The Quantico Shift

The Quantico Shift

Talk about a cut to relevance in the present day. Priyanka Chopra has gone international, breaking through both the ethnic and gender barrier in doing so.

There has been, of course, talk of a possible black Bond, and even a female one of late, though the Ian Fleming purists can’t yet see how, any more than the Broccoli clan of 

James Bond movie producers can.

But the longest playing big budget franchise in Hollywood movie history stands changed quite a bit too. M has been played by a woman, the formidable Dame Judy Dench, for some time now. There has been a Malaysian Bond girl, of Chinese extraction, Michelle Yeoh, way back in 1997, no doubt with an eye to the massive South East Asian market and diaspora. There was also the rumoured consideration of  our own Aishwariya Rai Bachchan as an Indian Bond girl.

But what happened here is that another Indian beauty queen and Bollywood  movie star Priyanka Chopra, got herself a very good stateside agent. And ergo, she got results that were a good cut above the other two-way crossover artists from Bollywood.

She first test-marketed the western waters with her singing, recording and releasing an English pop song in collaboration with American rapper will.i.am that became a significant hit. And then, based on its success, Priyanka recorded as many as 45 other songs subsequently.

Then she bagged a starring role in brand new FBI drama TV series Quantico, recently debuted, and released in a 100 countries simultaneously.  While Quantico, Virginia, is the largest marines training base in the US in real life, the TV serial is probably a tip o’ the hat at the growing multi-ethnicity of the US, and indeed much of present day Europe too, in terms of its multi-racial casting.

Priyanka Chopra’s work in the series as FBI agent Alex Parrish, half Indian half Caucasian, has been broadcast in two episodes so far. It has been well received, beating another near simultaneous launch called Blood and Oil convincingly.

Chopra herself has been critically praised, and her ABC produced show has received good ratings as per Variety (US), with 6.9 million viewers per episode and rising. ABC, encouraged by the reception to its fast-paced and thriller plotted offering, is planning to put in repeat broadcasts to further enhance its viewership. And this is not counting Quantico’s reception in the 99 other countries its beaming to, including India.

Priyanka’s chosen launch vehicle in the field of Western entertainment is markedly different from that of all her peers in Bollywood. This, coming after a sustained stint as an A lister in Hindi cinema, where she is still in great demand.

In fact,Chopra has several films that highlight not just her looks, dancing ability and star appeal, all musts in Hindi cinema for top billing; but also her acting prowess, including  in ones called Barfi and Kaminey.

While the first episode of Quantico itself received favourable reviews, calling Priyanka Chopra  the show’s ‘best asset’, it remains to be seen how it does down the turnpike. As Chopra herself said in a recent interview - in India, her movies release on Friday and by Monday the box office collections tell you how you’ve done. But in a TV serial, the expectations are renewed every week.

The remarkable thing about Priyanka’s role as Alex Parrish, and that of her multi-racial/gender colleagues all training to be and working as FBI agents and analysts,  is  probably best stated by the current real-life FBI director.

He  says he is actually struggling to diversify the  overwhelmingly ‘white and male’ line up of  ‘bureau’ agents to reflect the new American reality.

Some other actors, from the UK’s Indian diaspora, have been working steadily on both sides of the Atlantic and sometimes in India too. Notably, there is Art Malik, famous from the award winning Jewel in the Crown(1984); the late greats Saeed Jaffrey and Zohra Sehgal. And the versatile Roshan Seth, who also played Nehru in Attenborough’s Gandhi, wherein home grown theatre director and adman  Alyque Padamsee played Jinnah.

Om Puri too more or less works only in English language films, mainly in the UK, after featuring in City of Joy(1992). Naserudeen Shah got to play Captain Nemo of the Nautilus in League of Gentlemen but has no lead roles there though he rarely plays the lead in India as well. Similar is the story with Irrfan Khan, another very fine Indian actor, as yet based in India, occasionally working abroad.

From a more recent vintage, there is Parminder Nagra, first introduced to the world in Bend it Like Beckham, and Dev Patel from Slumdog Millionaire along with home based star Anil Kapoor,  who have all taken the plunge into American TV serialdom, all well before Chopra.

Nagra essayed a role in Blacklist in the first season, and a long standing one in ER. Dev Patel is quite a prominent character in The Newsroom   where he plays an Indian IT nerd. And Kapoor worked in 21.  Freida Pinto, moved to the West permanently now, after being discovered in Slumdog Millionaire , has also worked in a number of middling feature films since.

But none  of these many actors have begun with the kind of pivotal starring role in a major and mass market production that Priyanka Chopra has bagged! Anil Kapoor is, in fact, making the Hindi version of 21 for Indian TV, and making sure he stars big in it now.

