This movie brought to you by the tourist board of Amritsar.

 Chandigarh Amritsar Chandigarh (2019) is not a Bollywood movie; it's a product of "Pollywood," the Punjabi film industry, but the storyline is the kind of thing I would expect to see from a Bollywood movie made ten or so years ago.  In fact, it's exactly the story I saw in 2014's Mumbai Delhi Mumbai, which was in turn a remake of the 2010 Marathi film Mumbai-Pune-Mumbai.  It's a very adaptable premise, so you can take any two rival cities, add local cultural flavor to taste, and create your own New York LA New York or Edinburgh Glasgow Edinburgh.

Reet (Sargun Mehta) is a fashion designer form sophisticated Chandigarh.  She's come to bustling Amritsar to meet and reject the potential groom her parents have lined up for her.  Of course, this isn't the way things are normally done.  Usually the groom is supposed to go and meet his potential bride, but Reet wants the whole thing over with, so she's making the trip to Amritsar without consulting her parents.

Almost immediately after arriving, she manages to pick a fight with her rickshaw driver, Murari (Rajpal Yadav) over which city is better, and he winds up cycling away in terror with her phone still in the seat of his rickshaw.  Reet is alone and having trouble navigating the city, so she asks local Rajveer (Gippy Grewal) for directions, spoiling his cricket game in the process.  Rajveer gives her the directions she asks for, she finds the groom's home but discovers that he is not there, and then she realizes that her phone is gone.

Reet asks Rajveer top help her find her phone, and he agrees because he considers it a matter of his city's honor.  And he keeps on helping her, even when they argue. They argue a lot at first - she seems to be a bit stuck up, he seems like exactly the sort of overly dramatic Amritsar guy she's been complaining about, but as the day goes on they start to get along and become friends, despite never finding out the other's name.

Meanwhile, Murari the rickshaw driver is having a terrible day.  Every fare he finds eventually complains of the seat vibrating and eventually slaps him.  He visits a guru who tells him that the rickshaw is haunted, probably due to driving over a lemon (it's a thing) and gives him a list of ridiculous instructions to exorcise it.  And to top it all off, the scary lady from Chandigarh keeps chasing him down and yelling at him for reasons he doesn't understand.  In other words, while Reet and Rajveer are living a romantic comedy, Murari is stuck in the sort of farce that usually stars Rajpal Yadav.  

It's all building up to a final. . . . well, not really a  twist.  A final punchline about the identity of the groom.  I already knew the punchline but if you've seen pretty much any movie ever you can probably figure it out.  But that's okay; a movie like this is all about the journey, and it's a pleasant journey in the company of attractive and ultimately nice people.  Not every movie has to break new ground.

Maybe try talking next time?

 Chori Chori Chupke Chupke has always been my benchmark for terrible plans in Indian movies; it's hard to top "Honey, let's hire a sex worker to live with us in Switzerland for a year and bear your child in order to make Amrish Puri happy, because there's absolutely no risk of everything becoming a complicated tangle of emotions that threatens to end our marriage and upend our place in society."  However, Hey Sinamika (2022) may be a new contender.

When driven paleotempestologist Mouna (Aditi Rao Hydari) meets unemployed free spirit Yaazhan (Dulqer salman) they are immediately caught up in a heavy storm, which means that when I say they have a whirlwind courtship, it's a pun rather than a cliche.  Yaahzhan may be unemployed, but he's handsome, cultured, an excellent cook, and a skilled and dedicated conversationalist.  So yes, whirlwind courtship.

Two years later, they are married.  Mouna is using working at an architectural firm, using her knowledge of weather patterns to help create safer buildings.  Yaazhan is still unemployed but happily busies himself as a devoted househusband.  Every time Mouna turns around he's there to feed her some sort of strange and fattening treat, he fusses over his houseplants nearly as much as he fusses over her, and he is. Always. talking.  Mouna is on edge, and after a car trip in which Yaazhan tries to A. R. Rahmansplain her own taste in music back to her, she's had enough.  She wants out.

Mouna can't bring herself to hurt Yaazhan, though, so she schemes with some co-workers to find a way to convince Yaazhan to divorce her.  (This is a bad plan, but it's not Chori Chori Chupke Chupke bad.  Worse is still to come.)  All of these schemes fall through, because Yaazhan is so aggressively laid back that nothing bothers him.

Mouna is frustrated, but she manages to wrangle a year-long assignment in Puducherry, so that she can at least enjoy a year of being able to hear her own thoughts and eat what she wants.  She breaks the news to Yaazhan, emphasizing how terribly she's going to miss him, so of course he follows her there so that she won't be alone.  It's the same dysfunction, but in a different city.

One of their neighbors in Puducherry is Dr, Malarvizhi, a psychologist and family therapist.  Malarvizhi has a tragic backstory which doesn't come up until late in the movie, but it has convinced her that there are no good men in the world, and she brings that belief to her counseling work, striving to expose the men in the couples that she counsels, going so far as to photograph one client canoodling with another woman at a wedding.  This is incredibly unethical, but nobody ever points that out.  

