Boredom + Bollywood = "Come! Fall in Love!"

Last winter, Sonia, Elizabeth, and I were in the midst of one of our “I need a boyfriend” weeks so, as a remedy, we decided to have a chick flick movie marathon. After seeing movies such as “Love Actually” and “The Princess Bride”, Sonia was overcome with an irresistible urge to watch one of her old Bollywood movies. This desire came up because, according to her, Bollywood movies were like the ultimate chick flicks. We didn’t have time that night, and besides, Elizabeth was less than enthused so, Sonia and I decided to watch one of them on a different night.
I should have been wary once I found out that, once translated, the title of the chosen movie was “Come! Fall in Love!” But no, even this did not make me realize the extent of cheesiness that we were about to encounter. The first scene opened with at least thirty women dressed in brightly colored saris in a cornfield. They were just sitting there and as I was about to ask Sonia what exactly was going on, the sitars started playing and all of the women stood up and began to dance. Just as the screen was filled with jumping, leaping, and twirling women, it focused in on a man who was feeding pigeons, of all things, in the middle of a cornfield. This was when I started wondering what I had gotten myself into. He began to talk, in Hindi, and one slight issue became apparent; there weren’t any subtitles. Now neither Sonia nor I speak Hindi fluently, or at all for that matter. So the next thirty minutes were spent with her father trying to figure out how to get the subtitles to work. After this half-hour had passed, we reached the conclusion that subtitles were not a possibility. But in our eagerness for a good chick flick, this small factor did not deter us. We decided to guess what they were saying and to start our own dialogue.
At first our lines were rather typical. We inserted things such as, “I like rain” when the main girl was sitting at her window looking at the rain outside (and other dull things like that). But after a close up of the girl’s face, we got a rather unattractive view of her lack of waxing. After this shot, at least every other line we inserted had something to do with unibrows, for example when her mother called her to wake up (or so we assume), the daughter would cry down the stairs, “Oh mother, I don’t think I’ll be able to come down for breakfast. The weight of my unibrow has made it difficult to get up out of bed”. Needless to say we became increasingly confused as to what the plot was actually about. For all we could tell, it had something to do with a rather furry girl who liked rain. Then we were introduced to the guy. He was somewhat…er…eccentric, to say the least. I swear his eyes took up maybe a third of his face, giving him the constant impression of a rather excited goldfish. Now, along with the eyebrow comments, whenever the guy spoke, it was as if he punctuated all of his sentences with exclamation points and constant yelling (due to his apparent excitement). But it wasn’t until the girl was running to catch a train (I’m not sure why she was getting on a train; for all we could tell it was because she needed to visit a eyebrow-ologist in another city) that we really went to town. As she ran for the train, it was hard to miss the fact that she was extraordinarily blessed in the chest area…. and despite this, had managed to forget a bra. From this point on everything that we placed in the conversations had something to do with her chest and her unibrow. For instance, at one point the guy offered to hold her bags and our word choice for this part was quite memorable. As he held out his hand for her suitcase he said, according to us, “Would you like me to hold on to those (gestures towards chest)? They seem to be getting in the way of your luggage, as does your eyebrow, may I suggest braiding it? That would probably keep it out of your eyes more effectively”.
Well after quite a bit of hysterical laughing fits that came from the ridiculous turns that the plot was taking as a result of what the characters were apparently saying, Sonia and I had reached an impressive level of hyper-ness. This led to some embarrassing but nonetheless funny moments. For example I learned something that night: apparently all Bollywood movies are musicals. There was one particularly catchy tune that we just had to dance to; in fact, we actually learned the dance from the movie. There we were, in Sonia’s basement, dancing around to a song that could have been talking about suicide for all we knew. It was great. It was only after our second time rewinding back to the beginning of the song so we could dance to it again that we realized that none of the instrument players were actually moving their fingers or playing their instruments at all. This was a slight disappointment but it did not stop us from replaying it a few-hundred more times.
By the end of the movie, a good three hours later, I had reached my crash level. The lines that I inserted became decreasingly humorous and increasingly bitter. Instead of “I cannot chase you because I am afraid that my huge boobs would break down a building”, they became more like, “If you don’t chase me I will shave of your fricken unibrow while you are sleeping. Then what will you do? Huh? Huh?” While I had fully enjoyed the movie, I had also started getting sick of love (So would you after three hours of “Come! Fall in Love!”). If I had discovered anything, it was the perfect remedy to our “I need a boyfriend days”. In fact, after watching the drama unfold throughout this movie, I wanted nothing more to do with boyfriends or love. If I learned anything from this process, it was that no matter how moody or lonely I got, I could always pop in this movie and dance around with my friends and get enough of love in the course of three hours to not need it again for quite a while.