Filmi Geek

Filmi Geek metapost

Namaste sab ko!

It has been a fun and busy couple of months since my last metapost.  I've reviewed 16 more movies since then (wow!) which means that review #100 is just around the corner.  In my last metapost I thanked you for 10,000 page views - I will reach a total of 20,000 today or tomorrow.  I was delighted to see yesterday that one of my reviews was linked on a Wikipedia page - my thanks to the reader who did that.  But mostly I thank all of you for reading and offering your comments and perspectives.

I would also like to make a small plug for a website I've gotten involved with.  Jaman is a place to download, watch, and discuss movies from all over the world.  I hope you will consider checking out Jaman's offerings and fledgling communities.  You can find me starting discussions in Jaman's South Asia section.  There is also a lot of interesting work by independent filmmakers from other parts of Asia, Latin America, and more.

I can't make any predictions about what will pop up here on Filmi Geek in the next couple of months - I have tons of films waiting to be watched and I'm sure more will insert themselves into the queue.  In the near future I expect to watch some more Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor classics, some more of the fun 60s and 70s fare I enjoy so much, mix in a few modern films, and of course you can count on more of the magnificent Shabana Azmi turning up sooner or later.  There are some things in life that are simply immutable!

Chokher bali (2003)

In my adventure romp through the rich fields of Indian cinema, I have been very fortunate.  Thanks to the guidance of thoughtful friends in communities like the BollyWHAT? forums to shape my selections, I have seen very, very few Indian movies that I found truly awful, without any redeeming feature.  There are only about two Indian movies that I pulled the plug on partway through,  and only about two more, out of the ninety or so reviewed on this site to date, that I wished I hadn't stuck out until the end.  I regret to say that Chokher bali ("A grain of sand") is a third.

In Raj-ruled Calcutta, Binodini (Aishwarya Rai) has had a hard year.  Her family's marriage proposal was rejected by Mahendra (Prasenjit Chatterjee), so she was married to another man, who survived less than a year.  Binodini enters the ascetic world of the 19th-century Hindu widow - she dons plain, unadorned sarees, forgoes all makeup and ornamentation, commits to strict dietary restrictions, and ceases her English education.  When Binodini arrives for an extended stay at Mahendra's home, she insinuates herself into the quotidian routines of every member of the household.  She develops a fast friendship with Mahendra's vapid and privileged wife, Ashalata (Raima Sen), and encourages the other widows in the household - Mahendra's mother and aunt - in the mild transgression of drinking tea, a habit that is both forbidden to widows and also excessively English.  She also entertains a light, intellectual flirtation with Mahendra's friend Behari (Tota Roy Chakraborty), a bookish agitator for independence.  Most explosively, she cultivates a passionate sexual affair with Mahendra himself.  From there, the tightly-wound threads of human relationships in the household snap and unravel.

At least I think that's the story.  The film opens with an impenetrable twenty minutes of exposition, in which the backstory leading to Binodini's stay in Mahendra's household is told in a confusing series of voice-overs.  It is equally unclear at all moments who is speaking and whose drama is being told - names of characters swirl by with little solid connection to images on the screen.  I watched the opening segment several times before I felt confident that I knew who was who; my viewing companion paused the film and referred to a plot synopsis on-line to settle her own confusion.   These are not markers of competent filmmaking.

And matters don't improve from there.  While the beginning of the film is dense with this exposition - telling the viewer what happened instead of showing it as a film can and should - in the middle of the film, when we finally do get to see the characters interact, there are excruciating segments in which very little happens.  The characters' most intense and personal feelings are revealed in letters written to one another and read in voice-over.  This device may have worked beautifully in Rabindranath Tagore's famous novel from which Chokher bali is adapted; in the film, however, it only spares the actors the challenge of conveying their emotions on screen, and robs the viewer of the experience of perceiving them.

