Bollywood/Hollywood Review

Rahul Seth hires escort Sue Singh to pose as his fiancé during his sister's wedding celebrations and promptly falls in love.

by Patrick Peters |
Published on
Release Date:

21 Feb 2003

Running Time:

105 minutes

Certificate:

12a

Original Title:

Bollywood/Hollywood

Despite the irresistible symmetrically of the title, this hybrid of the Indian musical and the American indie might have been called Sundance Masala.

With its knowing captions and jaunty songs by Sandeep Chowta, it's a far cry from Deepa Mehta's contentious social critiques, Fire and Earth. This is her Monsoon Wedding - or at least, her Pretty Woman. Yet it's also a parody - not in the Scream sense of lampooning standout scenes from popular movies, but in the way in which Mehta exploits the various conventions that have become almost compulsory in the average Bollywood melodrama. Mother love, the generation gap, class/caste snobbery and the clash between tradition and progress all feature in the typically convoluted narrative, in which Rahul Khanna hires escort Lisa Ray to pose as his fiancé during his sister's wedding celebrations and promptly falls in love.

The musical numbers zing and the knowing Bollywood nods raise a smile, but the pedestrian, Hollywood rom-com plot often fizzles.

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