I keep thinking it's just a time-killing phase, that the magic will wear off at some point... but... I can't stop watching them. They're on Prime, Netflix, Hulu, and all the nutty free networks too... and now the AI knows I like them, so it populates all the TV guides with Bollywood movies.
I'm a serial Bollywood romance watcher! Somebody stop me before I watch another one!
The men are kind of hapless and awkward, and kind of hopeless romantics... dorks for love... I can SO relate ...
The women are mysterious and magical, with their bottomless dark liquid eyes and megawatt smiles... the culture is fairly conservative, so the dress is wholesome. The women show a little midriff in the special outfits, a little cleavage but not much... nothing overly tight... the mystery of womanhood remains a mystery, and I much prefer it that way... they don't do any of the tongue-kissing and leaping into bed in the first ten minutes of the movie... the stories aren't excessively, ah, humid, shall we say... heck, there's hardly even any cussing. And EVERYONE can DANCE! And they do!
It's wholesome, but they pull it off without any hint of parody... the stories are still like real life... just without the T&A and the F bombs.
I feel sadly confident that reality in India is nothing like Bollywood romances... and that's probably why they NEED these movies, why they make so many of them.
I don't care, as long as they keep doing it. And it helps that the history of India means English is taught in schools and the actors often say lines in English to express themselves better... it's not done for English speaking audiences, just for the Indians who are watching... because speaking English in bits and pieces of a conversation has developed into a cultural thing with them.
She is a career girl (a brave new thing in Indian culture, reminds me of America circa 1972) who dreamed of owning a nice home of her own, but even with that good job at the bank, she can't quite afford it. I haven't quite sussed out HIS motivation yet, but at this early juncture he isn't in love with her, so I guess he's just trying to move on up in the world.
So, first they pretend to be married. Then they go through with it, to get the necessary documents to complete the home purchase. Then, if this first half hour is anything to go by, they'll be pretending to be married for some people, trying to CONCEAL it from other people, and all along they'll be slowly falling in love with each other.
Which everyone else will see long before either one of them does.
I always wondered if I would still think so highly of love when I got old, and it became someone else's thing to fall in love and not mine. Turns out I like it as much as I ever did.
Now I cheer for other people to fall in love. Still magical.
