Sholay, olé!

>>The Bollywood Bike-in offers booze,
beats and Bachchan’s big breakout
on the Lachine Canal

INDIANS PLAYING COWBOY: Scenes from Sholay

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

The universe of Bollywood, the Indian film industry, is vast and complex, and commands amazing passion in its devotees. Regardless, it wouldn’t be too hard to achieve consensus on the 1975 hit film Sholay being a good place for newbies to get on board.

“I polled a lot of film resources—students, professors, general Bollywood aficionados—and in their top-10 lists, that’s the one that came back again and again,” say Pop Montreal’s Patricia Boushel, organizer of this weekend’s Bollywood Bike-in screening/dance party at the St-Ambroise terrasse, out back of the McAuslan brewery in St-Henri. “Because of the nature of the event being a bike-in, going to see a movie outside, it could draw any number of people with any number of film interests, so I thought it was important to show one that had mass appeal.”

Given that Sholay, aka Flames or Embers, is the highest grossing film in Indian history, “mass appeal” would certainly apply—a flop on release, word of mouth built momentum, and soon the packed houses were echoing the iconic dialogue, karaoke-style. True, Sholay doesn’t boast the splendorous song-and-dance sequences or impressive production values of modern Mumbai movies like Devdas or Paheli, though it does have a few musical numbers and a frequently freaky score by the late, great R.D. Burman. On the other hand, whereas many Bollywood films can be a long, maudlin haul between the bright, bouncy bits, Sholay’s an attention-grabber from the first frame to the last.

Produced and directed by the father-and-son team of G.P. and Ramesh Sippy, Sholay is clearly inspired by the wackier spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, mingling gruesome gunplay—it’s a revenge yarn par excellence—and goofball antics, and it in turn triggered a wave of “curry Westerns.” Sholay also cemented the superstar trajectory of Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood’s answer to Pacino and de Niro (if they could dance, fight convincingly and measure six feet without a milk crate). Decked out in disco duds, the future king of Bollywood proved equally adept at action, romance and comedy, the same equation that made Chow Yun-Fat China’s coolest export.

But other than a duet on a motorcycle, what does Sholay have to do with a bike-in? The venue of Boushel’s event, dig, is best reached via the Lachine Canal bike path—just keep pedalling west till you hit the Eadie locks.

“It’s a part of Pop Montreal’s incentive, or M.O., to use alternative spaces and bring culture out of the movie theatre, out of the concert hall, and onto the streets, out in your backyard, out along the canal—there are some really interesting nooks along the fringes of the city, like industrial spaces. We discovered the St. Ambroise terrasse as a really interesting backdrop for an alternative event such as this one. There’s the canal on one side, but there’s also these huge grain silos there. We’re gonna be setting the screen up right in front of it, and it’s just such a stunning backdrop for seeing films or art projected.”

Or more Bollywood clips, which Boushel hopes to mix up as visuals for the dance-party part. “Immediately following the Bollywood film, we’re gonna be doing a lot of bhangra. Ghostbeard and Khiasma are gonna be pretty much tag-teaming, and they’ve been scheming over that for the past week.”

With DJs Ghostbeard, Khiasma,
A-Rock, Hatchmatik and Merk Meny at the
McAuslan Brewery’s St-Ambroise Terrasse (5080
St-Ambroise) on Friday, Aug. 10, 7 p.m., free