The Indian Audience
I’ve been immersing myself in India cinema for the last few months. Before I go into a full analysis of what I’ve seen and what I think of it in later posts, I thought I’d first examine a comment about a Bollywood movie made by a friend of mine. His comment was, “it was made for an Indian audience.” It wasn’t said as a complement, but more as an excuse. It got me thinking. Can we excuse a level of mediocrity or lower the bar of standards because of the type of audience a movie is geared towards? And what does that say about our impression of an audience if we assume that low quality is all they can handle?
It would be easy to generalize the movies of any country that mass-produces films like India or the United States. Do we shrug our shoulders and accept the mindless action and lack of story in Transformers 2 because it’s, “made for an American audience”? I’m sure a lot of people do, but I don’t. The thing is, just because a large number of people enjoy action movies, doesn’t mean we have to dumb down all action movies to satisfy the lowest common denominator. Look at “Iron Man”. That was a great movie, full of action and depth.
This brings me back to India and the chicken and the egg question. Do we lay the blame on the audience, for not being open to films with greater depth and stronger filmmaking? Or do we blame the filmmakers, raised on this low-level standard and willing to produce weaker films that please greater numbers? If those of us ranking outside of India are rating all Indian films on an “Indian scale” rather than a “film scale” isn’t that a cause for concern?
The last point is the bigger problem. I don’t think it’s a good thing for an entire set of films to be subject to a different standard. It doesn’t allow room for improvement, and it creates a negative stigma about that set. The blame falls on the shoulders of the audience for not demanding higher standards. The people producing the films for profit are not going to go out of their way artistically if the people in the seats at the theater keep filling their pockets. I think it’s a terrible thing, both for the art of the films and for the pleasure of the audience.
So I don’t think it’s fair to rate a movie as “okay because it was made for an Indian audience”. Until those films start being held to a standard of film that is accepted by the rest of the world, they will never earn the respect they deserve.