In Gurinder Chadha's Cinema

Musical ‘Contact Zones’ in Gurinder Chadha’s Cinema Serena Guarracino UNIVERSITY OF NAPLES ‘L’ORIENTALE’ ABSTRACT This article explores strategies of cultural representation in the produc - tion of Gurinder Chadha, a British director of Sikh origin. Chadha’s work is located in what Marie Louise Pratt defines as ‘contact zones’, negotiating between US, European and Indian audiences. The result is a directing style that puts together ‘East’ and ‘West’, Bollywood and Hollywood, in an in-between space that has been radically reconfigured through hybridization. This happens in particular through her use of music and soundtrack, from the documentary I’m British but . (1990), up to the recent Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and Bride and Prejudice (2004). Here, many and diverse musical languages are put together through the representational strategies of parody and kitsch, deconstructing the idea of cul - tural identity in the very gesture that creates it. KEY WORDS Gurinder Chadha N contact zone N cut ’n’ mix N popular culture N post-feminist masquerade N South Asian diaspora There is always the possibility to transgress. (Said, 1991) A dark-skinned, blue-eyed DJ raps on the remix of a traditional Punjabi melody. Young KMD, son of diaspora, animates London clubbing nights where both South Asian and white youngsters come to dance and socialize to the sound of bhangra , a mix of Punjabi traditional songs, African- American rap and hip-hop, and disco music. The period, as we can infer from the profusion of backcombed hair and shoulder pads, is the late 1980s. Somewhere else and some time later, a whole town (Amritsar) dances and sings in celebration for a ‘marriage come to town’, a song in English set to a distinctly ‘Indian’ sound. As two brightly painted elephants dis - appear from screen taking away the dazzling red-clothed brides and their husbands, the end titles take us (the audience) to a totally different setting, the fountain at Somerset House, London. We have already watched this scene somewhere else in this film, featuring dashing Lalita (Aishwarya Rai) and hunky Will (Martin Henderson); here though, it is director Gurinder Chadha who dances with her husband, scriptwriter © The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/ journalsPermissions.nav European Journal of Women’s Studies, 1350-5068; Vol. 16(4): 373 –390; 342620; DOI: 10.1177/135050609342620 http://ejw.sagepub.com 374 European Journal of Women’s Studies 16(4) Paul Meyeda Berges, while the soundtrack shifts from ‘A Marriage Has Come to Town’ to the theme-song ‘Take Me to Love’, a markedly rhythm ’n’ blues, metropolitan song. Between these two scenes, from the documentary I’m British but . (1990) and the film Bride and Prejudice (2004) respectively, Indo-English director Gurinder Chadha frames the impressive variety of influences that mark her production. Her directing style makes use of a wide range of elements from both popular and high-brow culture as well as from many cultural milieus, whose very borders are called into question by their sharing the same representational space. This power of transgression is mainly exemplified by her use of music and soundtrack, that exceed any direct cultural reference to map what Giuliana Bruno has named ‘e motion ’: ‘the moving image – our nomadic archive of imaging – is implanted in this residual cartographic e motion . It is here, then, that we can try to rethink our current practices of psychogeographic mapping in the face of our hybrid histories’ (Bruno, 2002: 10). CINEMA, MUSIC, PERFORMANCE Chadha’s production will here be read, watched and listened to as a hybrid expression of the e motion produced by cinema through diasporic routes. Hybridity, the cultural métissage that characterizes metropolitan multiculturalism, needs to be mapped differently , not according to places of birth or native language, but considering the emotion elaborated in the motion , both the many routes of diaspora and the movement of the mov - ing image. On the other hand, though, cinema also plays a pivotal role in the construction of cultural identity, as Rey Chow remarks: . if cultural identity is something that always finds anchoring in specific media of representation (such as print, music, art, and now, increasingly, digital media), it is easy to see why, in modernity, the modes of illusory presence made possible by film would become such strong contenders in the competitive negotiations of cultural identity. (Chow, 2007: 15) Yet, while both Chow’s and Bruno’s work are almost exclusively con - cerned with the visual dimension of cinema, I believe their interdiscipli - nary terminology and methodology may be usefully applied to other ways of watching/listening to/feeling cinema. In particular, any attempt at mapping the strategies of cultural identity at work in Chadha’s films requires marking the decisive contribution of musical language in shap - ing the narratives her work brings forth. In particular, musical perform - ance sometimes contradicts the main narrative