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BOLLYWOOD/HOLLYWOOD Send This Review to a Friend
Deepa Mehta's "Bollywood/Hollywood" succeeds too well for its own good. The aim is obviously to create a North American example of the sort of Indian films that pour from Bombay studios--known as Bollywood--and feature stories of romance and family complications, always with interludes of song and dance. The trouble is that such films are generally corny and silly, dime novel stuff for the undiscriminating movie-going masses.
Accordingly, that's what Mehta has wrought. The story, set in Toronto and filmed there, is from hunger. The parents of Rahul Seth, young and rich, insist that he become engaged before his sister is permitted to go ahead with her wedding. He's all set, only with a non-Indian pop star disliked by his family, but she suddenly is killed in an odd accident. What now?
At a bar Seth, played well enough by Rahul Khanna, meets an escort, Sue (Sunita) Singh, enacted by pretty Lisa Ray. He asks her who she is and she tells him she can be anyone he wants her to be. Thinking that she is Spanish but could pass as Indian, he hires her to pretend to be his girlfriend and takes her home to Mummy (Moushumi Chatterjee in a job of gross overacting, as intended in such films). But what exactly is Sue's past--that of a prostitute? (Seth doesn't seem to know what "escorts" really do.) Naturally, Seth begins to fall in love with Sue and just as naturally, there are the inevitable misunderstandings.
The characters are cliched, including a feisty grandmother, this one given to incorrectly spouting Shakespeare for every occasion. The required singing and dancing interrupt the drama at strategic points, and when all is said and done, you have a Canadian-made film that could have come out of the Bombay pot. That's good imitatively but not good story-wise. A Magnolia Pictures release.
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