It's a silly story about headstrong singles finally swallowing their pride and getting married, only the more strange for taking place in familiar settings. A bit in this respect like "Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna," one of last year's big films, which took place all over New York City, though a New York City from one end of which you could move to another as swiftly as through a hypertexted website (and change costume, too!)! Of course Bollywood - especially but not only in its dance numbers - is not about continuity, and to notice bloopers seems simply to miss the point.But it's not insignificant that "Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna" took place among NRI (Non-Resident Indians) in New York and that "Salaam Namaste" takes place among NRIs in Melbourne. Big budget Bollywood films take place in all sorts of strange and wonderful places; what's important is simply that these take place abroad. The foreign locales allow the films to take on forbidden topics, allow their NRI protagonists to let it all hang out. In India, I learned, "Kabhi" isn't the New York movie, it's the divorce movie - the first movie to present divorce sympathetically... (it seemed extravagantly cruel to me when I saw it...)
And "Salaam" isn't the Melbourne movie; it's the living-together-when- you're-not-married movie. I'm sure it's not the first film in which proud young people who've rejected marriage shack up and get pregnant but it's the first to give them a happy-ever-after ending anyway, although they do have to suffer a little bit on the way. (When she can't go through with an abortion and he won't marry her because he doesn't want kids or marriage, she says it must be her karma to have fallen in love with him and gotten pregnant - despite using birth control! - and now have her life ruined,
a punishment for turning down the ten matches her parents found for her which only he could have meted out to her.)Divorce and living together without marriage are explosive topics to an Indian, but to a jaded western viewer the films are striking for other reasons. Like the delirious dance numbers in "Kabhi" and the strangely disconnected love duets in "Salaam" and the crazed camera work in both! Lucky for you people have posted some parts of "Salaam Namaste" on youtube. So you can see many places I see every day as the protagonists fall in love ("My heart goes hmmm"). You can also see something I've never seen before - go on, I dare you - the title number where Australian girls in bathing suits do Bollywood dance numbers (not all that well). And here's something really bizarre, the only NRI whose English sucks is a Crocodile Dundee wannabe, with a Leitmotif from Ennio Morricone - is this how Aussies are seen in Hindustan?
