Beyond Bollywood’s Glitz, a Subtler Indian Cinema Embraces New Stories
It is an Indian film without song and dance. The lovers don’t share a word, their main interaction a fleeting moment of eye contact in the monsoon rain.
There are no car chases and no action stunts. The men are vulnerable. They cry. And yet when “Kaathal — The Core,” a film in the Malayalam language about a closeted middle-aged politician, was released last month, it became a commercial success as well as a critical one.
Cinemas in the southern state of Kerala, home to the Malayalam film industry and about 35 million people, sold out. That one of South India’s biggest stars had taken on the role of a gay man, and portrayed him so sensitively, started conversations well beyond Kerala.
Outside India, the country’s cinema is often equated with the glamour and noise of Bollywood, as the dominant, Hindi-language film industry is called.
