Bollywood Beats Big Brother in Bucharest

Romanian TV viewers last Sunday consummated their simmering love affair with Bollywood.

A classic Hindi film from the 1970s, replete with swaying hips and swishing sarees, fought off competition from the Romanian version of the global reality-TV franchise, Big Brother, to attract the biggest prime-time television audience for the evening.

Viewing figures for the vintage blockbuster, Yaadon ki Baraat, or A Procession of Memories, were nearly double those for the other channels, whose output for the evening included an Elton John concert as well as a big-budget US thriller featuring Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones.

Sunday's extraordinary audience figures show Romania's infatuation with Indian cinema has come of age. But those who have been watching Bollywood make inroads into the country were not surprised.

"More and more people are hoping for a miracle to deliver them from poverty, and they are turning to the happy fictions shown on television," said Petrisor Obae, a media analyst for the weekly, Capital. "Indian movies fit the bill perfectly."

Bollywood is the catch-all term used to describe the Hindi-language films produced in the Indian city of Mumbai, or Bombay, as it was once known. With thousands of films coming out of Mumbai every year, reaching audiences of millions in India and abroad, Bollywood can claim to be the film capital of the developing world.

According to the critics, however, the world's most prolific movie industry is also its most formulaic. Plotlines typically feature a boy and a girl who fall in love but cannot marry until they have overcome obstacles of class, caste or religion - personified by scheming suitors and villainous uncles. The story invariably has a happy ending, which is ushered along by countless song-and-dance routines.

Romania's relationship with Bollywood began over thirty years ago, when the film, Aawara, or Vagabond, took the country by storm, breaking box-office records. The heady mixture of the exotic and the downright escapist proved popular in communist Romania, and Bollywood blockbusters were screened throughout the country during the Sixties and Seventies.

Makeshift cinemas would play the latest subtitled Hindi hits to crowds of hundreds in far-flung Romanian villages - in a setting that echoed the one in which the films were viewed by many Indians.

India's cordial relations with Moscow during the cold war enabled Bollywood's fame to spread throughout Soviet Russia's sphere of influence, where western films were forbidden. After the fall of communism in the early Nineties, these markets were flooded by American cultural imports - but now, Bollywood is staging a comeback.

Daniela Chelu, a 50-year-old who works as a housekeeper, explained her love for Bollywood, "These movies remind me of my youth. We watch for two hours or so, and forget what problems we have. It makes us want to see more."

With her earnings of less than 80 US dollars a month, Chelu is typical of Bollywood's Romanian fan base. According to Petrisor Obae, "These films are mostly seen by people over 35, who belong to the lower working class and are educated, at most, to high-school level."

Roughly 30 per cent of Romania's population of 22 million lives below the poverty line.

Obae, who admits it is hard to explain how Hindi cinema came to exercise such a hold over Romania's imagination, says its success is down to "a mixture of nostalgia and a sensibility that enjoys Asian music and the happy ending".

Cultural studies expert Cezar Paul Badescu agrees, "Songs and dances, as well as colourful costumes, are part of the Indian world. But most people here are also close to this, shall we say, Oriental way of life."

Badescu also thinks Indian film songs play a major role, "The music moves the love story. It lends a setting, and helps people fall in love with the character. And Romanians like this."

There may be another factor behind Bollywood's surging popularity. According to a recent poll, Romanians watch the most TV in Europe - averaging four hours daily during the week, and six hours on weekend days.

Cinema and outdoor sports, which were once the biggest pastimes in Romania, have become increasingly costly. Private television stations, most notably Antena 1, are well aware of this, and have worked out an enticing schedule of Hindi blockbusters to keep audiences glued to their sets.

For Daniela, Bollywood's popularity in Romania is down to its skill at creating domestic melodramas. "The themes of most Indian movies are family values. Romanians are by nature very emotional people," she said.

Romanian viewers' responses to Sunday night's film back Daniela up.

Commenting on a movie website, Antonescu Mirela, said, "This movie was wonderful. I watched it with my mother and father and we were dancing all the time. My parents know the songs from the movie by heart."

Leonard Piron wrote in, "Please don't argue against Bollywood films. These are movies for the heart and the soul."

Marian Chiriac is an IWPR contributor in Bucharest