Pardes meri mehbooba movie#
This portrayal is a hard pill to swallow for Indian immigrants and no doubt the movie must have polarized audiences more than any other film in recent years. Ghai spends a considerable time in formulating this. More importantly, he has no interest in what is Indian. Beyond his devastatingly good looks and the fact he speaks Hindi as a foreign language, Apurva actually embodies nothing of India. Like any pampered American, life revolves around him. Meet Rajiv (played by hunk Apurva Agnihotri), the rich and spoiled millionaire, vain and ultimately cruel. Ghai has taken an interesting and risky angle in telling the tale of an immigrant by taking a drastic stand on what it means to be an Indian, albeit he played on the pride of Indian independence.
Pardes meri mehbooba full#
I can’t remember the last time I have felt so galvanized and moved by full sentences unadorned by profanity, guns and violence.
A stunning must-see drama, Pardes is proof that words have not lost the ability to shock our anesthetized society. At the end you don’t know for whom to feel sorry, the father for trying too hard or for the son who can’t seem to get anything right. His obsession leads him arrange his son’s engagement with a country girl from India, a culture neither his son understands, nor relates to. Part of the movie’s brilliance is the way it juxtaposes the father’s determination not to lose his son culturally to the West against the reality of what his son has become. However, director’s commitment to identity politics never feels political, and it’s a sign of his confidence that you find yourself lost in the characters he’s building and the storyline that is about to unfold. This is a bold move for Ghai to open his movie in the voice of a 60-year-old dad, and I’m not sure it usually works: I would imagine it tends to isolate the youth. He wonders how his American son can maintain dual identity without the identities dueling. Kishorilal (played appropriately by Amrish Puri), a wealthy and successful businessman living in Southern California (feels more like Vegas, Nevada). The story is told from the father’s point of view, Mr. While we are not short of immigrant films, none has ever captured the generational cultural gap so sensibly as Pardes. How about Guru (2002)? Directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer about Ramu (Jimi Mistry), a UK dance instructor who migrates to the US to become a film star but ended up becoming a sex guru for the rich and famous. Remember the Oscar-nominated Dirty Pretty Things (2003) by Steven Knight? This was a thriller about a gruesome London underworld preying on the fear and desperation of immigrants.
On a lighter note, there is Mira Nair’s film Namesake (2006) about a tale of a first generation son of traditional Indian immigrant parents.
Movies that come to mind in recent past are Crash and Traffic, multi-character dramas about the illegal immigrant experience in Los Angeles.
There have been countless films about immigrants and collision of races, cultures, and classes. While Big Fat Greek Wedding is between two Americans of different sub-culture, Pardes is a story about Indians from two different cultures. If you like Joel Zwick’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), you will appreciate this movie.