B/H stands up as a comedy AND an affectionate parody of Bollywood formula romances. The very title underscores the love-hate relationship many contemporary South Asian filmmakers feel about the Hollywood hegemon (see http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue9/bollywood.html ). As such, it offers a sly reworking of the Pretty Woman formula, with an Indian twist which raises the question of why Mehta's writers chose THAT Hollywood movie to build a comic plot upon. One answer requires examination of how women, especially young women, are depicted in Bollywood movies, which valorize even enforce Ramayana-like ideals of female purity versus the reality and problems of female identity in a modern world. Compare Mehta's Fire. The comedy and parody in B/H offers a different take on a Mehta theme. The Shakespeare-quoting grandmother reflects another aspect of the film's comic concern with the clash between tradition and modernity here, the kind of British-inspired education the grandmother would have received, which often required students to memorize whole scenes from Shakespeare (whose plays were and are very popular in India). The comic turnabout at the end might be examined in light of equally sudden turnabouts in movies like DDLJ, the difference being that the main blocking character at the end of B/H is Sunita herself. Her father, minutes before, reverses himself BECAUSE he has seen movies like that one. A very "filmi" intrusion into the comic plot, but (true to Mehta's sympathies) it is Sunita herself who becomes for a moment the blocking character whose needs must be recognized. It's a matter of HER identity, albeit within the framework of Bollywood comic romance. As such, her situation offers, for the perceptive, a bittersweet comic take on a question Mehta raises more seriously elsewhere. B/H is a parody, yes, but it has a serious side as well. Think about this while you laugh.
Review of Bollywood/Hollywood
