France bets on Bollywood – Picture postcard scenes of France in Befikre

This news has been read 7700 times!

NEW DELHI, Dec 6, (Agencies): As France contends with a drop in tourist numbers following a series of deadly attacks, the government is hoping that a new Bollywood romantic comedy can help it lure Indian visitors.

From the golden beaches of the Cote D’Azur to the roof of the Paris opera house and the historic bridges of the Seine, the blockbuster movie “Befikre” — “Carefree” in English — is filled with picture postcard scenes of France.

The makers of the blockbuster movie, which hits Indian screens on Friday, say it is the first Bollywood production to be shot entirely on the French mainland.

For French ambassador to India Alexandre Ziegler the new movie, which features Bollywood star Ranveer Singh and Vaani Kapoor, is worth “all the marketing campaigns in the world”.

“In a country like India, the impact of movies on the dreams people have of visiting an unknown place and on the desire to discover is absolutely huge,” Ziegler told AFP.

“It is without doubt the biggest influence over travel today for the Indian middle classes.”

Top tourist hotspots around the world have recently focused on Chinese visitors, but are increasingly setting their sights on neighbouring India.

The country’s burgeoning middle class is travelling abroad in growing numbers, with 50 million forecast to do so by 2020, up from just 20 million in 2014.

Last year 524,000 Indians travelled to France, a figure dwarfed by the number of Chinese and Japanese visitors but which is growing rapidly.

Sophie Lacressonniere, marketing director of the promotional agency Atout France, says the Indian client base is also “resilient to security fears”, a key factor in the wake of recent attacks in France.

Other European countries have already enjoyed the Bollywood effect — the number of Indians visiting Spain doubled in 2012 after the release of the hit road movie “You Won’t Get This Life Again”, parts of which were shot there.

Imaginations

Switzerland meanwhile has long loomed large in the imaginations of Indian travellers.

Its snow-capped peaks and quiet rural villages were immortalised in the cult films of the Bollywood director Yash Chopra, who died in 2012.

All of which meant the French authorities pulled out all the stops when they were first contacted by the makers of “Befikre” last year.

As with most Indian movies, the schedule was tight and the crew spent around 50 days shooting in France in the spring.

Lacressonniere says she is now working with French operators to try to organise tours that take in the places where the film was shot.

A model of Ranveer Singh will make its debut at Paris’s Grevin wax museum next year, and more Bollywood projects are said to be in the pipeline.

Ambassador Ziegler believes that in the future France may even get as many Indian visitors as Chinese — 1.7 million of whom travelled there in 2014.

Calling “A Kid” a nice family drama may sound faintly damning, but the fact is the film is just that, a solidly crafted story about a man discovering that his late father, Jean, had another family, told with the right dose of emotion, without sex, and with a finish designed to leave a warm and quasi-tearful glow. In lesser hands, “A Kid” would have tipped into bland sentimentality, but Philippe Lioret (“Welcome”) is a master at weaving narratives that balance a sufficient degree of psychological depth with good old-fashioned storytelling know-how. Though the midsection is weak, the movie compensates with a well-played ending that makes it a natural for mainstream Francophone art houses, not to mention Euro satcast rotation and in-flight entertainment.

At 33, Mathieu (Pierre Deladonchamps, “Stranger by the Lake”) appears vaguely unsatisfied with his life as a dog-food sales executive in Paris. His relationship with ex-wife Carine (Romane Portail) is good, he’s an involved dad to son Valentin (Timothy Vom Dorp), yet he seems to be treading water. Then he gets word that the father he never knew has died in Canada, leaving two other adult sons, and he decides to go to Montreal to meet the family he was unaware existed.

Mathieu’s sole contact is the person who broke the news by phone, his father’s friend Pierre (Gabriel Arcand). At the airport Pierre appears demonstrably annoyed that Mathieu made the journey, urging him to keep his existence a secret from half-brothers Benjamin (Patrick Hivon) and Samuel (Pierre-Yves Cardinal). It’s all very perplexing to Mathieu, whose mother died eight years earlier sticking to her story that she’d had a one-night stand and never revealing even his father’s name.

Making matters more complicated, Jean drowned in a lake and his body hasn’t been found. Benjamin and Samuel head north to the site in the hopes of finding their father’s remains; Pierre reluctantly agrees to bring Mathieu along provided he doesn’t tell the brothers that he’s the half-sibling they don’t know about. Here’s where the script sags a bit, as tensions between Benjamin and Samuel feel forced (money and religion come into play), and their interactions could have been better played. More meaningful and considerably more satisfying are scenes with Mathieu at Pierre’s home, where Pierre’s wife Angie (Marie-Therese Fortin) and their daughter Bettina (Catherine de Lean) offer insight into Jean and his family while extending warmth and understanding to the slightly bewildered Frenchman.

Lioret sets up Pierre’s family dynamics as an antidote of sorts to Jean’s more fractured household, but in keeping with the helmer’s quietly unassuming style, he reveals that loving families come in all forms, and that surfaces rarely offer views into what lies beneath. “A Kid,” very loosely adapted from a novel by Jean-Paul Dubois, plays with these notions in a straightforward yet layered manner, contrasting forms of fatherhood without passing judgment. The film also juxtaposes Mathieu’s French laissez-faire outlook with the Canadians’ more unyielding mindset, in which secrets are allowed to stew and bubble over in sometimes violent ways. That said, there are barely any true fireworks here, just the kind of gradual understanding that comes with hard-won maturity.

Deladonchamps plays a seemingly more conventional character than in recent films, but Mathieu is never less than an interesting figure, decent and kind without being wishy-washy. That’s a good summation for the whole film: handsomely made, gently told, and revealing depths that weren’t so apparent from the beginning.

This news has been read 7700 times!