Colonialism 'Fair' game
The Write Stuff - Jonathan Bing
|
The British empire, whose decline and fall has long been a source of fascination for Hollywood, is set to crumble again in a handful of films that depict the perils of empire from the other side of the Union Jack.
The next post-colonial salvo could come from Universal's Focus Features and U.K.-based Granada Film, where helmer Mira Nair and writer Julian Fellowes, who won an Oscar for "Gosford Park," are developing "Vanity Fair," William Makepeace Thackeray's doorstop of a novel about Victorian society.
Set against the Napoleonic Wars, the novel offers a sharply satirical portrait of England's ventures abroad -- in India and Continental Europe.
Nair ("Monsoon Wedding"), who plans to set some of the film in India, said she's particularly interested in the corrupting influence of the money flowing into England from the colonies in the 19th century. Donna Gigliotti, former prexy of production at USA Films, is producing with Granada's Janette Day .
Ismail Merchant is also developing a new project, "Indians Win the Empire." Merchant, who with partner James Ivory is responsible for several films about England's ill-fated colonial ambitions (including "Heat and Dust") plans to direct the comedy, based on an original idea, about England as seen through the eyes of its growing Asian population. Merchant-Ivory exec VP Richard Hawley will produce.
AS THE WHITE HOUSE FLEXES its muscles around the world, expanding its role as imperial supercop, films that raise questions about the limits of global dominance are gaining currency.
"This is a world of which we have barely scratched the surface," said Merchant. "There are always power-hungry nations and people who want to gobble up others or extend their values to other countries. But we are now seeing a new colonial power, America, emerging, in which military might and economic power are playing the most important part."
Movies with high-handed lessons on foreign policy tend not to catch fire at the box office, but in Merchant's footsteps, a new generation of directors are taking an interest in the legacy of colonialism -- sometimes in the most unlikely ways.
Take Wes Anderson's "The Royal Tenenbaums," whose estranged patriarch, played by Gene Hackman, and slippery South Asian helpmeet, Pagoda (Kumar Pallana), personify the faded empire of some mythical, patrician New York.
Even M. Night Shyamalan's alien invasion blockbuster "Signs" dabbles with the idea that the real alien lifeform is a dark-skinned man, played by the Indian-born Shyamalan himself, living in Mel Gibson's predominantly Caucasian hometown. In a film that suggests there's no such thing as coincidence, is it a coincidence that the first aliens land in India?
FROM "GUNGA DIN" to "A Passage to India," Hollywood has wrested great stories from the dust of England's ill-fated foreign adventures. But there are other factors behind the latest wave of post-Colonial pics.
These days, there's no need for filmmakers like Nair and Merchant, tackling such themes on a grand scale in period dramas, to waste money on hot literary properties. There's already a treasure trove of material -- the collected works of Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad, for example -- in the public domain, ripe for the taking.
The globalization of the film business has also raised the profile of directors from Asia and Africa, among other places.
The Taiwan-born Ang Lee broke ground in 1995's "Sense and Sensibility" bringing to the Jane Austen classic the same meticulous attention to matters of class and status familiar from his earlier, Chinese-language films.
Both Merchant and Nair were born in India. In their wake, a new wave of Indian directors is chronicling the travails of cultural assimilation and dislocation. There's Gurinder Chadha, director of "Bend It Like Beckham," forthcoming from Fox Searchlight, and Deepa Mehta, whose "Hollywood/Bollywood" is opening the Canadian Perspective at the Toronto Film Festival.
The success of "Black Hawk Down," which grappled with the perils of U.S. intervention abroad, suggests mainstream filmgoers are well-disposed to such movies -- even if its director, Ridley Scott, had to smuggle his foreign policy message into a loud, effects-heavy blockbuster.
