Hooray for Bollywood. (Book Review).

Movies make the world go 'round. OK, so maybe not, but that's the message one gleans from Nasreen Munni Kabir's appropriately titled homage to Indian cinema, Bollywood: The Indian Cinema Story (Channel 4 Books, pp. 230). It's an often powerful narrative, but in the author's single-minded quest to prove India's cinematic superiority, she seems to forget that movies are not all that India has to offer to the world, thereby rendering Bollywood more trifling than triumphant.

The encyclopedic work reads like a veritable who's who of India's top film actors, directors and producers -- and readers quickly learn the identities of the many who contribute to Bollywood's signature vividness -- but there are more than a billion people residing in the southern Asian region, making it easy to forget all but the most prolific of the bunch.

It doesn't matter, really. According to Kabir, all movies in India have virtually the same plot: boy meets girl, girl's controlling father disapproves of boy, boy and girl cow-tow to controlling father and decide they don't need each other after all. It's a fairly depressing story, but the elaborately staged musical numbers interspersed throughout the tale lessen audience anguish significantly. The reason for such melancholy is that flicks must have a universal appeal, able to engage the modern and sophisticated movie patrons in urban areas, and the old-fashioned village-dwellers -- many of whom still adhere to India's antiquated caste system -- alike. Moviegoers don't spend their money to witness a unique story They pay for the spectacle, for the grandeur. They count on their tried-and-true formula, but they expect a lot from it. They insist that actors cast as heroes always play heroes and actors cast as villains always play villains. And while performers quickly tire of the often one-dimensional roles they are beholden to, Indian audiences won't accept anything else.

In addition to their inability to embrace change among the male actors, Indian cinephiles demand that female roles be just as clearly defined. Women who've played vampy roles in the past can't and won't be accepted as lily-white heroines in future films. Also, Kabir points out, females over the age of 40 are wives and mothers and nothing more. Showing them in a sexual context is unthinkable and just not done. This repression of female sexuality is nothing new to Bollywood. Early films featured males in the female roles because acting was considered an unladylike and disreputable profession for an upstanding member of the community, effectively barring women from the industry. When women finally did enter the biz, Hindu and Muslim actresses were looked down upon for their dishonorable behavior. Jewish and Christian actresses were somehow viewed as above the social stigma, and after some time, Hindu and Muslim actresses were also accepted as legitimate performers.

For a brief period in the 1970s and 1980s, a new type of heroine emerged in the shadow of the meek heroines of yesteryear. Part action-hero and part demure flower, these "Rambolinas" would honor their parents and mow down the bad guys in a single scene. But while it seemed for a time that Indian audiences would welcome these new female roles, they eventually tired of them and demanded that the heroines they used to know and love be restored.

Bollywood churns out more than 800 films a year, and one would think that many of India's aspiring actors would get a shot at stardom, but like Hollywood, it often seems that a minority of the thespians play a majority of the roles. Since Indian audiences are a fickle bunch, actors feel they must remain in the public eye or doom themselves to lives of anonymity. They accomplish this by working concurrently on multiple films, leading to an appalling level of unprofessionalism that wouldn't be tolerated in even the basest realms of Tinseltown. There, even the most luminous stars are aware that they could be replaced at a moment's notice. It seems that in Bollywood, the biggest names are irreplaceable, and they know it, leading to swelled heads, swelled budgets and ultimately, movies that could be better and could have been wrapped up more swiftly had the actors not double-booked themselves. Besides the amateurish look that is the awful trademark of a Bollywood film, the many languages and dialects of the area, as well as an inability to control on-set noise, lead to an inordinate amount of dubbed films, reinforcing a sense of artificiality and unreality for Indian films.

Kabir paints an intense picture of Bollywood, using the brilliant colors of India as her palette, but ultimately fails to convey the mystical and magical mystery that shrouds her beloved country and the kinds of movies it produces. She seems to want to categorize all the films, forgetting that many of the world's greatest cinematic gems are movies that defy classification, defy genre. Many great finds refuse to be reined in by the human desire to place all things into groups. Kabir seems unwilling and unable to recognize and accept a unique Indian voice in Bollywood. Her fondness for her subject is apparent throughout the work -- she treats it tenderly, like a wayward child. But just like a mother's love isn't always enough to lure the prodigal son out of darkness, so too can an author's love of topic just not be enough to save it from itself sometimes.