The word for “prince” in Hindi — shehzada — is also the name of a Bollywood movie that opened nationwide on February 17, including at Majestic 10 in Williston. The title character is a prince — with a twist. This wise hero played by Kartik Aaryan is also a dancer, singer, lover, fighter, peacemaker, biker and family man. In one scene, he saves a man who’s been stabbed with an umbrella; in every scene, he’s good-looking AF. He shares this latter attribute with his love interest and costar, Kriti Sanon. (Or maybe she surpasses him.)
Shehzada is one of a spate of Bollywood movies with recent or upcoming screenings in Chittenden County. Pathaan played at Majestic about a month ago, and the romantic comedy Tu Jhoothi Main Makkaar opens on March 8. Its trailer has 67 million views on YouTube.
Bollywood clearly has an enormous audience, and such movies commonly play multiplexes in more populated areas. Until recently in Vermont, however, the only theaters regularly programming foreign-language films were art houses such as Merrill’s Roxy Cinemas in Burlington and the Savoy Theater in Montpelier.
Merrill Theaters president Merrill Jarvis changed that when he brought Indian movies to Majestic 10 about a year and a half ago and started playing them alongside the superhero epics and other big Hollywood releases that form the backbone of the multiplex’s programming. Though his current schedule represents a particularly heavy Bollywood rotation in Vermont, he said Indian movies are generally the foreign films most likely to show up on his 25 area screens.
Vermont lacks a sizable population of people of South Asian ancestry; according to the 2020 U.S. Census, the state’s Asian population as a whole is 1.8 percent of its total population of 643,077.
Yet Bollywood movies have a solid audience here, Jarvis said. In fact, he noted, some are the top-selling films at his theaters on their opening weekends. Most of the Indian films shown at Majestic 10 are in Hindi with English subtitles, though some are available in Telugu or Tamil. On occasion, Jarvis has shown the same movie in three languages, he said. The theater has screened movies such as the Oscar-nominated blockbuster RRR, made by “Tollywood,” the Telugu equivalent of Bollywood.
“The customers that I get for these films, they know what they want to see, and they want to see the movie as soon as it comes out,” Jarvis said. “It’s a whole family thing, no matter what the movie’s about.”
“It’s our own language and our own actors.” Mansi Patel
For the Patel family of Essex Junction, Bollywood in Vermont means they don’t have to drive out of state or across the border to see a movie in southern New Hampshire or Montréal.
“We are so, so happy,” said Sameer Patel, 49, a computer programmer. “This is a great opportunity for us to have [Bollywood] movies coming here in Vermont.”
The Patels attended a February 18 screening of Shehzada, where the family of three represented about one-quarter of the 11-person audience.
Patel and his wife, Mansi Patel, are originally from India and moved to Vermont from Vancouver seven years ago. Bollywood films are made to be seen on the big screen, the couple said. They’ve seen five at Majestic.
“It’s our own language and our own actors,” said Mansi, 45, a pharmacy technician.
Theater owner Jarvis, 65, understands the appeal of Bollywood, whose industry name combines Bombay (now called Mumbai) and Hollywood. He grew up in the movie business and slept in the projection room of his family’s drive-in theater at 3 days old, he said.
“These Indian movies compare to Mission Impossible, but they’re better than Mission Impossible because Tom Cruise can’t dance,” he said, perhaps having forgotten about Cruise getting down to Bob Seger in his underwear in Risky Business.
“The star of the [Bollywood] show can sing and dance and hang on to the side of an airplane and get in fights,” Jarvis continued. “A lot of times, they make Hollywood look not so good. The whole movie’s a spectacle.”
Jarvis started screening Bollywood movies because customers told him they were traveling several hours out of state to see them. “They asked if I could play one, and I did,” he said. “And it did well.”
Arunima Dasgupta, a 49-year-old engineer who grew up in Calcutta, has lived in Vermont for 20 years. The Essex Junction resident was beyond pleased to discover recently that she could see a Bollywood movie in a neighboring town, she said. For years, she’d been driving to Boston or Albany, N.Y., to watch movies — a costly event that involved spending the night in a hotel.
“To see Pathaan in a movie hall 10 minutes away from home — I was beaming ear to ear,” she said.
Herself a Bollywood-style dancer, Dasgupta enjoys the pure entertainment factor of many Bollywood movies, with their elaborate song-and-dance numbers. “For three hours, you’re in a different world,” she said. “You get transported to wherever and then come back.”
In a Facebook post about watching a Bollywood movie in Williston, Dasgupta wrote: “I love Vermont a little more now!!”
The opening of Shehzada coincided with the Global Roots Film Festival in Burlington, which presented films submitted to the Academy Awards by countries such as Finland, France, Pakistan and Uganda. The festival drew a large audience, with sellouts and near sellouts, according to Orly Yadin, executive director of the Vermont International Film Foundation, the nonprofit that organizes the event.
But Yadin’s overall experience is that “Americans are not used to seeing so-called ‘foreign-language films,'” said the organizer, who moved to Burlington 20 years ago from London, having lived in Europe most of her life. “It’s taken me a long time to even come to grips with it.
“People in Europe are used to seeing films in so many languages, they think nothing of it,” Yadin said. “I still find it hard to think of the Anglocentric culture, generally, in the U.S.”
The festival screened a Bollywood movie about four years ago as part of a program on cinematic musicals, Yadin said, noting that the movies have a devoted audience.
“People who like Bollywood films will travel miles and miles and miles to see a Bollywood film in the theater,” she said. “People who like French films will not travel miles and miles and miles.”
The majority of the local audience for Indian films is people of Indian descent, Jarvis said. On Presidents’ Day, two young women at Shehzada told him they’d driven three hours to see the movie.
“We try to please everybody,” he said.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Showtime in Hindi | A local multiplex plays Bollywood movies”
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This article appears in Mar 1-7, 2023.
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