Main Aur Mrs Khanna

Last night Ania and I ventured into deepest Feltham to see a movie at the Cineworld cinema complex at West Liesure, a mass of American-style commercialism and fast food joints huddled in an industrial zone.

Movie poster for Main Aurr Mrs Khanna

We had originally intended to see Up, the new Disney/Pixar film, at the Cineworld in Wandsworth. But at the last moment we veered left onto the M25 and drove towards Feltham instead, largely to avoid the seven or eight speed cameras, on the A3 between Esher and Wandsworth.

Most people seem to have worked these into their routine: dashing along at ten or thirty miles per hour above the limit, then slowing suddenly en mass right before the cameras (which are a square foot in size and bright yellow). But while I can manage the sudden slowing easily enough, instead of starting to seem normal, the whole thing has just become more and more annoying.

It's not having to slow down that irritates me: it's the sheer bloody-minded pointlessness of a system which is perpetuated, for greed, in spite of it clearly not working. And that's tolerated so placidly by us, the public, in spite of the fact that a good 60 or 80 percent of us clearly don't believe it's a sensible solution. But then, this is the same country that put up with eleven o'clock pub closing times for fifty or sixty years with hardly a complaint.

So instead we drove to Feltham. However on arriving it turned out that Up wasn't showing -- and none of the other films seemed appealing -- so instead we decided to watch a Bollywood film called Main Aur Mrs Khanna.

It's not unheard of for us to choose Bollywood over Hollywood. When we lived closer to Wandsworth we belonged to the Cineworld (nee UGC) Unlimited club, whereby we could watch any film at any time for a flat monthly fee. When going to the cinema is effectively free you consider seeing films you otherwise might not risk seven or eight quid on.

After a time we developed quite a taste for them. They're all musicals, of course, and their style is quite different from Hollywood films, or even European ones. But given that Bollywood makes both more films than Hollywood and more money, it seems churlish to dismiss them entirely due to some kind of basic cultural prejudice. We watch Spanish films with subtitles, so why not Indian ones.

Movie poster for Lago Raho Munna Bhai

And in truth some of them are good. Lage Raho Munna Bhai for example, a warm and satisfying comedy about a likeable small-time gangster who meets the ghost of Ghandi (and wins the girl, to a rousing Bollywood soundtrack). Or Taare Zameen Par, a faultlessly told story of a young dyslexic boy's experience of prejudice and ignorance of his condition at school.

Sadly less the case with Main Aur Mrs Khanna, which is more your standard blockbuster romantic comedy, Bollywood style, told with lashings of glamour and glitz but questionable production values. As bad as say, a bad American romcom, but in Hindi.

Something which always surprises us is the reaction of the cinema staff and the audience. The people watching the Bollywood films are, without exception, entirely Asian. It's safe to say I've never seen another European. This causes some interesting situations where the staff assume you've been inadvertantly given a ticket for the wrong film. They try -- and fail -- to find a delicate way to explain that the film is an Indian film, in Hindi, and so clearly not your thing.

The other cinema goers are equally surprised. Some are even moved to come over and ask you questions, bewildered and confused.

Bizarrely, the question they always ask is not why we chose the film, but rather how we understood it. Which is amusing, given that the films generally have English subtitles. Either they're so used to not reading the subtitles that they've forgotten they're there, or they can't imagine how any westerner could hope to understand or enjoy one of their films, even with the aid of on-screen clues. It's true Bollywood cinema is a cultural expression - with more ritual and significance than your or my average night out to see the new James Bond.

And it's true the subtitles aren't always the best help. Often you can tell they're wrong, even though you don't understand a word of Hindi. And astoundingly, even the English parts of the films -- Bollywood is liberally sprinkled with Hinglish -- are very often 'mistranslated'. In last night's film Swissair was translated as Cathay Pacific. Sometimes the character on screen will say "Okay that's great" in perfectly understandable English, and the subtitles will read "Let's go, I'm hungry". Weird.