VirginiaK_NYC

This movie is so funny, moving, charming, intelligent - such a totally engaging illustration of the never-old truth that wit, ambition, creativity, and ingenuity can turn up anyplace at any time.

In a poor and, to most of the rest of the world, not-known part of India, some people make, screen, and enjoy their own low-budget, high-effort versions of famous movies, from Bollywood and, in the adventure narrated here, Hollywood - in this one they're filming the story of Superman, re-presented as a local superhero, retaining of course his distinctive caped costume. Highlights include an interruption for the (very skinny) actor to attend his own wedding, and the wonderful story of the crew solving the problem of making Superman fly.

This is the kind of very slight story, held together by little but a theme of inconsequential seeming-naughtiness, that was carried off much better by somebody like Hrishikesh Mukherjee in, say, Chupke Chupke - the necessary sparkly script mostly isn't there. But I found it watchable-to-enjoyable nonetheless, mostly owing to Uttam Kumar's charisma and the overall gentleness of the story-telling.

Anjana Bhowmick is Urmita, a young Hindi film actress who doesn't seem very enthusiastic even though she's apparently just become a star. When she accidentally is stranded in a remote Bengali town -- curiosity has impelled her to get off a train she is riding, and it leaves without her -- Uttam Kumar, the bachelor stationmaster, accommodates her in his quarters. A servant assumes she is his wife and spreads this news to the genteel neighbors.

That's about it. We find out a bit more about the characters. A positive here is -- no hysteria at all, and a bonus is a trip that the couple makes to a local fair, which looks to me as if its filming made documentary use of an actual local fair somewhere in Bengal in the middle 60s. The crowds of people and animals and odd attractions, like an aged man who uses a pet pigeon to tell the customer's fortune, or some traditional folk-singers of a kind I haven't run into in movies, make it more than worth a watch, as does the irrepressible beautiful smile of Uttam Kumar.