in the guts.

Why does Ek Ajnabee director Apoorva Lakhia think it is de rigueur in Bollywood to include these song-and-dance ensembles?

"You have to understand one thing - 10 years ago, we didn't have the MTV channel or any of the networks which we get right now," Lakhia says. "As a culture, we got our music from films. We never had rock bands or performers, so our culture is cinema music. At weddings, you dance to songs which are popular from cinema. The Indian public loves to see their heroes and heroines dance."

Of course, it's not all about cinematic tradition. The music also brings in big bucks.

"Music is a very important factor for income of a movie," Lakhia says. "The producer makes a lot of money when he sells the music of a film. Even though my film had one song, my CD had six songs. It's big revenue for the producers so we can never do without it."

Perhaps Lakhia could get away with only one dance number in his film because he snapped up Bachchan as his star: "He's Sean Connery, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner and Marlon Brando rolled into one."

It was a coup, not least because Ek Ajnabee is only Lakhia's second feature.

"It's every filmmaker's dream to work with [bachchan]," Lakhia says. "He's a legend. Legend is a small word for him. He's someone you could put his face on the note of Indian currency."

Lakhia says he found working with Bachchan, who for much of the film sports a pair of Oakley sunglasses Lakhia bought for himself in Melbourne, nerve-racking at first.

"In the first three or four days, it was very intimidating because Mr Bachchan has a habit of sitting on his chair not talking and staring at you," he says. "So I kept thinking, 'Oh my God, he must be thinking I'm this little idiot who's making his second film and doesn't know what the hell he's doing.' When I got to know him better, I felt like I was going to film school because he's such a great personality and he talks about his experiences from over 200 movies he's done."

Lakhia doesn't know how much his film grossed in India, but it was enough for his producer to buy a Mercedes-Benz. Business was no doubt helped by Lakhia keeping his gritty yarn clean enough for a rating that allowed younger viewers to see it. (Even his Bangkok pole dancers are modestly clad.)

Lakhia was happy not to push the moral boundaries, but the same can't be said for fellow director Kunal Kohli.

Kohli's film Fanaa is like two films in one. The first half plays out like a new-school romance: rogue boy meets blind girl, they spend the night together and, when she phones her parents to tell them she's in love with someone they know nothing about, they're delighted. The boyfriend then dies in a terrorist bomb blast. The second half kicks off with a James Bond-like feat, when the chap presumed dead parachutes from a burning chopper with a snowboard attached to his feet.

Besides the unbelievable fast and hard action, Fanaa has two highly bankable stars. Aamir Khan has the box-office appeal of Brad Pitt, while the stunningly photogenic Kajol, who plays opposite Khan, is the Julia Roberts of Bollywood.

The combination is so irresistible that Fanaa is the third-highest grossing film in India this year and has raked in about $US22 million ($30 million) worldwide. Not bad for an extravaganza that cost just $US4 million ($5.4 million) to make.

Kohli says Fanaa is not as radical with its relationships as his previous film, Hum Tum. When Kohli visited Australia two years ago to talk about Hum Tum, he came under fire at Q&A sessions from young Indian-Australians shocked by his storyline, in which his two stars have sex and don't rush off to make wedding plans.

"India has moved on," Kohli says. "Today, people accept something like the sex in Hum Tum but Indians abroad find it a little hard to digest. They're stuck in a time warp."

Kohli also copped criticism over Fanaa, in particular that his blind heroine chooses her own lover in a far-off city and that her parents supported the choice.

"They said, 'How can they just accept him so happily and they don't even know the guy?' But I think that's OK. It's nice to get criticism for something new that you do. It means people are getting bothered by it."

source:AP

image:supplied/AP:BLUFFMASTER....Indian film directors still love a song-and-dance routine..