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graveyard of DOOM index < | > I'm just back from seeing Hum Tum, which is screening as part of the second Bollywood movie festival at Cinema Nova. Last year they had a one-off "Beginner's Guide to Bollywood" week, and so many people came to see it that they figured, well hell, let's do this every year! Won't get any argument from me, since I didn't get to see any of the fillums last year - they were all sold out by the time I rocked up for tickets. This year I got in early and bought a five-movie pass, which means one film a day for today and the next four days. I'm hoping that this immersion will give me some good ideas for the long-form Godlings story I want to start writing - familiarising myself with the tropes of Bollywood can only be good research for writing about three pseudo-Indian minideities, right? Plus, I couldn't think of a better way to celebrate 150 years since the Eureka Stockade. So. Hum Tum. A fairly standard romantic comedy masala movie, the kind of thing that starts out all slapstick and faux pas humour about the eternal miscommunication and difference of outlook between men and women, and ends up all tongue-tied love as our adversaries realise that despite initially despising each other, they now can't live apart. Add a dash of darkest-before-dawn oops-I-said-totally-the-wrong-thing-and-now-I've-lost-her-forever-just-when-I-realise-I'm-nothing-without-her in an attempt to distract the audience from the inevitable (and satisfying) happy ending, complete with progeny, and the package is complete. For my money there wasn't enough singing and dancing, but I gradually warmed to Saif Ali Khan as the roguish and incorrigible Karan, and Rani Mukherji as the aloof and overly proper Rhea, our two star-crossed lovers-to-be, as the film follows them for the nine years that pass between their initial meeting on a flight from Mumbai to New York and their by-the-numbers wedded bliss. Over those nine years Rhea and Karan keep bumping into each other, in Mumbai, in New York, in Paris. With each meeting they're older, wiser, more mature and more likeable. They still don't sing enough, though. One of the best musical numbers was the Parisian dealie that is initiated when Karan bets Rhea that he can teach a group of preadolescent French cheerleaders to say one word in Hindi. He goes much further than that - within a minute he's got everyone in the god-damn park singing Hindi pop and dancing masala-style around as the brass band mimes the backing music in a breathtakingly atrocious way (here's a tip, kids: if you're going to mime playing the flute, you need to at least put the thing up to your mouth).
In Indian romantic comedies there always seems to be a dance routine that involves our heroine dancing in the rain, a sort of subcontinental wet T-shirt contest that serves to placate audience members that are frustrated by the lack of actual physical contact between the lovers - rarely do things get much steamier than our hero standing behind his lady with his arms around her, holding her tight, or perhaps daring to peck her gently (but passionately) on the throat or collarbone or shoulder. To a decadent western filmgoer's eye such things can seem quite tame, but Bollywood knows how to make these moments absolutely sizzle. One of the best ways to achieve a bit of non-contact raunch is to have these brief, forbidden, restrained touches take place in a rainstorm, the couple's bodies glistening and damp, their beautiful clothes clinging to their heaving bodies. Hum Tum is happily no exception to this rule, and pleasingly there were four costume changes during the raindance, which I was surprised - in a good way - to see end with Karan and Rhea tumbling into the surf and stealing an actual, if abbreviated, lip-to-lip kiss (no tongues, though) a la From Here to Eternity. All in all, it was a good bit of happy-ending escapist schmaltz, full of forgettable pop, archetypal dialogue and a cast that provided a healthy dose of well-dressed eye candy. I think I'm going to give this one three samosas out of five. Related links: |
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