Normally, I like to end my annual Bhooty Call with something really scary, but this year the real world has been entirely scary enough for my tastes, so I'm going with something different. After all, ghosts are exciting, but sometimes, they need to be busted. That's when you call Sardaar Ji (2015.)
Bilal (Ali Kazmi) and Ruksana (Anita Kailey) live in London, or possibly Birmingham or Leicester - the geography isn't always clear. They are rich and happy and blissfully in love, so their wedding is going to be a big event; the Queen is expected to attend, and they've booked a "castle" for the ceremony.
The problem is, the place is haunted. However, the invitations have already been sent out, and the Queen has already accepted, so the wedding absolutely must happen at the appointed place and time in order to preserve the royal honour. They try a team of American ghost hunters and an exorcist from Africa, but they fail. It's clear that they need someone absolutely fearless, who won't ever quit once they've accepted the mission. Obviously, they need a Sardar.
The Sardar in question, is Jaggi (Diljith Dosanjh), a highly efficient exorcist. He can rid a building of a ghost in just a few minutes, forcing it into a bottle and carrying it home. He actually keeps the bottled ghosts around and talks to them sometimes, often flirting with the ghost ladies, but he hasn't yet found that one special lady ghost that he can . . . keep in a bottle on the shelf and occasionally talk to. Yeah. Moving on.
(I think the intention here is to showcase that despite his bravado, Jaggi isn't confident around actual women. Flirting with ghost girls is safer, because it can't lead to anything serious, while courting a living woman means making yourself emotionally vulnerable. It's a bit clumsy, but I'll allow it for now.)
Despite his successful ghost busting business, Jaggi is happy to drop everything and fly to England in exchange for a large sum of money. Jaggi enters the house,m but instead of the exotic English blonde ghost he was expecting, he meets and is immediately captivated by the beautiful and very Punjabi Pinky (Neeru Bajwa.)
Wait, wrong picture.
Pinky tries to drive him away, but Jaggi is experienced and persistent. He tracks down Pinky's mother (Sunita Dhir) to learn all he can about her, then returns to try again to convince her to leave. They settle into an uneasy truce, and Pinky agrees to leave if Jaggi will bring her a dancer named Jasmine Gill (Mandy Takhar.)
Jaggi finds Jasmine, and utterly fails to make a good first impression. However, she teaches a salsa class, so he tries to sign up for her class. She doesn't want to accept him as a student, both because the class has already started and because she thinks he's kind of a creep, but reluctantly agrees to let him join the class if he can demonstrate basic salsa proficiency. Since he doesn't know salsa at all, that means it's back to Pinky for remedial salsa lessons.
When it comes time for the actual test, though, Jaggi chokes. Salsa dancing involves touching an actual, living human girl, and he just can't do it. At the last minute he manages to save the situation with his bhangra skills, because there's no problem that can't be solved with judicious application of bhangra.
Jaggi spins a story about learning salsa to impress his fiance, Lucy Spanish (you wouldn't know her. She goes to a different school) and the lessons begin. As Jaggi and Jasmine grow closer, he realizes that he has feelings for this actual, living human girl, and he feels terrible for lying to her. Of course, Jasmine has been keeping secrets as well, especially about what happened to Pinky.
The supernatural elements take a back seat to relationship drama here. The romantic triangle is a bit clumsy at times, and the "collecting ghost women like Pokemon", but the movie does do a good job of showing just how terrifying it can be to open yourself up and make a connection with a real person..
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