Rating: *
After all that hype of being an international Indian film, Marigold is finally out and it can’t get more disappointing! 10 minutes through the movie and expectations come crashing down the roof. Marigold can easily classify as one of the most slipshod movies of the year. After fervently searching for a storyline, I just decided that this was one of those movies that they make because they have too much money and don’t know what to do with it! Ironically, there is a character in the movie that plays a movie director who casts Marigold (Ali Larter) in his movie just because she is a foreigner and rewrites her part umpteen time to suit her ’special skills’. Well, it certainly seems like this movie itself was made under similar motives! Only here, we swap Ali Larter with Salman Khan. Looks like director Willard Carroll was a bit too star struck with Salman Khan to remember to direct the movie!
Two words to describe Marigold – ‘Odorless Misadventure’. Fragrant and pleasant as it should’ve been, Marigold manages extremely well to turn off the audience and lull them to sleep with its flaccid dialogues and lackluster screenplay. While Marigold’s expedition to India should’ve been a pleasurable interlude from Hollywood, it rather turned out to be a nightmarish mission gone wrong.
The movie being an international venture, attempts to discover the inscrutable mysticism of India while also trying to explore the much hyped about Indian film industry. But well, things didn’t seem to go quite as expected! While the movie should’ve been instrumental in showing the fast developing India and the changing position of India in global economy, it still chose to portray Salman as a Rajastani prince and Bollywood as a heavily chaotic place to work in. The movie simply doesn’t work because the India that Marigold portrays is an evasion of what the West used to relate India to. But what the director seems to have missed is that the West no longer relates India to princes, elephants and magic men! Mixed up between portraying modernity and his virtual vision of India, director Willard Carroll seems to have been muddled up in uncertainty.
Coming back to the story (ok, there wasn’t one really!), Marigold Lexton (Ali Larter) is an extremely arrogant small time actress from Hollywood who can’t remember the last time she acted in a movie without a sequel number next to it. She comes to India hoping to act in the threequel to Kama Sutra, but well, something somewhere goes wrong and the project is scrapped. Fifteen minutes of twists and turns and a bumpy ride from Goa to Mumbai later, she manages to land a small role in a C grade Bollywood movie. Enter Prem (Salman Khan), the Bollywood choreographer… Attraction blossoms and the ’seven stages of love’ follow! In between these are the characters of a paranoid heroine and an equally irritating movie director who just can’t seem to decide the story of his film (Very similar to Marigold itself!)
Prem takes Marigold home but tradition seeps in and his ‘Royal Family’ refuse to have Marigold as their daughter-in-law. While Prem repares to marry Jhanvi (Nandana Sen), who he has been betrothed to ever since they were kids (What was that???) Jhanvi decides to be martyr and get Marigold and Prem married instead! Crawling into all this, we have a
character named Barry who is actually Marigold’s boyfriend. Why or how Jhanvi and Barry manage to suddenly get married (considering they don’t love each other) after sacrificing their respective lovers is totally beyond comprehension! With close observation one would notice Gulshan Grover in the background. He says just one word in the entire movie. He acts as Prem’s ‘Royal Guard’! All he does is stand in the background throughout the movie!
The line ‘Marigold – Just like the flower’ reverberates throughout the movie testing the audience level of patience!
Salman Khan and Ali Larter dole out decent performances. Hat’s off to Sallu’s American accent. Very well done.
Choreography is bad. Costumes – the lesser said the better. Don’t be surprised to see male junior artists wearing sashaying skirts and bustiers dancing with the Taj in the background! Music is okay. Considering that the direction is bad and its not worth a watch, we will skip the other aspects of the movie.
Marigold is a complete chaos. Watch it if you think Ali Larter is pretty or if you have too much money and time and don’t have anything better to do!
Sanskriti Media