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Bombay
studios churn out a panoply of fat-woman love films we never get to see.
When we do see an Indian movie, it's from the other side of Indian, Satyaffit
Ray's russeet-brown Bengal. And so the welter of garish Neapolitan pinks
and blues, yellows and greens in Mira Nair's first feature comes as a
brilliant shock. Ostensibly the film tells the story of Krishna, a ten-year-old
circus boy who runs away to 'the nearest big city' where he learns to
fend for himself but its glory lies in the intricacy of a dozen interlocking
stories, making the plot as densely populated and complex as a nineteenth-century
novel's. Very quickly we come to know the good and bad points of a large
cast of utterly human low-life characters: the Madame and the virgin;
the gang of street-urchins; the pimp, the tea-seller and the dealer, all
of them resigned to the sweet street evils of Bombay. For her debut. Nair
has broken a mould: to the astonishment of the Bombay film community,
she insisted on filming not in a studio but in the vice-laden sums of
her story. She spent months rehearsing the children of those streets,
and then combined them with a few professional actors. The result is a
film which is impressively modest and impressively true. Long after the
screen is dark, you'll remember the ice-cream colours of Bombay. The Indian
new wave is born.
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