Tandoori Love

This film is for anyone who loves Indian food, loves cooking Indian food, or loves Bollywood films. The only thing missing from the all-singing, all-dancing segments was the flower petals floating in the air. Sadly, the script writer/directors seem to lose direction a couple of times. We jump from one scene to another with no connecting links. When in doubt, the director throws in an improbable accident or two. Nothing is ever really resolved, and the ending is more resonant with Crocodile Dundee 1 than coherent within the film. If you just want light-as-fluff entertainment for about 90 min, go for it. If you're looking for a comedy with some sense of story line, look elsewhere.

Tandoori Love is bright, colorful, musical, romantic, slightly violent and best of all, contains extreme close-ups of beautiful, delicious Indian food. This is fusion film-making at its best and most hilarious, and you will leave the theater desperately searching for the nearest Indian restaurant.

Sonja lives in the Swiss Alps and is engaged to Markus. Well, he hasn't actually proposed yet, or given her a ring, but he has already announced the engagement to their families. Markus seems like a nice guy if a bit of a mama's boy, and Sonja is a gorgeous Swiss Miss with very long legs and red hair.

All is going well until a Bollywood film crew sets up camp next to their chalet/restaurant. Spoiled Priya is a Bollywood diva who loves Raja, the crew cook. But Raja only has eyes for the Swiss beauty in the chalet. Markus, unaware of Raja's love for his fiancé, hires him to be the new cook for the restaurant.

And now the fun begins. The arrival of the film crew has turned all of Switzerland into a Bollywood movie. Raja makes an impromptu marriage proposal to Sonja in the supermarket and suddenly is singing a love ballad while all the Swiss customers start dancing in sync. After every declaration of love or rejection we cut to an overproduced Bollywood music video. And of course we have the standard boy meets girl, loses girl, accidentally stabs a man in the back, and then wins girl in the end. But you never know which boy and which girl will end up with whom.

This movie is just pure, enjoyable fun. There are no deep messages here, no thoughtful quandaries to think about later, it's just a fun and quite beautiful Swiss-Bollywood movie. Definitely one of my favorites at Cinequest Film Festival this year.

Vijay Raaz is the most humble, "talented Hindu Indian"artist that India has. It's always fun to watch him in every role. I could watch him perform continuously forever. What a great human being.

Tandoori Love is the story of an Indian cook, Raja and his series of (mis)adventures in the Swiss mountains. These include leaving his Bollywood troupe to starve as he starts working for a Swiss restaurant, delighting people with his Indian delicacies, stabbing a man, singing, and perhaps most significantly, falling in love with his boss Markus' fiancée, Sonja.

It is a tender story of a man who falls in love, pretty much at first sight, and his attempts to woo the girl that has so captured his imagination. It is the story of a girl who finds herself torn between her egoistic and self-centered fiancé and a kind and gentle cook, whom she's increasingly attracted to. Above all, this is a story of prejudices and the unintentional hilarity ensuing from it. From the unassuming folk in the Bernese Mountains who regard the Indian film troupe as a bit of a nuisance, to the Indian film crew who expect only cheesiness to flow from the Swiss landscape, to Sonja who approaches Raja's advances with trepidation, to her fiancé who at first brands Raja condescendingly as a refugee but later more than wholeheartedly buys into his Indian cooking, the film deals with the clash of prejudices and stereotypes. It makes for some fun viewing as the two cultures are introduced to each other and slowly start to get to know each other better.

With Tandoori Love, director Oliver Paulus offers his tribute to the frothy Bollywood song and dance routine. The brilliance of this move is best reflected when Raja utterly smitten by Sonja as soon as he lays his eyes on her breaks into a song. So far so good, except that he does it right in the middle of a Migros Supermarket a complete antithesis of the snow capped peaks in the Swiss Alps. The director also displays enough knowledge and understanding of Indian film crews and depicts it with his tongue firmly in his cheek. Most importantly however, Paulus portrays the love triangle between Raja, Sonja and Markus in a disarmingly natural manner and that is where he scores. This is, first and foremost, a love story and Paulus manages to keep us hooked onto it as we make our way through a few songs, some moments of humor and others of sheer madcap brilliance.

As far as actors go, Vijay Raaz is superlative as the smitten cook who would go the extra mile to woo the girl of his dreams. He may be average looking, but more than makes up for it with his utterly natural performance. He character goes from madly in love, to bewildered, to slowly becoming confident in a foreign environment and Raaz excels in every scene, helping the film along as we warm up to this golden hearted chef. Lavinia Wilson and Martin Schick lend depth to their characters as Sonja and Markus respectively and special mention has to be made of Shweta Aggarwal as the typically spoiled, unprofessional Bollywood leading lady. All the supporting actors do a fine job. be it the restaurant regulars in the Hirschen, or members of the Indian film crew. The songs are also very short in the film so that their freshness is retained and never once coming across as cumbersome.

This is one of the better films to come out of Switzerland in recent years, and director Paulus and his team have to be applauded for coming up with a refreshingly entertaining piece of cinema. Go watch it!!