Dumped by her fiancee two days before her wedding, traditional Indian daughter Rani decides to go on her honeymoon alone, and discovers happiness again.
Mostly in English subtitled Hindi with some Italian, French, German, and
Chinese thrown in, this is an uplifting fish-out-of-water story with some scary and cringeworthy twists. Rani, whose name means "Queen", arrives in Paris with a broken heart, but ends up making friends, discovering her talents, and breaking out of her shell.
This is bright and colorful, with a Bollywood techno soundtrack. It's terrible to craft to if you want to follow the story at all, but it's compelling and worth paying attention to. The lyrics to the music can be surprisingly deep, poetic, and spot-on for the situation. The colors are bright and flashy, and Rani takes us to a few choice spots in Paris and Amsterdam. If I hadn't been so afraid for her safety so often, I might have said this movie was heartwarming, but she was at times naive and/or clueless, and it triggered a cringing empathy that started to make me uncomfortable after a while. She did have some great friends to help her out, though, and that counted for a lot.
If only all sheltered women could find trustworthy friends to help them break out of their shells the way Rani did.
There were seven laugh out loud moments, and one holy crap moment when I realized that her friend in Paris had the same name as her fiancee'. I gave this a four out of five stars. I would have rated it better, but I didn't like the pranks the boys played on her, and this film was also really, really long. Two and a half hours of subtitles gets a bit draining.
So far I've only seen it available on Netflix, so catch it there if you like a thought-provoking foreign film.
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