The last stop in our Seven Samurai remake extravaganza marks yet another facet of international cinema. China Gate, unlike the name’s suggestion, hails from Bollywood, those most prolific of all moviemakers. Indian film is an enormous question mark to me, despite this prolificacy, as it plays almost entirely to a homegrown audience, populist entertainments which do not travel well abroad. There is little of the self-serious pretension which caters to the art house circuits which usually champion foreign language film.
Most Bollywood films inhabit the musical genre, almost wholly forgotten elsewhere. For all my ignorance of this field, I have evidence enough of this fact, as my best exposure to Mumbai movies comes of trolling dance numbers on YouTube. Eh, that, plus some old Sanjarit Ray, and Slumdog Millionaire, which really doesn’t count. So China Gate is for me an immersion into an almost totally alien filmic style, made easier by a familiar narrative.
“Our humble tribute to late Akira Kurosawa.”
Director Rajkumar Santoshi is undoubtedly aware of the Japanese masterpiece which informs China Gate. As this version is basically a contemporary-set Indian western – a Curry Western, the term goes – there is also, unacknowledged, as much relationship to The Magnificent Seven. Oh, and reading a little about Indian film history, one discovers the original Indian western, Sholay, from 1975, which also borrowed from those previous sources. It is not, however, a Seven Samurai remake, as it is equally influenced by unrelated westerns such as Once Upon a Time in the West and The Wild Bunch. So when China Gate premiered in 1998, Indian critics were somewhat harsh on it for being an antiquated copy of Sholay, stylistically, with little to say on its own. I’m at a loss here, but I’ve got something new for my Netflix queue.
Directorially, one can still recognize certain overused tricks, which lose their value with repetition – tricks like silhouetted horsemen, Peckinpah-esque slow motion, ham-fisted symbolic reference to vultures again and again.
But there’s a world of conversation in picking apart China Gate’s tone and style, and let’s first set the stage. The village of Devdurg, out in a desert region of India I cannot identify, is under repeated violent assault from the bandit Jagira (Mukesh Tiwari). As we are talkin’ violent, a celebration of decapitations and eviscerations to rival Vlad the Impaler. Not that China Gate shall be persistently vicious, for its tonal strangeness.
A woman from the village seeks aid from Colonel Krishnakant Puri (Om Puri, seemingly one of the major Bollywood stars). Actually, we see this first, before even a narrated flashback reveals Jagira’s villainies. China Gate is equally efficient in assembling the team of heroes Krishnakant shall lead, as it’s done with a single nigh incomprehensible montage, and suddenly we’re beset with eleven – eleven – leads all at once. Also a dog.
These are some major upsets to the standard Seven Samurai scenario, as seen in basically all other variations. The speed of team assembly, which eliminates the recruiting section – usually the most fun portion of these remakes. (Upping the count from 7 to 11 makes little never mind, other than losing many, many characters in the mix.) That’s because China Gate has an agenda far different from its fellows. See, these ten + Krishnakant are all former soldiers, of the Indian army, who were all disgraced and court marshaled over a bungled mission 17 years ago called China Gate – making the inevitable controversy “China Gate Gate.” Ah hah! So the China Gate focus is on their past, their present relationship, with this mission to defend Devdurg an attempt to restore honor.
Now…China Gate is over 3 hours long – it’s the longest of all such exercises, excepting Seven Samurai itself. Having glossed over the first hour and change in under 20 minutes, it expends far more time upon the act of defending the village itself. And unlike Seven Samurai, there really isn’t enough content to justify this length, except for the notion that Bollywood films need length by audience expectations, as film-going in India holds a different social position than it does elsewhere.
The remaining – yikes! – two and a half hours are made up partly of repetitive desert shootout clashes between the Eleven and the bandits. These are never conclusive in any way, and there is no real strategy to it. Never once is defense of the village a true concern. Instead, the Eleven just occasionally shoot at the bandits, and vice versa, with the Eleven always triumphing (and bandits riding off) entirely due to their status as good guys. This fits in with the broad populist notions India apparently employs, but it renders China Gate a rather mindless adventure film with certain aims at Indiana Jones-style greatness.
As long as I’m critiquing the action styling of China Gate, let’s talk the heroes. I’ve not yet distinguished them – the only one who stands out to a Westerner’s eyes is second-in-command Colonel Kewal Krishan Puri (yeah, they’re all called Puri, which probably means something). He is officially the greatest badass in the bunch, because actor Amrish Puri (Puri!!!) is a known entity – he played Mola Ram in Temple of Doom! Whoo! Hence, I only thought of his chubby, mustachioed soldier as “Mola Ram” throughout the pic, hopelessly awaiting an eventual heart removal which never came.
