Saturday, May 21, 2022

I'm wondering if she still gets her commission.

 In Bollywood they say that romance is dead.  It's not, of course; the Hindi film industry runs in cycles, and romance will always come back, though it is true that the days in which Shah Rukh Khan stood over the subcontinent like a colossus, arms outstretched and asking a nation to look into his eyes have ended.  In any case, Bollywood is not the only game in town, and the Telugu film industry is still making movies like Shaadi Mubarak (2021).

Even though Satya (Drishya Raghunath) is the daughter of a marriage broker (Rashshri Nair), she's not particularly interested in tying the knot herself, and especially not with the college friend her mother has picked out for her.  Still, Satya likes to slip her picture into the collection of eligible brides her mother keeps in the office, just to see if anyone likes her.  (They do!)  But while Satya may be mischievous, she's still a dutiful daughter who cheerfully listens to her father's story about the baby boy born at the same hospital on the same day as her, a boy whose mother died, leaving a heartbroken husband and a valuable lesson about the power of love, even though it would be an outrageous coincidence for the boy to show up now after all these years.


On her birthday, Satya is asked to take a client to meet three potential brides.  The client is Madhav (Sagar R. K. Nadu).  When Satya asks him why he's ready to get married now, a question she asks all her clients, Madhu explains that his horoscope predicts that he will marry an older woman, and his parents insist on marrying him off right away to avoid that terrifying fate.  And in a shocking coincidence, it's also Madhav's birthday.


Madhav dutifully meets with the potential brides, but it's clear that he's more interested in Satya.  She finds him intriguing as well, and snoops through his bag when he's not looking, playfully trying on the ring she finds inside.  Naturally, it gets stuck on her finger.

Despite the mutual attraction, though, meeting other women is not a situation conducive to anything more than a little light flirting and the occasional bit of exposition.  Satya learns about the girl Madhav used to love, before her policeman father rounded him up along with his friends and had him beaten.  And in another coincidence, that girl, Bhagyamati (Aditi Myakal), is the third bride.


It must be fate, because by the end of the day Madhav has accepted Bhagyamanti, and a heartbroken Satya calls her mother and agrees to marry the man picked out for her.  Madhav tracks her down and tries to explain that he only agreed to Bhagyamanti's proposal in order to help her elope with the man she's secretly in love with, but Satya grew up in the Village of People Who Jump to Conclusions, so she assumes that he's only after his ring and refuses to listen.  


It sounds like a perfect recipe for drama, and there's certainly a fair bit of angst involved, but this is a light fluffy romance, and the problem is solved through the grand romantic tradition of separate epiphanies followed by a loud argument in the middle of someone else's wedding.


Shaadi Mubarak
is not a deep film; it's the kind of earnest and goofy romantic comedy that they made in Bollywood fifteen years ago.  It's a pleasant movie about good looking people who are nice and eventually wind up together; that may sound dismissive, but being pleasant etc. is what you want out of this kind of movie.  That's its job, and it does it well.



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