From Chandni Chowk to Canada

I've always had a thing for Akshay Kumar, whose Bollywood fame was taking off when I visited India in the early 1990s. So I didn't walk but ran to a downtown screening of his new film Chandni Chowk to China--the title phrase must be spoken a dozen times in the two and a half hour production. It's a funny picture for the studios to market as a cross-cultural crossover. On the surface--and this is a film that's little more than a surface of Chinese location shots, beautiful heroines, broad comedy and hand-to-hand combat--it's very accessible. At least it doesn't feature reincarnation as a plot point. But what the film does do is deconstruct Kumar's own life story. Like his Borat-like protagonist, Akshay grew up in Delhi's cacophonous Chandni Chowk and was a chef before transforming himself into a kung-fu fighting action hero.

His nerdy antics for the film's first two hours are only really funny for anyone over eight years old if you have a sense of his Bollywood reputation as a sex bomb. I guess that makes the film's grand conceit comparable to the use of Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button--we are engaged with the wrinkled old Brad early in the film partly because of our anticipation of eventually seeing the Thelma And Louise hottie that's idealized in our cinematic imagination. Without some kind of Kumar primer, North American audiences lose that layer of meaning (and God knows the film doesn't provide much layering).

My most vivid memory of Kumar is a Stardust magazine photo spread he did in the 1990s, one shot of which had him in a towel, narcissistically sprawled on a foggy mirror. (Sorry, haven't been able to find it online anywhere and I lost my copy years ago.) So in CC2C, the climax is not when our loser hero finally kills the bad guy, but when, after intensive kung-fu training, he takes off his shirt to reveal the Akshay we knew was there under the bad moustache and buttone-up shirt.