Haven't you ever wondered why it is that when there are so many romantic comedies made that very few of them are any good? You'd think that the people who made those types of films would have had enough practice by now that they'd know what they were doing. Yet instead it seems like the more of them they make the more they do the same lame old plots that are so predictable that you can almost recite the dialogue along with the actors as they do their scenes.
Then again I guess you can say the same thing about so many movies these days. Once somebody discovers a formula that works nobody wants to mess with it and be the one who loses money because they dared to do something a little bit different. I'm sure this applies to the movie industry all over the world; from Bollywood to Hollywood the credo is don't mess up and make sure the producers get their end and at the very least the studio recoups any money it sank into the film.
Therefore, any time I hear of a movie which even has the slightest chance of deviating from the tried and true, or at least offers a new twist on an old theme, I'm more than willing to give a chance. So when I was offered the opportunity to review My Faraway Bride (that's it's title in the United States - the rest of the world will be seeing it as My Bollywood Bride), distributed by Salient Media, I thought, "Why not?" The premise, while not completely original, at least offered the potential for something different from the norm, and I was interested in seeing what they would do with it.
Alex (Jason Lewis) is a young American who meets Reena (Kasimera Shah), a beautiful Indian woman, on vacation in California. As is the case in all of these movies they have a whirlwind romance and fall in love. One day Reena disappears, and Alex discovers that she has left the country and returned home to India without saying good-bye. Determined not to let her go that easily he heads off to India. Somehow, although he only knows the name of the Mumbai suburb where she lives and her first name, he is determined to find her.
Unfortunately there are a couple things he doesn't know about Reena. One, she is already engaged to be married to a man her parents have chosen for her, and two, the man she is engaged to be married to is the producer of the movies she stars in as she is one of Bollywood's leading ladies. The good news is that her being a star makes it easy for Alex to find her, as her face is on almost every billboard in Mumbai. The bad news is how to get close to her when she is constantly surrounded by movie people, including her thug of a husband to be, Shekhar (Gulshan Grover), for him to have a chance of convincing her to change her mind about the wedding.
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