An American actress finds love and herself in this musical romantic comedy.
Marigold (Larter) is a self-absorbed, bitchy princess type with no layers whatsoever. She spends the first quarter of the film demonstrating her character flaw again and again.
She flies to India to appear in a low-budget flick, only to find the project has folded, she has no luggage and her taxi driver has stranded her in the back of beyond. Then, before you know it, this class-A cow has befriended a lovely Indian girl called Rani, who sees something in Marigold despite her prickly exterior, and gets her a job on another film shooting in the area.
Marigold falls for the choreographer, Prem (Khan) and they spend the rest of the movie (the one we’re watching and the one they’re making) living out every romantic comedy cliche. Prem teaches her to dance. They laze on a Goan beach by a campfire, surrounded by pretty lanterns and brightly coloured silks which just happened to be lying around. A boat trip here. The Taj Mahal there. And it’s all liberally sprinkled with Bollywood dance numbers which Larter bravely participates in, even though she’s a very average singer and dancer.
Director Willard Carroll clearly went to India on holiday, fell in love with the ‘culture’ (for culture, read picture postcard India) and wanted to make this rather obsequious love letter to the place that so inspired him.
He borrows heavily from the structure and style of Bollywood but effectively cherry-picks the bits he likes and ignores plot and characterisation. The arrival of Barry (Bohen), Marigold’s on/off boyfriend is painfully clunky; in all of India he just happens to come to the right region in order to find his stroppy girlfriend. In a later instance, he coincidentally ends up at the same hotel. What?
The whole point of Bollywood’s hyper-real romances is that you’re rooting for the love interests to get together at the end of the movie. When they do in Marigold (this isn’t a spoiler – there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done better in a hundred Mills & Boon novels), it’s like someone letting the last bit of air out of a long-deflated balloon. It was already flaccid to begin with.
The dance numbers are spectacular but any fool knows you can make an audience feel good with a bit of Busby Berkley-style abundance. Lots of people together in colourful costumes, doing the same dance moves and looking like they’re enjoying themselves is always going to pick things up. But leave that to Bollywood.
Verdict
As Prem’s dad says of his son’s feature film career, “I know nothing about dancing and the plots seem ludicrous to me.”
Channel 4
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