Whatever message Chokher bali might wish to send - whether regarding the plight of widows, male-female inequality, sexuality, or any other theme - is lost among the endless narrations and the lurching pace of the story.  Even the film's ostensible focus, Binodini, is a mess of inconsistent characterization; she wheels from conniving manipulation to false contrition to real contrition and back again so many times that by the end her motivations are completely opaque.  Adding insult to injury is the fact that the film, originally shot in Bengali, is dubbed into Hindi, severing the connection between the actors' movements and their words and evoking Sunday-afternoon Japanese monster movies from my childhood.  In a better film this would have been forgivable and perhaps not even noticed; here, though, it only exacerbates a simply dreadful cinematic experience.

(Chokher Bali is available for download from Jaman.)

An Evening in Paris (1967)

Like the contemporaneous Jewel Thief, An Evening in Paris taps into a certain "occidentalism," an Indian fetishization of the west that is the mirror reflection of the west's orientalist exoticization and fetishization of the east.  It is a whirlwind tour of romantic locales - strolling along the Seine, skiing on the Jungfrau, water-skiing at a posh resort in Beirut, and spinning to a dramatic climax in the swirling rush of Niagara Falls. 

Deepa (Sharmila Tagore) is a wealthy Indian debutante out for a sojourn in Paris.  Tired of the endless gold-digging suitors who pursue her only for her wealth, Deepa longs for true romance, for a man who will love her for who she is and not what she has.  Enter Sam (Shammi Kapoor), a bold and manic Indo-Parisian who aggressively courts the recalcitrant Deepa; following her around Paris and ultimately to the rest of the film's locales, donning disguises and pulling off elaborate schemes in his efforts to woo her.  Meanwhile Shekhar (Pran), the son of Deepa's family servant, is down on his luck and in debt to some very dangerous gangsters.  To pay them back, he determines to woo Deepa and her riches for himself.  The gangsters, though, have other plans - they are looking to kidnap Deepa and sell her back for ransom.  Thrown into the mix is Deepa's twin sister Rupa, kidnapped years before when the sisters were tiny children, and now a hard-boiled nightclub dancer and gangster's moll known as Suzy.  From there, romance, adventure, mistaken identity, and other familiar masala elements take the action around the globe. 

Like Sharmilee a few years later, An Evening in Paris packs a social message into its disposition of the twin sisters - Deepa, despite her jet-setting independence, is always an upstanding Indian girl at heart, while Suzy's skimpy clothes and sharp, westernized edge are paid for with an ambiguous fate.  Indeed, in a sequence in which Suzy impersonates Deepa, it is her cigarette - a evocative symbol of the errant bad girl - that gives her away to the amorous Sam.  (The same device reveals the evil twin's deception in Sharmilee as well.)  And yet this moralizing is set against the backdrop of the lush western romanticism of Paris and the film's other exotic locations.  Deepa enjoys her exotic jaunt to the fullest, but even when she falls in love her good-girl instincts never falter; she is scandalized by the sight of Parisians kissing in public, and despite Sam's gentle encouragement insists that such enjoyments wait until after marriage.

Aside from this social message - which really accounts for only a fraction of the movie - An Evening in Paris is a solid, entertaining masala meal, particularly in its first half, which is driven by Sam's relentless pursuit of Deepa.  While I can see, with his wild gyrations and floppy hair, why Shammi Kapoor is sometimes compared to Elvis, he is a notch too tubby for my taste.  Still, his antics in this film are charming enough, and the song density is unparalleled - the rocking tunes, like this one, come every fifteen or twenty minutes through the film's first half.  Adding to the fun are crowds of perplexed Europeans in the background during the songs that were actually shot in broad daylight the streets of Paris, watching the dances.  Unfortunately, as is often the case with masala thrillers, the film gets bumpier when the plot, such as it is, gets going in the second half - but the dramatic climax at Niagara Falls is worth hanging on for. 

Sharmilee (1971)

शर्मीली

Sharmilee ("Shy")  appears on the surface to be a jaunty masala film with many of the usual elements: a soft-focus heroine (here in a dual role), a handsome, upstanding soldier (who also happens to be an orphan raised by a priest), a passel of shady hipster bad guys, wistful romance, mistaken identity, and a generous helping of dishoom-dishoom.  As is often the case in films of its era, though, Sharmilee is is something of a morality play, an allegory projected through a masala lens. 