Priyanka’s chosen route outwards is also very differently thought out from the Cannes red carpet walking Aishwariya Rai Bachchan, fellow beauty queen and Bollywood star. Aishwariya, sometimes called ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’, acted in and adorned quite a few Hollywood movies alongside famous Hollywood actors, but alas without herself making much of an impact.  She does rather better being brand ambassador for a number of international luxury brands because she does photograph incredibly well.

Even her father-in-law, the 72 year old durable doyen of Indian popular cinema,  and living legend Amitabh Bachchan, only put in a fleeting appearance in Baz Luhrman’s flourescent version of the poignant  Scott Fitzgerald  classic The Great Gatsby.

If Priyanka Chopra’s first substantive acting effort overseas clicks episode after episode and segues into several seasons, she will become an international star too.

One other Indian has been down this path but long ago. He is Kabir Bedi, a handsome hunk and model in his heyday, but no great actor beyond the English language stage where he made the role of Tughlaq directed by Alyque Padamsee memorable. He, like Dalip Tahil after him, also from Padamsee’s English theatre stable, also made a large number of forgettable Bollywood films.

And then Bedi tried his luck abroad, in the late seventies, and found fame and fortune starring as a wildly popular and swashbuckling pirate in Sandokan, an Italian TV mini- series.  Bedi is fluent in Italian and still popular there. He was knighted by the Italian President as recently as 2010.

Sandokan, however, did not travel well in those celluloid days, way before digital copies, routine dubbing, international distribution agreements for European language  productions, and of course, satellite broadcasting.

But Bedi did work extensively nevertheless, but in lesser roles on both prime time and daytime TV serials in the US, and also, quite famously as the villain Gobinda in Octopussy, the Bond film, partly filmed in Udaipur.  

Omar Sharif  however, was probably the first to make the transition from East to West, way back in the sixties, moving from popular Egyptian movies of the 1950s to Hollywood. And once there, competing in sheer male beauty with Peter O’Toole in David Lean’s magnificent Lawrence of Arabia(1962).

Then came Doctor Zhivago (1965), again directed by David Lean, magnificently bringing Pasternak’s wonderful novel of love, sacrifice and revolution to the screen. It once again not only featured, but starred the accented and long eye-lashed actor, in the pivotal role of Zhivago.

Sharif ran through the rest of his long acting career, performing both in British and American productions but almost always in feature films. His dreamy Arab appeal sustained throughout his life in the West. His last film was released in 2013, though he never did act in Egyptian movies again.

Perhaps he was one of the earliest examples of a racially neutral transition, though David Lean’s insistence on casting an ethnically credible actor as Sharif Ali had a lot to do with it. Omar Sharif, unknown in the West at the time, earned an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor in this, his very first English language blockbuster. Before Egyptian Sharif, in the forties, there were a number of hauntingly beautiful Hollywood divas with some Indian blood- Merle Oberon and Vivien Leigh amongst them, but it was not the kind of thing you could admit to. 

When Omar Sharif hit the big screen, the US was just in the process of being desegregated. Blacks and Hispanics, let alone Arabs, Chinese, or Indians, did not get lead dramatic roles. Even if they were cast, they could not kiss the white girl heroine on screen, let alone have sex with her. Coloured people and foreigners were often portrayed in a demeaning manner - subservient, comic, caricatured.

But Sharif passed straight through into the White world, mostly cast as an exotic foreigner helped by his ability to speak English, French, Greek, Italian, Spanish and his native Arabic. He never had to be confined to stereotype in fezzes and long shirts, leaving that to the Western comedians playing Turks. He even spent his later semi-retired and retired years playing competitive and professional contract bridge and indulging his love for gambling in all the European capitals and on the French Riviera.

Those were big single screen cinema hall days, when Sharif was a matinee idol. Hit movies ran for weeks and months, eventually changing on Fridays. And the halls around the world had marquee names- Roxy, Minerva, Rialto, Metro, Bijou…

Television was still very young, beamed to flickering, boxy, sets; transitioning from B&W to Colour, the pace picking up considerably by 1965. But, TV had enormous traction right from the fifties, already showing daytime soap operas, Westerns, War serials, Variety programmes, game shows, mostly from America.

Later, even Bruce Lee, despite his stardom and formidable skills, was only ever seen in Kung Fu films. But Jackie Chan is an international star without borders, though to this day divides his time between Hollywood and the famous Run Run Shaw productions out of Hong Kong. Run Run died only in 2014, at the age of 106, and so some things about his media empire might change now.

Times however, have definitely changed. There is a black man in the White House, and Priyanka Chopra is accepted playing a patriotic American without preamble or  explanation.

For: Swarajyamag

(1,797 words)

October 5^th, 2015

Gautam Mukherjee