Chaste "Lolita" fails to excite traditional India

MUMBAI, March 7 (Reuters Life!) - Their bodies remain veiled, the sex only implied in lust-filled looks, yet conservative Indian audiences are rejecting a new Bollywood film apparently inspired by the controversial 1955 novel "Lolita".

By India's moral standards, "Nishabd" (Silence) -- about the love between a 60-year-old man and a teenager -- is bold, touching upon a subject avoided by Bollywood, where raunchy song and dance sequences are the staple.

Apart from the scandal of the attraction of an old man, played by the legendary Amitabh Bachchan, for a girl old enough to be his granddaughter, "Nishabd" has little in common with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.

There is no sex in the film and unlike Lolita, who is a pubescent 12, the Bollywood heroine is a precocious 18, an age perhaps chosen to skirt trouble from Indian censors. Neither does she meet the same fate as Lolita, who dies in childbirth.

"We're still very orthodox and conservative about something like this," said critic Taran Adarsh.

"The film tackles an issue which, for some unexplainable reasons, we don't wish to discuss publicly."

For all its claims of boldness, "Nishabd" -- directed by maverick Ram Gopal Varma -- has been panned as feeble.

"Thematically, the plot's fairly progressive and for starters, as riveting as a beer-bikini calendar," said Khalid Mohamed, film critic with the DNA newspaper.

"The trouble is that he gives you an adult story that finally doesn't have the courage to stand by its convictions."

Nabokov's "Lolita", considered scandalous in the 1950s, was rejected by several prominent American publishers before it finally made it into print.

The book generated controversy in Italy and was banned in France, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Elsewhere, parts of it were censored.

Hollywood made two attempts to adapt "Lolita", including one by Stanley Kubrick, but neither was a big success. Both films were banned in India but the book is available.

Now, Bollywood's adaptation of the novel has turned out to be a box office disaster as cinema halls are virtually empty a week into the film's release.

"Only if Ramu had dared to break the mold a bit more and not been wary of the moral police... Nishabd would have ended up as landmark cinema," critic Nikhat Kazmi wrote in the Times of India newspaper.

But Varma, known to make cinema that pleases him, is unfazed.

"Not all love stories are palatable to the masses," he said in a TV interview.