Bollywood / Hollywood (DVD)

Bollywood Hollywood is a Bollywood style English language film released in 2002 with a 12 certification.


Rahul Seth is a millionaire living in Toronto with his widowed mother, paternal grandmother, younger sister Twinky, who’s about to be married and school-aged brother Govind. Rahul has his own bachelor pad but is madly in love with Canadian woman Kimberly who his mother and grandmother wholly disapprove of as they want him ...
...After all, this is a Bollywood film and aimed at a family audience BUT unlike other Bollywood films the dialogue is wholly in English and where random sentences are spoken in Hindi there are subtitles automatically on the screen/ Also unlike Pretty Woman this film is a comedy.

Deepa Mehta directed and wrote the script for the film which is rather an unusual direction for this rather serious Canada bred Indian film-maker. The film ... more

Bollywood Hollywood is a Bollywood style English language film released in 2002 with a 12 certification.

Rahul Seth is a millionaire living in Toronto with his widowed mother, paternal grandmother, younger sister Twinky, who’s about to be married and school-aged brother Govind. Rahul has his own bachelor pad but is madly in love with Canadian woman Kimberly who his mother and grandmother wholly disapprove of as they want him to marry an Indian girl preferably from their village back in India. Sadly for Rahul; Kimberly dies in a freak accident and his mother insists that he must at least get engaged before his sister’s wedding or it won’t take place. Twinky admits to her brother that she is pregnant so he has to take drastic action. He meets Sue in a bar and she admits she’s an escort, he assumes she’s Spanish, so he “hires” her to be his fiancée during the Twinky’s wedding celebrations which go on for over a week. Sue turns out to be of Indian origin and wins the heart of Rahul’s family and they even start to have feelings for each other but things start to go wrong when certain things are revealed about Sue’s past.

One could say that Bollywood/Hollywood is an Indian version of the blockbuster film Pretty Woman. Except that Sue isn’t a prostitute, she’s an escort and she does not have sex with Rahul. After all, this is a Bollywood film and aimed at a family audience BUT unlike other Bollywood films the dialogue is wholly in English and where random sentences are spoken in Hindi there are subtitles automatically on the screen/ Also unlike Pretty Woman this film is a comedy.

Deepa Mehta directed and wrote the script for the film which is rather an unusual direction for this rather serious Canada bred Indian film-maker. The film is only 105 minutes in length which is also VERY short for a Bollywood film but this isn’t particularly aimed at a typical Bollywood audience. I don’t think they would get the humour of some of it or might even be offended by some of the stereotypes that are quite exaggerated in the film.

Rahul is played by Rahul Khanna, the less famous and more serious son of Vinod Khanna. He’s not particularly famous in Bollywood but he’s also not someone who seems to just do films for the sake of them. He’s pleasant to look at and a fairly decent actor. His English is very good and he looks very slick in the expensive suits he wears throughout the film. We don’t see him smiling very much and it is quite amusing how his mother seems to drive him to distraction with her whims and histrionics so much so that he feels he has to actually hire a girl to pretend that he’s getting married.

Sue (short for Sunita) is played by Lisa Ray who I’ve never seen before although she’s appeared in several Bollywood films as well as some South Indian language films (such as Tamil, Telugu, etc) but she didn’t really impress with her acting skills. She’s quite stunning and I understand she is Indian on her father’s side and Polish on her mother’s and she grew up in Canada. She doesn’t look particularly Indian but I guess she was the prettiest female actress they could find within their budget to play the lead. Her character’s justifications for becoming an escort were extremely absurd and far-fetched especially as she’s supposed to be well educated. Her father tried to get her an arranged marriage which she didn’t go along with, big deal. I know 100s of British born Indians that that has happened to and they didn’t become an escort because of it! There’s a scene where she describes meeting the suitor her father arranges for her and he is apparently a WWA wrestler called Killer Khalsa (which is actually the real name of the person playing the role and the real profession of the guy too who I understand is the Indian version of The Rock). He is again like many other characters in the film; highly exaggerated traits as in his case - a typical male chauvinist who asks Sue if she studied cooking or Home Science. I really can’t actually imagine a prospective Indian bridegroom asking such chauvinistic questions or making crude comments about his various muscles when meeting a prospective bride, especially in front of her parents.

The character of the mother is played by the lovely Moushumi Chatterjee who is looking superb for her age. She was in her mid 50s when this film was released but looks years younger. She is quite amusing as the somewhat overbearing mother. She overdoes the role wholly but the film is, I suspect poking fun at some of the typical Indian traditions such as older children being expected to get married before younger ones or it will cause scandal. There’s a scene at a pre-wedding party where Mrs Seth is sitting with a group of friends at a table just gossiping about ridiculous things which made me chuckle as I’ve seen my mum’s friends sitting around having conversations like this. Dina Pathak plays the grandmother, who as the eldest in the household, thinks she’s in charge. When Rahul brings his girlfriend Kimberly around dressed in Indian attire, she gives the poor girl the third degree in Hindi with her daughter-in-law translating for her, even though she speaks English throughout the rest of the film. She tries to come across as an ogre but she’s really quite soft-hearted and her amusing character trait is that she’s always quoting Shakespeare.

Rocky (played ably enough by Ranjit Chowdhry) is Rahul’s chauffeur who is also a part-time transvestite who sings in a club. What this has to do with the overall story is not really very clear but it gave the chance for a couple of song and dance numbers which I thought were rather awful. Aside from songs visualised on Rocky there are a few other short Bollywood style song and dance numbers thrown in which I felt were unnecessary due to the film being quite short anyway and due to these songs, it just took time away from having much character development for any of the main characters. I must admit the scene where Bollywood actor Akshay Khanna attends one of Twinky’s pre-wedding parties and tells Mrs Seth that Rahul is like a brother to him was rather amusing as they are brothers in real life.

One thing I found a bit amusing initially was the random text appearing on the screen saying things like “Now it’s time for a flashback” or “Rahul-ji sings a romantic song” but this happened quite a bit through the film and it then started to get tiresome!

I found the story overall to be somewhat credible and somewhat amusing but I wasn’t sufficiently entertained with the film to want to watch it again in the near or distant future and I can’t understand how the film won the Audience Award for Best Comedy at the Sarasota Film Festival or the Genie Aware for Best Original Screenplay. It wasn’t that funny and it certainly wasn’t original. I saw bits lifted straight from the plot of Pretty Woman in the film which was so blatantly copied that I can’t imagine how on earth it would win an award for original screenplay, shocking stuff!

The DVD I bought from Amazon for under £5 and as extras all it had was the film with a trailer of the film and the songs listed separately to play in succession and a choice of subtitles – either ON or OFF!

Overall I’d rate the film as a pleasant enough 3 out of 5. Fairly average! The poking fun at the idiosyncrasies of some Indian traditions was fairly amusing but not offensive.  

...less