offered to the audience by image and plot, and it acquires a peculiar relevance in the definition and problematic status of cultural identity. Guarracino: Musical ‘Contact Zones’ 375 Musical performance is already at the forefront in Chadha’s first experience as director, the documentary I’m British but . (1990), and it prominently features in the recent Hollywood/Bollywood fantasia Bride and Prejudice (2004) as well as, although less explicitly so, in the worldwide success Bend It Like Beckham (2002). This article is primarily concerned with these three films, excluding other works that include a massive use of soundtrack as narrative device, together with references to Bollywood cinema. Yet, quite significantly, these three films stress the centrality of musical performance , either by UK-based bhangra singers, US singer Sharleen Spiteri or Indian actress Aishwarya Rai. 1 In these three examples, it is the body – in the last two examples, the female body – that marks the locus where identity and culture are negotiated and per formed through music. Yet, the technical side of cinematic language must be acknowledged: if we (the audience) are not presented with a disembodied voice, it is also true that we are not presented with a performing body either. Indeed, the loudspeakers give away the illusion that the voice we hear may be bound to the body on the screen without any residue, any trace left by the machine creating the cinematic illusion of unity between image and sound. And still this technology guarantees an ‘authentic’ representation of reality through the ‘suture’ of sight and sound, achieving what Kaja Silverman (1984: 132–3) calls the ‘representation of a homogeneous think - ing subject whose exteriority is congruent with its interiority’. As a con - sequence, in the representative economy of cinema, sound is inextricably bound to the moving image because, as the entry ‘Soundtrack’ in Routledge’s Key Concept series on cinema studies reads: ‘we pretend, accept that [sound] comes straight from the screen; if it is not in synch we notice it and do not particularly like this instance of sound drawing atten - tion to itself and pointing to the fact that what we are seeing up on screen is an illusion’ (Hayward, 2006: 361). Yet what happens when image and sound do not match, or where sound draws attention not to one, but to a plethora of performing bodies that become inscribed on the one we see on screen? This overlaying of sig - nifying practices breaks up the smooth surface of Chadha’s film, opening its otherwise naturalistic strategies of representation to the multilayered emotion performed by music. Music and sound are here considered as nar - rative and technical elements of film production, whose ability to cross the boundary of the screen exposes the slippery signifying practices oper - ating in Chadha’s work. Hence, sound emerges not only as a part of filmic representation, somewhat secondary to and depending on the image; it becomes, as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam suggest, a critical instrument that allows for a ‘sounding out’ of strategies of representation in main - stream cinema, a ‘ seepage across boundaries that . remodels spatiality itself’ (Shohat and Stam, 1994: 214) . 376 European Journal of Women’s Studies 16(4) As Chow’s remark quoted earlier underlines, cinema works as a tech nology for the construction of a cultural identity even across state borders and cultural gaps: this point is also made by Vijay Mishra, who argues that the (re)productions of the homeland in Bollywood cinema are an ‘auratic’ artefact: ‘in diasporas . the reproduced artifact has its own authenticity, its own aura – not in terms of monetized value, but in terms of authentic emotional capital’ (Mishra, 2002: 244). Although Mishra’s work mainly focuses on the South Asian diasporic audience and their per - ception (I could say their e motion , although Mishra does not refer to Bruno’s work) of the ‘authentic’ representation of India in Bollywood movies, I do find her point relevant for this discussion of Chadha’s work as it addresses the issue of how the identity of the South Asian diasporic community (especially in the UK and US) is elaborated through the rep - resentation of the ‘mother country’. 2 Mishra’s work successfully under - lines how film as technological ‘text’ has been reshaped by the pressure of diaspora. The reproducibility of film, first on the movie reel and today in the more portable DVD format, has spread the ‘eighth art’ on a global scale along diasporic routes, without any loss to its emotional impact and its power to trigger dynamics of identification. On the contrary, the never- ending reproducible cultural object acquires deeper and wider relevance in the cultures born and fed in diasporic milieus. In this new, globally widespread context, cinematic technology often supports the creation of cultural identity in Chow’s terms, or of what Marie Louise Pratt would call a ‘safe house’, a ‘social and intellectual space .

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