Farah Khan's latest blockbuster, Om Shanti Om, asks the big questions. Namely, who needs Hollywood muscle when we've got Shah Rukh's six pack?
For many Bollywood fans, the Diwali showdown between Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Saawariya and Farah Kahn's Om Shanti Om was a battle of publicity to see whether two handsome fresh faces could stand up at the box office against Shah Rukh Khan's sculpted abs.
But the fact that Om Shanti Om took the top prize (not just in India, but overseas as well) shouldn't be simply interpreted as a win for a certain marketing strategy -- tempting as it may be to, once again, draw attention to SRK's greased upper body. Rather, Om Shanti Om's victory is a symbolic victory for Bollywood over Hollywood.
Every announcement for Saawariya made mention of the fact that it is the first Bollywood production funded by Tinseltown powerhouse Sony Pictures. In terms of set design and production values, one could argue that it displays a Hollywood veneer and is, without a doubt, one of the most technically lavishing Hindi films of all time. But audiences were only half interested. Its $16 million international opening was no small feat, but it couldn't match Om Shanti Om's almost $20 million.
One can call Farah Kahn's sophomore effort the opposite of Saawariya, which is in many ways the embodiment of Hollywood's increased interest in staking a piece of the impenetrable South Asian market. Om Shanti Om, on the other hand, is a symbol of just that impenetrability. Filled with in-jokes piled upon in-jokes, references to the corpus of popular Hindi cinema and an already-famous dance number featuring cameos by 31 (31!!!) of Bollywood's past legends and new superstars, Om Shanti Om pays off on the audience's vested interest in (and knowledge of) Bollywood as a self-sustaining, industrially-isolated, entertainment factory.
If Saawariya is centered on a pair of unknown young actors, Om Shanti Om is an ode to super-stardom. At one point in the film, we see Shah Rukh Khan's character, a movie star named Om Kapoor, standing on a bridge, looking at a billboard of himself in an advertisement for watches. But that's not Om paying tribute to his own superstardom. It's Om paying tribute to Shah Rukh Khan, who in real life is a spokesperson for Tag Heuer watches. Such double meanings can be read from beginning to end in the way the film repeatedly winks at the viewers who get the references.
Another example of this extravagant self-reflexivity is in one of the film's most hilarious scenes. The setting is the annual Filmfare Awards, during which we see Abhishek Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, and of course, Shah Rukh Khan parody their star personas in a series of ridiculous mock films with titles like Main Bhi Hoona Na, Dhoom 5, and Phir Bhi Dil hai NRI. If these titles aren't funny to you, then either you're a hard sell, or you're an outsider -- which precisely proves my point that Om Shanti Om doesn't just acknowledge Bollywood's impenetrability, but it revels in it, thumbing its nose at that other industry across the Pacific. The one that rhymes with Bollywood, but could never be it.
That attitude can be seen in the contrasts between the two films' uses of new actors. SRK's leading lady, Deepika Padukone is an unknown in Bollywood, but she's not a fresh face in the way Saawariya's leads are. In the case of Saawariya, the kids represent something new in Bollywood. Padukone, on the other hand, represents Bollywood's long-lasting ability to constantly replenish its ranks with talented and beautiful stars. This is flaunted in the scenes of Padukone's character being groomed for stardom in the film-within-the-film. And when she strolls down the red carpet and catches the eye of Om in the year's most mouth-wateringly sensational slow-motion, we see the birth of a star, not just within the film, but in the Hindi film world more generally. In such scenes, Padukone embodies the aura that is Bollywood.
Ultimately, Om Shanti Om is about the production of that aura. As in Singin' in the Rain (which the film's first half references), Om Shanti Om takes us behind the scenes of the film industry, not to deconstruct it, but to add to its wonder. In a scene in which the two lovers tour the backstage of a studio lot, you get the feeling that the boundary between the world of film and the "real" world is porous -- that a regular "junior artiste" can sing, dance, grin, and shoot lustful love glances like Shah Rukh Khan can. You come out wanting to believe in the industry's magic.
The film's first half also contains an incredible musical number with more set and costume changes than a Freed Unit musical, with SRK transforming from action star to badminton ace to puffy-shirted pirate in a matter of seconds, while the décor goes from retro flash to candy pastels with equal ease. The sets may not be as beautiful as the ones in Saawariya, but they visually display Bollywood as enchanting, indestructible, and peerless.
And to make Om Shanti Om's pro-Bollywood stance that much more explicit, there is the way it defines its villains and heroes. Let's just say that this is the kind of movie in which the bad guy is an Indian movie producer corrupted by Hollywood, and the good guy is the sort of man who knows that any dull film -- even arthouse dramas about traumatized paraplegics -- can be saved by the timely inclusion of a lavish disco number complete with scantily-clad females and pyrotechnics.
For if Saawariya points to (even pleads for) a future that sees Bollywood and Hollywood working in cross-cultural harmony (for the financial gain of Sony Pictures, of course), then Om Shanti Om tours the history of Bollywood and says with a shrug: why kowtow to the West, when we've already out Hollywood-ed Hollywood for the past half century? Now, there's nothing necessarily radical about such a stance -- it could simply be the Bollywood elite trying to keep power in its clutches. But Om Shanti Om's victory at the box office is a clear indication that Bollywood fans like to have their own stars, their own genres, and their own trashy, indulgent, gaudy sense of brilliant fun, and that Hollywood's hands are no match for Farah Khan's sizzling choreography and Shah Rukh's glistening abs.