Anyway, this particular Puri has fattened up a bit since his days of ‘80s villainy. All the heroes are little chubsters, which is perhaps appropriate as they’re all aging men seeking redemption. Eh, except apparently all Indian action heroes are the same – the nation seems to celebrate the pudgy, slow, middle-aged man above all else, something noted in this marvelous Cracked article. (Also this one.) My various Indian friends (I go to a tech school) attest this is true, yet the female Bollywood starlets are basically all the Hindi equivalent of Megan Fox – i.e. young, hot, but dumb as gerbils. Apparently, one may only attain celebrity in India by dancing all good like, and Indian dances apparently favor female voluptuousness and male rotundness. Ah, the double standard!
Not that China Gate’s action should all be a shallow, misread aping of old Spaghetti Westerns and early Michael Bay…as that same Cracked article proves.
Getting back to topic, I’m not wholly sure what China Gate is going for. It seems intent to replicate the mood of Seven Samurai, despite the changes. And that mood is one of utmost seriousness, even in an adventure tale populated with successful moments of comedy and levity. Actually, Seven Samurai is a brilliant example of how comic relief can work in a non-comic work. China Gate doesn’t understand that balance. It attempts, for all its seriousness, as much tonal variety as any great epic, yet…each tone is conveyed as obviously as possible.
For China Gate’s comic relief: If something “funny” is happening, the soundtrack will over insist, with “wacky,” “zany,” “lunatic” noises and splats, done with unsubtlety even Benny Hill would scoff at. This is helpful, as nothing on screen is ever apparently a joke, at least not legible as such abroad…Except for the moment where I inappropriately laughed at a cow, which was probably wrong.
As for the drama: Eh, let’s call it melodrama instead. Again, the soundtrack is responsible for overselling this too, but let’s give some credit to the actors. Many beat their chests, quiver their voices, and let the tears flow freely, any time something remotely dramatic/serious goes on. Hell, the first meeting between the Eleven has more hand-wringing forced sorrow than you’ll find in the whole of your average Oscar bait. They’re sort of peaking early, as they’re already at 11 (in the Spinal Tap sense, not the “eleven guys in this movie” sense), with nowhere to go but repeat this same thing every time dramatics return. And there is great disparity between a good performer like Mola Ram and the lesser players, apparently trained in the styles of bad silent cinema vaudeville.
As for action: Well…soundtrack! Really, that thing is damned manipulative. Imagine what Hans Zimmer was putting out in 1998; then imagine an Indian copycat of that. Not effective.
Moving off China Gate topic, it shouldn’t be too surprising that Indian genre fare is dominated by shallow imitations of more wholly competent filmic styles. Their popular film stories create utterly random mishmashes of (usually) American movies, with no real sense or art. So, I’m told, we have the movie where E.T. must defeat an evil Spider-Man (citation needed). What irks me about this, having chatted re: films with my Indian pals, is that they now cannot distinguish between the proper, well done Iron Man film, and something done on 1/50th the budget and with dance numbers.
I am acting protective of our blockbusters which I feel do have some value beyond profit. This creates an air of cinematic stagnation, where audiences genuinely disregard the value of, say, Star Wars because they’ve already seen their knockoff, so why bother? But these are the audiences which would never give a black & white, foreign language flick like Seven Samurai a chance in the first place, so it’s just as well they received their local version.
And, sadly, like many a remake of a foreign film, China Gate intends to replace Seven Samurai in local minds as much as The Ring was meant to completely supersede Ringu in the U.S. And back to that notion of seriousness. Santoshi wishes to fashion something as human, as grand, though it’s clear the competence is not wholly there – not Santoshi’s fault perhaps so much as local conditions. If the cast attests, the acting is not up to snuff, not enough for dramatic consistency amongst the players. Tone cannot be established genuinely, meaning China Gate rather oversells its hand to make a point. And for a viewer schooled to embrace the more subdued pleasures of the original Samurai, this makes China Gate a very interminable slog of never-changing scenes and techniques. Shootout, montage, dramatic argument, romantic interlude, shootout, montage, you follow.
