Dipping a Toe into Bollywood

Lage Raho Munna Bhai

If you’re a Westerner, or at least not Indian, you probably know that India produces a lot of movies, “Bollywood” being the generic term. I bet you’ve never seen a real Bollywood flick, and I’m sorry, but Slumdog Millionaire and Monsoon Wedding do not count. Those are for Westerners. They’re like having ham-and-pineapple pizza at an Italian place, or going to PF Chang’s and thinking you ate at a Chinese restaurant.

But where do you start? I was running the Google Cinema Club, where we showed a movie once a week for people on campus (but not on the Internet), and I had this curiosity: what are those movies really like, and are there any that Googlers would like? The Bollywood stereotype is a three-hour extravaganza with a silly plot featuring impossibly beautiful actors in gorgeous costumes and nonstop, over-the-top dance numbers

Really, these conventions are kind of specialized to Indian tastes. We didn’t like to show super-long movies because they wouldn’t end until after the last shuttle bus of the day (we started at 7:00 pm). I also didn’t think it was the right thing for our audiences; the Indians would have already seen it and the others wouldn’t want to.

We were getting all our movies from Swank, because we needed to get Public Performance Rights to keep our lawyers happy. So I looked through their Indian flicks, and found Lage Raho Munna Bhai. I asked the Indians I knew, and all of them were familiar with the film. “Do you think Googlers would like it?” I asked them, and their reaction was usually a cautious, “Well, maybe.” Good enough for us. We scheduled it.

It turned out that we liked it, but after re-watching it, I can’t do any more than point it out (as opposed to “recommend it”). You might like it; you might not.

The subtext of this movie is that modern India has forgotten the lessons that Gandhi taught, and is irretrievably corrupt. The contrast of that spiritual lesson with the mob boss who wants to relearn Gandhi’s lessons to win the love of a beautiful woman is the heart of the comedy, and this is a funny movie.

The Movie

Munna is a gang leader, who lives the life of ease while his henchman, notably “Circuit,” do his dirty work for him. He hangs out on the seashore, and becomes enchanted by Janvi, a radio host. Janvi is having a contest on knowledge of Mahatma Gandhi, and the winner gets to come to the studio to meet her. Janvi is, you guessed it, impossibly beautiful.

Munna is in love. He enlists his gang to swamp the phone lines to the station, and then when one of them gets in and passes him the phone, they all help him answer the questions about Gandhi’s life. He’s made it! He goes to a library that has everything ever written about Gandhi, and spends three days lost in reading, without eating or sleeping, until Gandhi actually appears to him. No one else can see Gandhi, of course.

He drives his motorcycle down the street, with Circuit in the sidecar, and everyone dances and sings: the girls at the gas station, the passengers on the buses, the people on the sidewalk… everyone. I saw this scene as a sendup of the Bollywood convention that all movies must have dancing. It’s brilliant.

He goes to the studio pretending to be a professor, and, by and by, meets Janvi. To me, they’d run out of plot at that point, but then, I’m not the one making the movie. So I won’t say any more about it than that. Lage Raho Munna Bhai is not the worst movie you could rent tonight.