For all that talk of feminism, the film regresses a little towards the latter part when it strays into Madhur Bhandarkar territory when a broke heroine of dirty films has to resort to porn to save her house. And with that one scene, by depicting pornography as an evil compromise she must do,The Dirty Picture draws its moral line between the mainstream and the subaltern. All the good work is undone because we are told dirty pictures are OK for a woman of spirit, but soft-porn... No, too low? Talk about hypocrisy.
The recent spur of interest in Bollywood films or Indian popular cinema is not just an academic phenomenon. Critical texts by Satyajit Ray (Our Films, Their Films, 1983), Sumita S. Chakravarty (National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema: 1947-1987, 1993), Ashis Nandy (ed.) (Secret Politics of Our Desires, 1998), Parama Roy (Indian Traffic, 1998), Rachel Dwyer (All You Want is Money, All You Need is Love, 2000), and Vijay Mishra (Bollywood Cinema, 2002), among others, have been instrumental in legitimizing an investigation and theorizing of Hindi cinema within university departments. At the same time, a glossy chronicling of motion picture in India in the coffee-table art-book format, such as B.D. Garga's So Many Cinemas (1996), has made the low-culture artifact of Bollywood cinema a fashionable item of display in upper middle-class Indian homes. Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bollywood Dreams, a British musical based on the film genre, has made it to Broadway, and there has been a Hollywood parody of the over-the-top 'formula' in Hindi films (Guru). For the first time a Bollywood film (Lagaan) has been considered for the Oscar and has even found its way to the Blockbuster video rental shelf. The term Bollywood itself has become as familiar as Hollywood to global audiences, which also points to the significance of the growing discussion about Indian popular cinema as both a distinctly national cultural artifact and as a product of global postmodernism.
The Dirty Picture in hindi
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