But the surest evidence of serious intent, in a Bollywood pic, is a near refusal to kowtow to that holiest of Bollywood traditions – the musical. China Gate was conceived as that rarest of things: a Hindi picture completely without songs! That’d be like releasing a Batman movie without Batman. But as all but the first of my screen caps can attest (Indian DVDs do not agree with my computer), that is not what happened. There is a musical number in China Gate, one which starts shortly into the third hour, which totally catches you off guard. It is easily the best part of the movie.
And here it is, in full.
That’s “Chama Chama,” an Indian pop song performed by Urmila (at least she dances to it; the vocals are somebody else). She is another major celebrity in the Bollywood firmament, and her eleventh (as it were) hour addition to China Gate assured some box office success. That, for all this scene’s wonderfulness, is a testament to how compromised China Gate is, how no Indian film can surpass the local cheesy requirements. Still, most of China Gate’s fame comes from “Chama Chama,” which was even featured in Moulin Rouge! Here, proof.
This dance has no place in China Gate, and isn’t even a substitute for a sex scene, as dances oft are. It just happens with a single edit totally out of the blue. And if my Indian chums are to be believed, this’d be the stage where theater audiences take to the aisles and themselves recklessly dance all about. Wow, it’s an entire nation of midnight Rocky Horror screenings!
My focus veers towards “Chama Chama,” as does everyone’s, because it is so much more successful than the rest of China Gate, done admittedly in a bit of a sub-MTV filmic style, but with a certain uncommon confidence. And China Gate wasn’t cheap! It’s sort of the Indian equivalent of its contemporary Titanic, in terms of running ridiculously over any previous industry budget. Ah, but China Gate went the way we thought Titanic would go, proving only mildly successful to a disinterested audience. It turns out Bollywood boosters were not ready for a relatively self-serious affair, even if it has that tonal lumpiness which seems to define the industry. And viewers outside of India had no need for a falsely artful movie, like if Dan Brown tried to write at the level of James Joyce.
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China Gate may be the final feature length film to officially remake Seven Samurai, but there’s more to this exploration even now. We travel back to Japan for the 50 year anniversary of Seven Samurai, 2004, to find among the celebrations the first Japanese reworking of what was originally a Japanese work. “Samurai 7” is an anime retelling of the Kurosawa story, and in certain ways it is the most respectful adaptation. Many scenes of dialogue appear directly out of the original, and the story follows the same beats quite faithfully…to a point. See, “Samurai 7” is a TV show (hence it falls outside of this blog’s primary purview), so it stretches the 3.5 hour narrative even further, into a mighty 26 episodes – we’re talkin’ one episode per member of the group, and then some. And owing to its animated status, “Samurai 7” takes advantage of its medium, filling feudal Japan with a steam punk mélange of robots, spaceships, whatever else an insane imagination can dream up. I am partway through this series, watching it even though it won’t get treated here.
It’d be nice to claim the final Seven Samurai effort as belonging to Japan, and for the immediate time being it is. Rather distressingly, the Weinstein Company has long been discussing the possibility of doing another American Seven Samurai remake. What’s enraging about this isn’t the concept, seeing as we’ve already seen The Magnificent Seven, Kill a Dragon, and about 7 other similar efforts. But all with enough decency to claim their own names. Weinstein’s villainous droogs seem intent to maintain the Seven Samurai name itself, in a complete lack of respect for the source material, same as the long-threatened Rashomon remake. (Which already got its own western remake, The Outrage, as nearly no Kurosawa samurai epic can avoid a western remake – See also Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars, and The Hidden Fortress as…Star Wars?! Wow! [Okay, I already knew that one.])
What’s especially idiotic about this looming possible remake isn’t just its mere existence, but some specifics. In order to “contemporalize” it (why why why?!), it’ll be set not in the past, and not in Japan, for who cares about that? Nah, it’ll be about modern mercenaries rescuing a village in war-torn Burma…Wait, I’ve seen this movie! It was called Rambo – the fourth Rambo, that is, the one actually named that. Which means, yes, Rambo is another example of the Seven Samurai template reappearing in action cinema. Rambo is not a remake, not officially (besides, I gotta save the Rambo franchise for another day). It just goes to show ya how hugely important Seven Samurai has been already, and how foolish it is to try co-opting that name.
RELATED POSTS:
• No. 1 Seven Samurai (1954)
• No. 2 The Magnificent Seven (1960)
• No. 3 Kill a Dragon (1967)
• Nos. 4 - 8 (1979 - 1993)
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