A friend was telling me this story sometime ago. A teacher back when he was in his school apparently used to act small parts in films. And all the students were fascinated by seeing their teacher in the big screen at the cinema hall in Fikkal. So after watching this particular film where the teacher appears in a scene explaining the death of a buffalo he tells me, the friends all went up to him and asked “How did you bring the buffalo down?”

“So our teacher would say, very mildly, he was a mild man, he tells us, ‘they have a syringe with a medicine to bring it down’”, he says laughing on having encountered the memory.

It came on a time when were watching this South Indian movie in the television, middle of the day. It had the main hero in an action sequence involving him rolling on shards of glass while the heroine dances an all important Tandab dance on him (as he rolls), to keep continuation of a long kept tradition, that the villains are trying to break.

There are also things like, two warring clans in a rustic Indian village whose tradition of revenge is to kill a member of the opposing clan soon as the blood on the shirt of a recently murdered kin dries to yellow, an unbreakable promise the hero makes to a dying lover (who dies while trying to protect the hero’s life in front of a Shivaji shrine) and so on.

Sometimes I don’t know how these films work. I am more baffled by the Nepali films. There are gaping loopholes in the plot, the acting especially by the lead actors is bad, the sequences and just the amount of morality is irritatingly unrealistic. Sometimes characters fluctuate with such ease, you know there is no character at all, you can almost imagine the hero coming on sets, looking at his dialogues and reiterating them off the back of his hands, movie after movie.

Even the disappearances of some important co-characters in the middle of the film, without any substantial explanation goes for the final cut.  And yet, none of this seems to dent our cinema’s popularity among the masses it is intended at. Then me and my cousin had a discussion about it and we came to the conclusion that, this market that understands and relates to these films, are influenced by it and influences it being made, they believe in it enough to be suspended in its fiction.

If I come to think about it, there are no “superior” or “inferior” films per se. Every cinema’s intention is to make its audiences believe that what is happening in the screen is real. Even when you know the shots every scene is composed of for unblinking continuity and variance, it can be difficult for you to come out of that essential illusion. Good or bad, the moving images hold up enough, and sometimes barely so, to make one believe.

And it is interesting how such a massive population is eager to be pulled into it, to watch and believe in something they might relate to exactly or stretch their imaginations enough to do so. We all love to be suspended in the fiction of constructed reality, to believe in that essential entertainment.

Chiya-Pasaley loves tea and writes about conversations that originate along the hours spent on drinking many cups of it. Besides that he is curious about many things and especially the rural-urban divide, and the coming of modernization to Nepal. He writes on the mundane and the very fantastic, and everything in between.

www.parakhi.com/blogs