Captain Ajit (Shashi Kapoor), stationed in Kashmir, is instantly smitten when he meets the spunky, aggressive Kamini (Rakhee).  Kamini disappears after one dazzling evening of poetry, though, and Ajit despairs of ever seeing her again.  Then Ajit's adoptive father, the kind-hearted Father Joseph (Nazir Hussein), unaware that Ajit has fallen for Kamini, seeks to arrange Ajit's marriage to Kamini's excruciatingly bashful twin sister, Kanchan (Rakhee, the other half of her dual role).  Ajit is briefly confused, but all seems set straight soon enough, and Ajit is set to marry his sprightly Kamini; Kanchan is depressed but resigned to her wallflower status.   When a shady gunda from Kamini's past surfaces, however, things take a turn for the weird, and a whirlwind of mistake, confusion, and deception follows, with an aerial climax worthy of the most over-the-top masala imaginable.

Sharmilee's allegory reflects an ambivalence in Indian culture toward modernization and westernization.  The duality - traditional versus modern, east against west - is embodied in the twin sisters.  Kamini, brash and modern, attracts all the attention; suitors come to the family to consider marriage to the modest, retiring Kanchan and end up enchanted with the flashy, outspoken Kamini.  She even wins the heart of Ajit, the ideal Indian man, a loyal and heroic soldier, obedient and deferential to his elders.  But the film punishes Kamini, and in the end it is the traditional Kanchan who is exalted and glorified.  Though she puts on a modern persona to please Ajit, Kanchan's heart is always demure.  Bollywood501 offers the excellent observation that unlike Kamini, Kanchan can successfully adopt western trappings only because she remains at the core a traditional Indian girl.  Thus, Sharmilee's ultimate moral is that without a traditional grounding, westernization is shallow, unmoored, and even dangerous. 

As a film, Sharmilee is reasonably entertaining, though some of its twists are whiplash-inducing.  Its driving force is the passion of the beautiful Shashi Kapoor; he radiates masala charm and charisma, but as Ajit  wheels from tenderness to anger to despair, Shashi's pure, abundant acting talent is also quite evident.  Ajit is an Indian renaissance man - a brave soldier, a good son, a passionate lover, a sensitive poet, and the interplay of these shades is the most compelling aspect of the film.  Rakhee is passable in her double role; she shows much more life and spark as the brassy Kamini, though, leaving the film's real heroine, the sad, innocent Kanchan, dull and flat in comparison.  The film falters where the masala-action elements take over; these are contrived, and undermine the film's strengths, which lie in the close interactions between Shashi and Rakhee's two avatars. 

Finally, Sharmilee's soundtrack is a gem by SD Burman; its standout song is the lyrical "Khilte hain gul yahaan," wistfully sung by Kishore Kumar and picturized on Shashi, who is as pretty as the song; Kanchan's domestic fantasy "Aaj madhosh huaa" is sweet; and the rest of the soundtrack is lovely as well.

(Sharmilee is available for download from Jaman.)

The Namesake (2007)

Mira Nair's adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's bestselling novel The Namesake is fairly true to the book; Nair's eye brings vividly to life the flavors and colors splashed through Lahiri's pages.  The result a lovely film with all the same strengths - and all the same weaknesses - as the novel it adapts. 

Ashima's (Tabu) marriage to Ashok Ganguli (Irfan Khan) is arranged by her parents in her home city of Calcutta; immediately after the marriage she is whisked to New York, where her new husband is a graduate student, and begins to adjust to the new and different life she will lead in America.  Their first child is a son, and they name him Gogol, after the Russian author, who (for a variety of reasons) is very close to Ashok's heart.  Gogol (Kal Penn) grows into a sullen teenager and eventually a discontented young man, disconnected from his Indian roots but also unmoored in the urban and urbane company he keeps.  As he moves through a series of romantic relationships and weathers some family tragedy, Gogol's identity shifts and reforms, and in time he reaches an understanding of the gifts his parents have given him in his Bengali heritage, his name, and his autonomy.

