Culture

Casablanca remake to be set in India

by ricknight | August 9, 2007 at 04:33 am

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Play it, Sam. But this time in India, against the backdrop of Tamil unrest.

Casablanca, one of the most popular U.S. films of all time, is getting a remake from Indian filmmaker Rajeev Nath.

Nath, 55, says he will create a "tribute to the original" film, made in 1942 with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

"As a student of films, I had watched this great classic 20 times," said Nath, who won an Indian award for direction in 1999 for his film Janani.

Nath plans to set his film in a coastal city in southern India and have his beautiful heroine, played by Bollywood star Mandira Bedi, fleeing India with her husband, a Tamil rebel fighting for an ethnic homeland.

"We'll always have New Delhi"... It seems that not only is there not an original idea left in Hollywood, there isn't an original idea left anywhere else either. I'm not a big fan of remakes (can you tell?).

"I remember every detail, the Indians wore khaki, you wore saffron"... nope, just isn't the same.

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Jordan Yerman

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 05:38 on August 9th, 2007

Studios in LA have talked about remaking Casablanca for years. It's never happened, though, despite rumours of Ralph Fiennes in the leading role. Clearly, though, they'll have to change the name of the film, unless they write in a bar called Casablanca Lounge in Sri Lanka or something.

Kaitlin

flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 08:14 on August 9th, 2007

ricknight, thanks for bringing this to my attention. I am a huge Casablanca fan, and a film student as well (Film Minor). To mess with a movie or to make a remake of a classic is definitely not advisable in my eyes--it's worked occasionally, but overall, not so much. However, I think that Nath is clear here that he's making a tribute, and not a remake, and I think that's very cool.

Rather than taking the view of "there's not an original idea left in Hollywood" (or, I guess, Bollywood) I kind of revel in the fact that as humans we tend to share similar experiences historically and personally across borders, races and generations--all's similar in love and war. That these repeated experiences show up in film is very satisfying to me.

After all, without tributes, we wouldn't have Akira Kurosawa's Ran (a tribute to King Lear); we wouldn't have Shaun of the Dead (a tribute to the Zombie genre on the whole); hell...we wouldn't have Star Wars (as Jordan points out, a tribute to Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress). So I say Viva la Tribute!

This is, of course, an opinion, but there you have it.