The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

The film tries its hand at humour, and does succeed at times; where it succeeds the most, even if unwittingly, is in being also a very depressing film. While trying to stereotype India, the India where only an Englishman can do something worthwhile (explain dunking toast in tea, visiting a maidservant/low-caste woman, telling how a cricket bat should be held, fixing a leaking tap, keeping accounts - and you better watch the film for the complete enumeration) and the Indian can only play capers and do frauds on people with the chalta hai attitude, the film in fact ends up stereotyping, very miserably, very unjustly (as all stereotyping is), the British themselves: unable to see beyond money and sex? The character of Evelyn Greenslade, played by Judi Dench, is the one most cruelly disappointing: even she was just after the usual rigmarole of companionship, sex and so-called independence! Oh dear! Tati could not have projected this circus in a better way: only, I highly doubt if the filmmakers of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel wished it that way. Interestingly, judging the high opinion in which the film is kept in many quarters, the stereotyping is certainly based on some reality: otherwise, how is that possible? (It would not be amiss here to recall another film, the French superhit of 2011, Intouchables, for the same combination of a film playing on stereotypes becoming a huge hit among critics and masses alike.)

The film starts well: the hypocrisy and heartburns in each character's lives are very believable, very much part of the Tati and Barnum play. But, then, the film nosedives: more and lower. The choices of language are interesting: a normal rickshaw puller is shown speaking in English (and quite fine words), but then why not the old cook and the maidservant? (Should it also be reminded here that the film reinforces European notions of caste and economic class being one?) The choices of language get further interesting: what kind of language is that character from Arsenic and Old Lace - yes, I do mean the Dev Patel character - using? The only worthy wit in cut-and-dried British style comes from the Anglo-Indian club secretary (Denzil Smith): of course not from the slavishly adoring maid.

The biggest flaw of the film is its British characters: the film ends, and yet all of them are where they were. How, where did they develop as humans? If a story starts at point A and ends right there, and no point B, then either you are Jacques Tati and making that as your point, or you are just expressing a very sad aspect of modern life, of modern Britain here: that there's no story (anymore?). No one discovers the rhythm of India, the spirituality of India, the peace of India, the non-aggression of India; running after their unrealized desires, they only discover a new woman in bed, a new man to call their own, a new confidence, a new self-respect, begotten from minds and eyes still in colonial awe.

And yet, are all the minds and eyes in India (still) under that colonial awe? Are they as awestruck by a society which does not even know what to do with their old? That won't be a comfortable question to pose to those who made the film: finding India a jumble and never able to go beneath the rumble.