The Namesake's greatest strength is that it is a real, uncaricatured story; it avoids the trap of lapsing into cliche, of recycling the tired themes of the strained arranged marriage, the overbearing immigrant parents, the second generation's rebellion.  Instead,  Ashima and Irfan's marriage grows from its formal beginning into genuine, moving tenderness; while Ashima laments the brash, American mannerisms of her children she and Irfan are committed to letting them have their own choices and freedoms; and Gogol's distance from his parents is not so much a reaction against being Indian as it is a general malaise.  His identity crisis is focused through his particular cultural lens, but his drifting of purpose perhaps resonates universally.

Because The Namesake is so much about what goes on inside its character's heads - Ashima's and Gogol's in particular - it would fail without excellent performances from its actors, and Mira Nair gets what she needs from her talented cast.  Tabu and Irfan Khan are particularly outstanding, communicating volumes even with very little dialogue; young Kal Penn stands up well also, with a handful of superb scenes that outweigh his few sullen teenager moments.  Indeed, Gogol's occasional shallowness is not really Kal Penn's fault.  One irritating aspect I recall from the novel is that Gogol is not always an interesting enough character to have a whole book about him; this weakness is not corrected in the film.  As with the novel, I am left wishing for more about Ashima and less about Gogol.  Still, there is enough substance in Gogol's arc to maintain the focus, even if the women in his life are thinly-drawn tokens.  And the film's eye never drifts too far from Ashima, navigating the vast confusion of American suburbia. 

Like the novel, The Namesake is episodic, sometimes disorientingly so, as the viewer is jerked through the passage of time, often with no hint of what transpired in the interstitial years; one moment Gogol is a high-school graduate headed to Yale; the next, he is a young architect living in a swanky apartment in New York with a rich, white girlfriend.  In fact the film omits some episodes in which the novel touched down, leaving the film to feel even more compressed and speedy at times.  But these are minor complaints, small flaws in a film that was on the whole lovely, sweet, and fairly satisfying.   

Do aur do paanch (1980)

दो और दो पाँच

Amitabh Bachchan, Shashi Kapoor, Hema Malini, Parveen Babi - sounds like a foundation for a great masala film.  Unfortunately, Do aur do paanch ("Two and two are five"), apart from a handful of top-notch moments - driven by the talent of its two leads - fails to measure up to its whimsical promise.

Vijay (Amitabh) and Sunil (Shashi) are competitive crooks.  Wherever one goes, the other is always at his heels, vying for the same heist.  They hate each other, and they take their adversarial rage with them even into jail.  After their release, Sunil's uncle - a standard-issue masala-film villain who lurks in an elaborate lair surrounded by an army of incompetent goons - engages Sunil to kidnap a rich man's son.  But Vijay wants the boy, too - the promise of a king's ransom is too good to resist.  With Vijay posing as Ram, a gym teacher, and Sunil passing himself off as a music teacher, Laxman, both men secure positions at the boy's school, and the race is on.  With a series of wacky pranks and clever ruses each tries to outwit the other and snatch the boy away from the protective gaze of his teacher Shalu (Hema Malini) and the headmaster's daughter Anju (Parveen Babi). 

That plot is less complicated than other masala films of the era, and that is part of what makes Do aur do paanch considerably less satisfying than its more ridiculous kin, like the delightfully absurd Namak halaal.  Still, Do aur do paanch does sport a few interesting features.  Amitabh and Shashi are always a treasure; even in a relatively weak film like this one, their unparalleled and starkly contrasting charm lights up the screen, and their antics as each tries to one-up the other with pranks and deception are definitely the most enjoyable part of the film.  The pseudonyms that Vijay and Sunil take on for their stint at the school, their teacher-avatars - Ram and Laxman - hint at the brotherhood that ultimately grows between the rival rogues, and there is some pleasure in watching that develop.

