Hitch vs Chhoti Si Baat

Hollywood adapts and remakes Asian films as part of its insatiable search for new

stories, or for new ways of telling half-familiar stories. But adaptation is also driven

by perceptions of the otherness of Asian cultures from Western perspectives and a presumed preference of audiences for localised remakes rather than originals. In an analysis of a pair of films – a source and its remake – demonstrate what constitutes the core cultural differences between the two.

Orientalism in the context of Asian and Western films, is a reciprocal process where both the Asian and Western audience perceives the “other” as exotic and thus different.(Gokulsing,Dissanayake 98) The use of the word exotic implies a positive connotation towards the idea of the “other”, however, the ‘other’ is often deemed as too different when it comes to Hollywood adaptations of Asian films as core cultural ideologies are removed or changed to better resonate with western moviegoers. Films from both Hollywood and Bollywood have various conspicuous difference on the surface, an example would be their lengths as various song sequences in Bollywood films make the films longer than their western counterparts.However, the fundamental differences between movies produced in Bollywood and Hollywood lies in the culturally specific ideologies of India and North America respectively, which is reflected in the romantic plot structure and characterization featured in movies from both culture.It is the western audience’s perception of “others” and their preference for localized films that drives filmmakers to adapt or be inspired by films from other cultures.As such, focusing on the notion of “otherness” of the cultural ideologies of Bollywood as its research context, this essay intends to analyse the core cultural differences between the Bollywood movie Chhoti Si Baat (1975), and its Hollywood adaptation Hitch (2005) through the examination of the culturally different romantic plot structures and...