SKIN FLICK: Poster of a Bollywood film

In search of spicy curry

Here’s not such a tricky question ? what do Arundhati Roy, Aishwarya Rai and Nandita Das have in common?

The answer, of course, is they have all been served up on the Cannes jury by the French as examples of delicious Indian women ? Arundhati in 2000, Aishwarya in 2003 and Nandita this year.

About the only Indian I have not met this year at the time of writing is Nandita. As a jury member, she is expected to see all the films in the main competition ? this often means an 8 am to midnight work schedule ? and not talk to the press.

But leaving aside the big names in the film business (eg. Subhash Ghai, Mallika Sherawat, Aishwarya herself who dropped in for a day, Sudhir Mishra), there are scores more Indian faces this year. And the number of parties, themed around Bollywood, have also gone up.

After several days away in Europe, negotiating treaties with Italy and suchlike, Jaipal Reddy, minister of information, broadcasting and culture, was clearly missing his desi khana.

Indian embassy staff from Paris, who came to organise his Cannes programme, asked him what he would like to have for dinner.

“What about Indian?” asked the minister politely.

The embassy staff put their collective foot down.

“Definitely not,” they chorused.

Quite right, too. Cannes is not known for its curry ? there is only one Indian restaurant, anyway, about which I have had mixed reports.

What about French, they wondered.

“Will it be spicy enough for me?” he asked.

Most of the Indians, though, are more in the mood for spicy films (mind you, the raunchiest posters come from Bollywood these days).

Judging by provocative film titles, the hottest ticket so far as Indians are concerned is a movie called Sin City.

LIMELIGHT: (Top) Akbar Khan before a poster of his film Taj Mahal in Cannes; Nandita Das, German director Fatih Akin, Salma Hayek and Spanish actor Javier Bardem, at the festival

Taj revisited

Once again I might find myself in a minority of one but I very much enjoyed Akbar Khan’s Taj Mahal. Probably, this is a movie which will do better with the masses than with scholars of Urdu or Mughal history ? though Akbar claims his film is historically accurate.

I don’t know who Zulfikar Syed is but he turned in a brilliant performance as Prince Khurram (the young Shah Jehan). Some of the music was wonderful, too.

Manisha Koirala, who plays Jahanara, confirmed the high opinion I have had of her as an actress ever since I saw her in Bombay. I know the poor girl gets a lot of stick over her alleged drinking problems but there is something fine and quite lovely about her screen presence. I saw the film in Palais D which has a small screen. This is a big movie which would look magnificent on a giant screen. No doubt others will quibble but I loved the sound of Urdu mixed with so much Persian. Whether, like Mughl-e-Azam, Akbar’s movie becomes a classic remains to be seen but I have resolved that when I return to London, I will reread my Mughal history.

ONE MAN AND A BOAT: Srichand Hinduja on his yacht

Backstage

ASHOK AMRITRAJ is the token Indian in Hollywood who used his hired yacht, the Moon Maiden, to host nightly parties where he revealed he wants to make a multi-million dollar American movie, in which “an Indian girl falls in love with an American man”.

BHUVAN LAL, the Indian journalist who writes for Screen, gets my award for the man of the match. Bhuvan somehow brazens his way into the most restricted of parties. Sometimes, he is accompanied by an Indian woman (perhaps a Deepa in real life), dressed to the nines, whom he introduces to burly security men as “Aishwarya ? she’s a star.”

Bhuvan pointed to the Martinez, the exclusive hotel right on the Croisette where some of today’s top stars stay. “Dr Karan Singh was born there in 1932 or ’33,” he said suddenly.

His father, Maharajah Hari Singh, was apparently holidaying in Cannes with his wife when his son was born.

DREAM THEME: Assamese filmmaker Sanchayita Sharma

FARRUKH DHONDY, who has cornered the market in writing scripts, has done a very good job with Red Mercury, a fast-moving thriller set in London and produced by London-based Inspired Movies.

We learn in the film that one of the three young Muslim men, who threaten to blow up London with a dirty bomb, learnt his physics at King’s College, Cambridge.

The fellow could easily have gone to another Cambridge college ? Pembroke, for example.

Farrukh is not amused. “You are mad if you think I would have him go to my old college,” he responds.

PAUL BERGES MAYAEDA has finished filming Mistress of Spices, which is in post-production in London. He said that Aishwarya Rai “is wonderful in the movie”, which is an opinion he would hold even if he wasn’t the director. ADITYA MITTAL, son of steel tycoon, Lakshmi Mittal, slipped into Cannes in his yacht, I am told, held a party and then left equally inconspicuously.

SANCHAYITA SHARMA, a glamorous Assamese film director who left her native Guwahati to settle in London four years ago, has brought a 27-minute feature, The Passage, which examines the effect of terrorism on ordinary people in Assam. She has sunk her entire saving of ?50,000 into the venture. You don’t have to be mad to make films but it helps. “Films are my passion,” she says. That is probably what unites most of the people who have come to Cannes this year from over 90 countries.

And that is what we need in Goa.

SRICHAND HINDUJA arrived in Cannes with three mobiles to save money ? one is his London mobile, the second his Mumbai mobile and the third is local for Cannes. No wonder he can afford a villa and a yacht.