Deepa Mehta's new film explores, spoofs and fuses the fundamentals of Hollywood and Hindi movies

By Monica Mehta

It's a shot at making the twain meet. But Bollywood/Hollywood, Deepa Mehta's first movie-making attempt to fuse the elements of Hindi and American cinema, has none of the seriousness of her earlier films, Fire and Earth. Mehta, needing a bit of humour after the real-life melodrama of her aborted movie, Water, has made a satirical comedy that pokes all sorts of fun at Indian life. But although the movie is often funny, it lacks the ground-breaking brilliance of her previous efforts.

The plot mixes traditional Bollywood with the more risque Hollywood. Rahul (Rahul Khanna), a young Canadian-Indian businessman, falls in love with a white Canadian rockstar to the chagrin of his widowed mother (Moushumi Chatterjee) and grandmother (the late, great Dina Pathak). When the rockstar dies in an accident, the weepy mother tells her son he must marry an Indian girl or else his pregnant sister's wedding will be cancelled. The desolate Rahul runs into Sue (Lisa Ray), a nubile and, apparently, a Spanish escort and pays her to pretend as his Indian fiancee. When he realises that she actually is Indian, he is angry but quickly, and for no credible reason, falls in love with her. But his "ingrained middle-class morals" make him uncomfortable with her profession.

The concept of the movie is two-fold-it is a "love song", at times tongue-in-cheek, to Bollywood melodrama and is inspired by the Hollywood film Pretty Woman. Says Mehta: "The whole point of the film is it is all about smoke and mirrors. Nothing is what it appears to be." As in Bollywood, characters burst into song and dance. Humorous captions accompany many scenes-Sue's first song is captioned "Sue-ji's song: I'm simply sweet and salty". One-liners run rampant-as Sue wears her first Indian outfit, Rocky, Rahul's chauffeur played by Mehta-favourite Ranjit Chowdhry, says, "J. Lo meets K. Ko-Lopez meets Karisma Kapoor."

The movie is peppered with paeans to the combined film style-"Holly Bolly, Bolly Holly-different woods, same tree," says Rocky. Mehta also plays with the more traditional elements of Hindi movies. When Sue is chided by her father (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) for wearing tight clothes and staying out late, she does not burst into tears but retorts, "Look at you, foaming at the mouth like Amrish Puri from some Bombay film."

Apart from the jokes rising often from allusions to Bollywood, the movie fails to deliver on Rahul and Sue's motives. Both are alienated youngsters but the characters do not have a distinctive personality and it is hard to figure out why they fall in love. This is a problem with characters in diasporic films-they are often one-dimensional. Why don't filmmakers show Indian youth living abroad as more complex?

If you watch Bollywood/Hollywood expecting to laugh, you won't be disappointed. The disappointment comes in hoping Mehta will once again create characters that come alive. In Fire and Earth, the audience empathised completely. But when Sue and Rahul speak, the dialogue is flat. Sue's first line to Rahul is, "Life is full of existential angst, so why not give up?" This may be clever on paper but does not ring true on screen. The next time Mehta makes a film about diasporic Indians, let's hope she makes us feel again.