Mouna learns of Malarvizhi's reputation for destroying marriages, and that's when she hatches her terrible, terrible plan: Malarvizhi will seduce Yaazhan, and Mouna can have the divorce she wants without having to have an uncomfortable conversation with her husband.  Even Malarvizhi can see that this is a gross violation of her professional ethics, but Mouna manages to browbeat her into taking the job.

Step one is to get Yaazhan a job, so that he can be out of the house and easier to observe.  Mouna calls in some favors, and Yaazhan is hired by a local struggling radio station as on air talent.  Talking constantly is a useful skill for a radio jockey, and he's an immediate success.  Step two is to make contact, and thanks to information from Mouna, Malarvizhi manages to befriend him in short order.

Two problems quickly become apparent.  First, Yaazhan is a good (if annoying) man who loves his wife, so while he is happy to be a friend, he's quick to step back whenever Malarvizhi even hints at anything improper.  Malarvizhi falls hard for him.

Second, after seeing her husband with another woman, Mouna starts to realize that she does love him after all; it helps that he has a job which encourages him to ramble on as much as he wants and  also a friend, so he's not entirely focused on Mouna at all times, making him considerably less annoying.  Suddenly convincing another woman to seduce her husband doesn't seem like such a good idea after all.

Hey Sinamika has more in common with Chori Chori Chupke Chupke than terrible life choices; in both movies, those terrible life choices are made by otherwise lovely people played by charming and attractive actors, and you find yourself rooting for the characters despite knowing that everything bad happening to them is all their fault.  Even Malarvizhi, whose Angry Psychology is a moral and professional disaster, comes across as a sympathetic character.

It's a very old school formula that was employed by many movies during the nineties (looking at you, half of Shahrukh Khan's early career), and when it works, it works.  Just don't forget that it's a movie, and in real life this kind of terrible plan will lead to a lot of damaged people rather than a happy ending.

A role that's so nice, they cast it twice.

 When Bollywood legend Rishi Kapoor died in 2020, shooting for his last film, Sharmaji Namkeen (2022) was still incomplete.  Rather than scrap the movie, the producers considered a number of frankly terrible ideas such as creating a CGI Rishi Kapoor or putting Kapoor's son Ranbir in prosthetics to play the part, but instead veteran character actor Paresh Rawal stepped in to complete the missing scenes.  The end result is a movie with two leading men both playing the same role, and it works better than you might think.

Our hero is Brij Gopal Sharma (Kapoor and Rawal), who has just been forced to take early retirement from the kitchen appliance company where he worked.  Sharma is not cut out for sitting at home and watching TV, so after driving the entire neighborhood crazy with home improvement projects, he spends some time bouncing from hobby to hobby and job interview to job interview.  His only real passion is cooking, but when he suggests opening up a small stall, his older son Rinku (Suhail Nayyar) shuts down the idea immediately; it's not a respectable position for someone of their social class.

However, when his old friend Chadda (Satish Kaushik) asls him to cook for a relative's religious function, Sharma agrees.  he cooks wonderfully, the people are all nice, everything is great . . . until Sharma catches a glimpse of the guests and realizes that he's not cooking for a religious function, he's cooking for a kitty party!  (A kitty party is a mostly Indian tradition, one part social outing and one part savings club, in which a group of (usually) women pool money in a "kitty", and then they take turns every month using the money to host a party for the group.)

Sharma is horrified, leaves immediately, and makes polite excuses whenever the women call him and try to hire him again.  But it was nice to have something to do, and even nicer to be treated with respect.  And he's intrigued by one of the women in the group, the beautiful, sophisticated, and widowed Veena (Juhi Chawla.)  So he goes back again.  And again.  Soon he's a fixture at the kitty parties, but he's still careful to keep his new career secret from his family and friends.

Sharma's not the only one keeping secrets.  Younger son Vincy (Taaruk Raina) has been focused on his dream of dancing, and has failed his college exams.  And Rinku is in a relationship with coworker Urmi (Isha Talwar).  They're practically engaged, and Rinku has already made a large down payment on an apartment, but the corrupt developer seems intent on keeping the money without letting the young couple move in.  Everybody's tired, and everybody's stressed.  And then a family friend finds footage of Sharma dancing at a kitty party on Facebook.

This is a very Rishi Kapoor movie. The man was a versatile actor, and he's put in some strong performances in a variety of roles, but even before he aged out of playing romantic leads his public image has always been cuddly and avuncular.  Sharmaji Namkeen has a charming, cozy ambiance that plays into that image.  There's conflict, but it's mostly conflict between people who love each other, and we know they'll make it work in the end.  The closest the movie gets to social controversy is its portrayal of kitty parties as a space where women can express themselves without worrying about their assigned societal roles.

It takes a little while to get used to the dual lead actors alternating scenes, but it's not as distracting as you might think.  It helps that Paresh Rawal doesn't look very much like Rishi Kapoor and isn't trying to do any sort of Rishi Kapoor impression, he's just  playing to the emotional truth of the character in his own fashion, a bit less cuddly and a bit more exasperated.  It lets Kapoor and Rawal fade into the background and lets Sharma take center stage.

This is not a groundbreaking movie, but it's a fun and comfortable movie, and casting Juhi Chawla as the female romantic lead in a new movie will always get bonus points from me.