The idea behind Marigold has or had potential: American actress goes to India and gets a part in a Bollywood movie. (And of course falls in love in the process.) This could have been a fun way to use some of the tropes of Bollywood movies in a film that is not fully Bollywood, which is to say an extravagant all-singing, all-dancing, three-hour soap opera.
But it doesn’t work. Perhaps it wasn’t a good idea after all. Watering down Bollywood for Western audiences robs the Bollywood style of its very appeal — its over-the-top luxuriance and general disregard for realism. Baz Luhrmann did something akin to this in Moulin Rouge, but he has an innate sense of flamboyance and he was working with the musical genre, which is already outside the realist frame. It’s as though he took the Western musical and gave it some extra energy with an injection of Vitamin B-for-Bollywood; Marigold takes the Bollywood movie and slowly drains it of life by sticking it full of clichés.
The favoured concept of American films venturing into exotic terrains (basically anywhere that isn’t America, or at least Anglophonia) is usually to provide a white person from whose point of view the audience (that is, Americans) can gain some purchase on the remote society. Here, that viewpoint is provided by Marigold, the said American actress (Ali Larter of Final Destination II … er … fame).
As the film begins, she’s finding her way to Goa, and she’s being a prime bitch all the way. This section is amusing; there is a funny extended joke about Marigold only starring in films with numbers after their titles. (And she even looks like a Sharon Stone clone.) Once she gets a part in the Bollywood movie, however, and starts falling in love, she becomes a much nicer person and the film becomes increasingly boring in proportion to her transformation.
As the couple encounter various predictable cross-cultural obstacles to their romance, the boredom quotient rises some more and by the time those obstacles have been complicated and then dealt with in the usual conventional romantic-comedy fashion, one is staying awake only by virtue of repeated self-injury.
Playing the actor-cum-dance teacher-cum-love interest is Salman Khan, apparently known as the ‘Bad Boy of Bollywood”. Perhaps he’s trying to reverse such typecasting with this movie, because he spends most of it gazing at Marigold in a painfully moonstruck fashion. He is forbearance personified, with only the added fillip of a certain smugness that seems to say: ‘I know you better than you know yourself, and I know I am extremely handsome and a wonderful guy, and I will triumph in the end” … and say it again, and again, and again.
A simple measure of how good or bad a movie Marigold is may be to count the actual marigolds that appear in it. I would hazard a guess, and I’m being generous, at about 50 marigolds in Marigold. Compare that to Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, which has about a million marigolds in it. That makes Marigold 0,005% as good as Monsoon Wedding, give or take a zero.