On balance, though, despite a few outlandish moments - Sunil skinny-dipping in a river as an angry Shalu (prodded by Vijay, of course) runs away with his clothes; a bizarre song featuring more than a dozen actors in animal suits - Do aur do paanch is just too much "dishoom dishoom" and not enough silly.  Hema Malini is utterly wasted - after a promising entrance in which she tosses sundry obstacles in the way of the bad guys' cars, she gets virtually nothing to do.  Not even the songs provide the over-the-top sparkle that the movie lacks.  The title song is a good solid exemplar of its Amitabh-Kishore pairing, and its reprise on a hoarse but triumphant Shashi is fun too.  Beyond that, though - apart from the odd song with the dancing mascots - there's not too much that is memorable. 

(Do aur do paanch is available for download from Jaman.)

Raincoat (2004)

Rituparno Ghosh's Raincoat is a languid commentary on love, on sacrifice, and most of all on the facades people erect when they cannot bear the harsh light of real life.  With a presentation that is more like a stage play than a film, it demands a lot of its actors.  For the most part, the film and the actors hold up well. 

Manoj (Ajay Devgan) is unemployed and in dire straits.  Desperate, he leaves his village for Calcutta, where his old school friend Alok, a successful television producer, has put in a good word for him with some of their mutual acquaintances.  Manoj's plan is to swallow his pride and visit each of these acquaintances, asking for loans so he can set up a small business.  He has one more stop in mind, though - to drop in on his old flame, Neerja (Aishwarya Rai), who left him six years before and married a man with more financial promise and security.   In one rainy afternoon, Manoj and Neerja desconstruct themselves as they spin tales for one another, catching up on the intervening time. 

Manoj and Neerja lie to one another about their circumstances as much because they are ashamed to admit the truth to themselves as they are to admit it to one another.  The titular raincoat is the film's principal metaphor for both the effect of such deception and its inherent weaknesses. It is a protective cocoon that shields its wearer from battery by the elements, but each time a character puts it on a piece of concealed truth is revealed.  Its message seems to be that the more the characters try to hide from themselves, the more likely they are to be discovered by the people closest to them. Raincoat amplifies and builds on the metaphor with others - closed windows thrown open and then closed again; broken lamps and the shifting shadows thrown by candles; fractured mirror reflections; roaches hiding in the darkness of a closed drawer.

Raincoat's premise is compelling enough.  Its theatrical style - much of the film takes place in one cramped room, and the narrative is principally conveyed through dialogue between Manoj and Neerja - is well-suited to the tight psychological study that the film endeavors to present.  It falters when, at times, the pace slows beyond even my tolerance for contemplative cinema.  And there are moments when the exposure of the stage-play approach is more than its actors can bear; Ajay Devgan wears a shroud of gloom so dense that at times he threatens to collapse inward on himself, and Aishwarya Rai's performance, which may have been aiming at nonchalance, verges instead on petulance.   

The most promising interactions are those between Manoj and his Calcutta hostess Sheila, Alok's wife - these two come much closer to honest connection than Manoj and Neerja ever do during their afternoon of elaborative fiction.  Unfortunately we are not treated to enough of Sheila; her revealing conversations  with Manoj are limited to a handful of crackling scenes.  Still, Raincoat offers enough to hold the viewer's interest in the small orbit of its characters, seasoned by lovely, plaintive songs with the poetry of Gulzar.  And its ending is both satisfying and thought-provoking - it reminded me of the ironic stories of O Henry, and I was pleased to see that inspiration acknowledged in the film's closing credits not moments after the thought had occurred to me. 

Padosan (1968)

पड़ोसन

Padosan (lit. "female neighbor," i.e., "the girl next door") is a simple-minded, warm-hearted slapstick comedy that doesn't ask much of its audience, and doesn't really offer much in return.  At its heart is a dim-witted hero, his cadre of even stupider friends, a pouty, vapid heroine, and a passel of broadly-drawn stereotypes that are unfortunately more mystifying than amusing to a non-Indian viewer like me.

