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Bollywood returns to win Chinese hearts
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CREDITS roll, lights come on and the audience — mainly Chinese — stand up, screaming and cheering at the makers of the movie “PK” standing at the upper right corner of the theater.
As the lead actor, producer and director of “PK,” the highest grossing Indian film of all time, and 70th highest grossing movie of 2014 worldwide, get on to the stage, the screaming gets louder.
Director Rajkumar Hirani, producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra and lead actor Aamir Khan were in Shanghai to promote the Chinese release of the film. The film officially will be released in the theaters on May 22.
Chinese comedian Wang Baoqiang gave the voice to the inquisitive alien played by Khan.
“We are very happy to bring the film here,” Chopra tells Shanghai Daily. “The most important thing is to bring the two countries and the people together, culturally. Politicians can make speeches and policy decisions, but we can join hearts.”
The film’s Chinese distributor hopes the film will mean “a comeback for Bollywood” in China. Indian movies once enjoyed a large following before the 1980s, but lost touch after that.
But the younger generation of Chinese, with big help from the Internet, are lapping up the latest films from the South Asian nation — complete with song and dance — and helping in gradually building up a market for Bollywood flicks.
“I was blown away when I first saw ‘Three Idiots’,” says 21-year-old Tina Zhang, who was among the crowd screaming at the cast of “PK.”
“I knew nothing about Indian movies or the country before I watched the film. I was in high school preparing for my college entrance exam when I saw this Indian film where the students share almost exactly the same problems as we do.
“The movie spoke to my heart, even in a language I did not understand,” says Zhang.
“Three Idiots” is considered the first Indian film to break the great wall of Chinese mainland’s film market.
It was No. 12 in the top 250 best movie list on popular film site douban, China’s IMDB, with a high score of 9.1 out of 10 from nearly half of a million ratings!
The Bollywood film critical of India’s education system won hearts of many, especially the younger generation of Chinese, who watched it through different channels before the movie was officially released here in 2011.
On the Chinese mainland, “Three Idiots” rolled in about US$3 million in the fiercely competitive December Christmas and year-end season.
The box office was nothing compared to its domestic Indian or other overseas markets, but impressive considering it was released more than two years after the Indian premiere, competing with limited screenings in a market dominated by action-packed Hollywood blockbusters and domestic romance movies.
“India is a country of multiple languages and multiple cultures. In its diversity, we have our strength,” Aamir Khan tells Shanghai Daily.
“So if we want to make ourselves relevant to any part of the world, we should be ourselves, we should be unique as what we are.”
“Three Idiots” marked the highest grossing Indian film released on the Chinese mainland film market. Only a handful of Indian movies were released in the past 15 years, not including the film festivals. Most of them were screened at very few theaters with even smaller box office revenue.
The success of “Three Idiots” and “Dhoom 3” shot up expectations on the satirical “PK,” which has already gained a large following in China through word-of-mouth publicity on the Internet and social media, despite its focus on religion, a topic not so crucial to average Chinese as it is to Indians.
It has already scored an 8.2 out of 10 from more than 40,000 ratings on douban — impressive considering it is yet to be released here.
“I was not interested in Bollywood before, or I knew nothing about it really, and thought it was just a lot of singing and dancing,” says 35-year-old Liu Han, who was forced to watch the film with his girlfriend.
“It has changed my image of Bollywood movies. I did not think Indians or Indian movies could be so cynically humorous and critical at the same time, so outspoken about sensitive religious issues,” Liu says.
Liu’s stereotype about Indian films is shared by many Chinese, who know little about Indian movies or how it swept through the generation of their parents and grandparents in the 1960s and 1970s.
At that time, Western movies were rarely shown in China. Only a select few of foreign films were screened here. Among them was Indian film “Awara” (known as 流浪者 in Chinese) that almost held sway over a generation of Chinese. It is almost a household name for those above 40 years old with its song, better known as the wanderer’s song, proving even more popular.
“It is a precious memory for my generation, part of our growth,” says the 45-year-old Chen Jianqiang, a post-production specialist with Shanghai Media Group. “The interest still holds and I am thinking about working on a feature film that touches on China-India ties.”
Chen has spoken to some of the younger people around him, those born after 1990, and found that they shared his interest in Bollywood films despite knowing little about them. They are attracted to the idea of a very different type of films from Hollywood or Chinese, with good music and dances with a mysterious, exotic and positive image.
“The definition of Bollywood is constantly changing, what was once the mainstream is no longer relevant,” Indian actor Khan says. “The good thing about Indian cinema is that the change indicates that something robust is happening. What at one time was considered experimental cinema, or off beat cinema, is becoming mainstream.”
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