Bollywood masala: Jab We Met

Dear lovely people,

Here’s a quick note to say I’m leaving Bombay tonight at midnight. I’ll head to the airport around 8:30. All is well, my stomach is reasonably functional again, and since everyone else left town this morning, and we checked out of our hotel rooms at noon, Linda (Tracy’s mom) and I went to see a movie: Jab We Met. It was in Hindi, so we may have missed some nuances.

Here’s what I think Jab We Met was about:

Young but very wealthy business man with pouty lips wants to throw himself off a train because his girlfriend married someone else.

He doesn’t actually have a ticket for the train, and is sitting in a seat that turns out to belong to a gregarious young woman in pantaloons who looks like an Indian Paris Hilton.

Concerned about his weird behavior, she follows him into a station and thus misses the train when it pulls back out.

He is forced to help her chase the train, on foot and then by taxi, and many hilarious hijinks ensue, including a brief respite in the questionable “Hotel Decent,” which appears to rent by the hour.

After a police raid at Hotel Decent they flee on foot and appear to decide, in a singing montage of playful activities, that they should take a little time out from their stressful lives and buy a lot of different outfits and laughingly steal people’s bicycles in scenic locations for three or four weeks.

But then it’s time to deliver the girl to her family home, which is an enormous mansion inhabited by many generations of Sikhs in colorful outfits.

It turns out they have been waiting for her (possibly wondering why her train trip took several extra weeks) and have spent the time festooning every architectural surface with marigold chains. Also selecting the outfits they would need during the dance scenes required to re-introduce her to the man she is meant to marry. They welcome the business man heartily after some initial skepticism – giddy girl explains that the young business man spent the last few weeks saving her from starving in the wilderness hiding from ravening tigers. Or something. So it’s okay she shows up in his company.

But it turns out she doesn’t want to marry her intended, who is a poor dancer with silly hand gestures.

So she and the business hottie, who is perhaps maintaining his business empire via fax, escape at night while everyone searches the wrong shrubberies, and of course decide to take a little jaunt to the Himalayas. Or possibly Tibet. After some more outfit changes the pouty-lipped man, his joie de vivre restored from his time with the gamin girl, bids her a misty-eyed farewell. Meanwhile she (now in a Swiss milkmaid outfit) trips merrily down the mountainside, having perhaps decided to live our her days as a mountain fairy.

We were a little mystified by the movie’s resolution, in which boy didn’t get girl. But then some lights flashed and we realized that we had merely reached Intermission. The audience rushed out to purchase small packets of popcorn in stapled plastic bags.

Two minutes later the film resumed with a Sound of Music spin: the gamin girl, still dressed as a milkmaid, sobs at the rejection of an entirely new man who runs some kind of mountain ski lodge. Perhaps he has told her he has no need to hire a mountain fairy and her dream is denied.

So she takes off all her eyeliner and immediately gets a job teaching girls in a dreary Catholic boarding school where she is only allowed to wear gray and walk with her head down.

Meanwhile the business man returns to his empire, where they are resistant to his return for about 3 minutes until he makes an impassioned speech about how you should be able to play guitar in the office and also sometimes loosen your neckties. Then they cheer and make a lot more money.

Until the jilted suitor from Act I shows up, demanding to know what happened to the girl. Business man explains reasonably that he left her on a mountain. But when he makes some calls to the ski lodge and finds she has vanished, he rushes out once again in his open-necked shirt to find her.

Which he does, and restores her broken spirit by encouraging her to place a cell phone call to the ski lodge man and call him (in English) a bastard. She finds this restorative and it was around then we realized the whole first half of the movie had been about the business man helping her to flee her arranged marriage and reunite with her ski lodge boyfriend.

But wait- now that her groove is back, the business man helps the girl convince the ski lodge boyfriend that her Sikh family will accept him (ski lodge boyfriend), even though he doesn’t wear a turban, and all three of them drive back to the family manse.

There some comical mix-ups ensue (and you can barely see the house for the marigolds) as the family misunderstand who is supposed to be the boyfriend and who the chauffeur.

They keep trying to set things right, as the girl (once so sassy) droops around the house in indecision. But in the end of course the girl marries the business man (and finally kisses him chastely in front of a tree).

You know they are married because first they dance energetically in front of a disco club dance scene involving blond women in sailor hats and black bras, and then the starstruck pair are seen sitting with two young girls, evidently their daughters, at the sickbed of the family patriarch, as disco music plays in the background.

FIN.

Good, no?

Off we go soon.

Love,
Deborah