Simple-minded Bhola (Sunil Dutt), after reading religious philosophy, decides that at twenty-six years of age, he should be starting a family.  Casting about for a suitable girl, Bhola's eye lights on the lively young Bindu (Saira Banu), and he is instantly smitten.  He soon discovers, to his delight, that Bindu lives next door to Bhola's aunt, with whom he is staying, and his bedroom window opens directly opposite Bindu's.  Bhola's initial attempts at courting Bindu are not terribly successful, though, so he turns for advice to his friend Vidyapathi (Kishore Kumar), a spastic, paan-chewing theater director.  Noting Bindu's love of music - Bhola's main competition for her attention is Bindu's excessively amorous southern dancing-master, Pillai (Mehmood) -  Vidyapathi hits upon the scheme of hiding beside the window and singing, while Bhola performs in lip-sync - just like a film hero.  This does get Bindu's attention - at least for a while.  But there is still the dancing-master to contend with, plus Bhola's hale and hearty uncle (Om Prakash), who, unbeknownst to all, is working with a marriage broker to arrange his own match with Bindu. 

Padosan's hero is aptly named - "Bhola" means guileless or innocent - and though he is almost insufferably stupid at first, as the film wears on his naive sweetness does grow on the viewer just as it grows on  Bindu.  The best parts of the film are the songs, a bright and clever collection of early R.D. Burman melodies.  The couple of songs in which Vidyapathi backs Bhola's performance (like "Mere samnewaali khidki") are a charming send-up of the Bollywood playback convention; there is a pleasant self-referentiaity in a tune sung by Kishore Kumar, picturized on a Kishore Kumar character, who is singing it for someone else to perform.  The other standout songs include "Ek chatur naar", a hysterical musical duel between the dancing-master and Bhola (well, Vidyapathi) that pits Carnatic against the north Indian style, and Saira Banu's cheeky bathtime frolic, "Bhai battur".

Beyond the songs, though, Padosan isn't really for me.  Much of the humor derives from broad stereotyping - the exaggerated accent and mannerisms of the Tamil-Brahmin dancing-master, the paan-juice perpetually dribbling down Vidyapathi's chin, Bhola's uncle's Rajput pride - that is largely lost on me.  The rest is of the shouting-and-slapstick variety of Indian comedy that is not much to my taste.  The result, I fear, is that much of what is side-splittingly funny in Padosan is just lost in translation.  And from a purely superficial perspective, neither the hero nor the heroine are particularly nice to look at.  It was fun enough while it was happening - and the soundtrack is definitely a keeper - but it's not a film I expect to return to again and again. 

Jaane bhi do yaaro (1983)

जाने भी दो यारो

This black comedy pits a pair of hapless knuckleheads against the vast and wealthy machinery of official corruption.  It's not exactly a fair fight, but it makes for a movie that is funny, textured, and rich with symbolism. 

Photographers Vinod (Naseeruddin Shah) and Sudhir (Ravi Baswani) are struggling to get customers into their portrait shop when opportunity knocks - a tabloid editor Shobha (Bhakti Barve) hires them to snap stealthy shots of the surreptitious meetings between the corrupt Municipal Commissioner D'Mello (Satish Shah) and the real estate developers who bribe him for construction permits.  First the photographers discover a bidding war between rival developers, the slick Tarneja (Pankaj Kapur) and drunken Ahuja (Om Puri).  When the competition escalates to murder, Vinod and Sudhir are determined to fight the good fight and expose the crimes and corruption they have discovered.  But they find themselves in a perilous tangle of deals and double-crosses, where everyone is on the take.   

From the outset Jaane bhi do yaaro ("Let it go, friends") has the tone of a zany caper.  Its guileless heroes zigzag their way from bluffing into D'Mello's home to photograph secret documents, to chasing a wayward corpse, to staging an impromptu takeover of a theatrical production of the Mahabharata, and each stop on the journey is more hysterical than the one before.  But the prevailing mood of the film, and presumably of its audience as well, is that the bumbling efforts of feckless interlopers, no matter how well-meaning, is not enough to jam the well-oiled gears of official corruption. 

The film strikes a nice balance with a madcap approach to a weighty subject; Vinod and Sudhir's naive earnestness is funny and charming.  And it's not just farce and slapstick; there are layers of meaning even in the silliest scenarios.  My friend Amit at Cross-cut has a nice comment on the complexity of the Mahabharata scene, for example, in which the film's characters usurp the stage performance of a familiar myth.  Amit notes that this is a metaphor for the people of India who sit and watch passively as the spectacle of corruption is carried out before them. 

While the characters are engaging and the antics side-splitting, Jaane bhi do yaaro's message is ultimately very bleak, with a flavor of no good deed going unpunished.  It is an excellent, entertaining, and provocative film, but be prepared for a sucker punch or two amidst all the mirth.

The Guru (2002)

As a white American with an obvious interest in Indian culture, I am sensitive to the stereotypes of white Americans interested in Indian culture, and I try very hard not to reinforce them.  Even so, I sometimes squirm a little uncomfortably when these stereotypes pop up in the movies.  I can't help but wonder: is that what I look like?  Fortunately, the version of the stereotype that is sent up in The Guru is so over-the-top that I didn't really have to worry.  And the film, a comical diaspora story about exploitation and love that draws on a number of Bollywood-ish elements, is a light, cute, and entertaining story.

Ramu (Jimi Mistry) is a dance instructor in Bombay who longs to be a star.  At the urging of his NRI friend Vijay (Emil Marwa), Ramu follows his dreams to New York, but arrives to discover that Vijay's tales of penthouse living and fancy cars were exaggerated just a smidge.  When a swami-for-hire passes out drunk before an appearance at a high-society party at which Vijay is working as a waiter, Ramu steps in and fakes his way through an impromptu discourse on sex and spirituality.  The ditzy, spiritually-searching socialite Lexi (Marisa Tomei) is taken with Ramu, and declares him her guru, the "Guru of Sex."  Suddenly Ramu finds he can make a ton of money by churning out pseudo-exotic sexual philosophy that rich, bored ladies who lunch will pay generously for.  But Ramu needs material, so he enlists the help of a porn star, Sharonna (Heather Graham).  Believing that Jimi is trying to break into the porn business - and knowing nothing of his spiritual sideline - Sharonna reveals her most personal thoughts and philosophies about sex and sexuality, and Jimi repackages these for his new disciples.  Sooner or later, Sharonna will find out that Jimi is using her - but not before he falls in love with her. 

The story is sort of dumb and some of the humor is a little crude, but on balance, The Guru is warm and funny, offering an unlikely love story amongst a fun and diverse collection of characters.  While there are some gems in the casting, the characterizations and performances are a little spotty.  Ramu's childlike dreamy innocence is somewhat at odds with his willingness to carry on a sexual relationship with Lexi, whom he does not seem to care for very much.  But Jimi Mistry is sufficiently cute and appealing that the inconsistencies in his character are not a serious distraction.  Lexi herself is spot-on; Marisa Tomei offers a perfect comic presentation of the spoiled rich kid who is hungering for something deeper than BMWs and penthouses, but who is too clueless and sheltered to recognize the difference between real spiritual depth and flaky trendism.  She is both a caricature and fully human.  Heather Graham's philosophical porn-star is neither here nor there, serviceable but not memorable.  There is one real treat in the cast, though - Christine Baranski, sharp-clawed as Lexi's sneering yet indulgent mother, is as delicious as she always is.

The Guru features a few musical numbers, mostly in Hindi; these are meant as tributes to the Bollywood form, I guess, and while some of them were quite good - Heather Graham was more alive in her song than she  was in the rest of the movie - others left me feeling that I'd rather watch the real thing.  The film's ending was delightful, drawing on one of Bollywood's favorite tropes - the interrupted wedding, with a couple of light-hearted surprises.

I would generally rather watch a Hindi movie than a western film inspired by Hindi movies.  Still, The Guru is a charming enough timepass, worth a watch if you happen to stumble across it.