Saturday 17 September 2005

I can see my house from here!

Ampersand Duck knows her Bollywood - and when I saw the local Hoyts was playing a movie she recommended, along went we. Salaam Namaste was filmed in Melbourne, & that home town effect was every bit as distracting as usual. Perhaps even a bit more so. One long driving sequence commenced in Elizabeth Street, then cut to somewhere that looked like Aspendale or Berwick, then back to the Bolte Bridge, then around a dramatic bend on the Great Ocean Road, then along Beaconsfield Parade in Port Melbourne, then back & forth between the coast and the general Station Pier area, until suddenly they're in a sandy, ti-tree beach car park & attending a wedding on a becalmed beach that looked a lot like Williamstown or Altona. (& looked damn cold, too.) As the Duck said, the happy couple's house seemed to be somewhere on the coast outside Melbourne (some place like Torquay or Portsea, I'd guess) but the heroine rode her bicycle to work in the city. And very fetching she looked as she pedalled off each morning. I liked the part where the hero and the eight-months-pregnant heroine went out in the middle of the night looking for chocolate ice-cream (cravings, you know.) They parked their little car outside The Body Shop in the Bourke Street Mall - nobody about except a Jamaican drum band - did some impressively funky and vigorous dancing about(again, heavily pregnant) down at Southbank in front of the casino, drove out to St Kilda (where the ice cream shop was closed) then somehow magically reappeared at the casino & sat down in a fancy restaurant, all in their jim-jams and fluffy slippers. When they walked in the front door of the casino two fancily-dressed couples sneered at the pyjamas, but I've been down there in the middle of the night myself, and very few of the real life patrons are in any position for sartorial sneering let me tell you.
All the university stuff was shot on my university campus, which I wasn't expecting! If I was filming a pretty-scenery type movie in Melbourne, LTU would probably be about third on my wish list. Maybe they got it cheap? I still can't figure out when the scenes were shot. They must've done it on a weekend.
Anyone else seen it? I don't think it shows off Melbourne in a particularly attractive manner. Some of the bits filmed along the walking tracks beside the Yarra had that delicate prettiness you sometimes get late in the evening, but in general I thought the light was all too realistically Melburnian grey, and Melburnian changeable, to do full justice to the shiny Bollywood style.

5 comments:

Phantom Scribbler said...

Adding it to my list of Movies to See Someday. It's been too long since I've seen any good Bollywood.

Ampersand Duck said...

Oh, I'm so glad that my rusty knowledge of Melbourne held good! It was a weird trip, wasn't it? I heard a Radio National interview with the director, and she said that it was originally going to be made in San Francisco, but she persuaded the relevant powers to move it to Melbourne. Apparently they needed a perky setting to do justice to the perky script, and she thought Melbourne was the funkiest place in Australia. Good for her. At least it wasn't the Gold Coast! 'Sky Beach' rings a bell for the wedding scene, or have I got that wrong?

Anyway, glad you saw it! We went to our favorite Indian supply shop today and bought three double DVDs of Shahruhk Khan movies, so I'm currently in Bollywood bliss...

lucy tartan said...

I heard that interview too. I had to go "huh?" when the interviewer (think it was Sian Prior) asked if the actors had any difficulty getting visas, because, you know, they might not want to go home after the shoot ended. The director gently but firmly set her straight....

You're asking the wrong person about beach locations.....

BwcaBrownie said...

I have a sari - does that count for anything?
Never heard of S Prior but she sounds like a bitch.
Laura, you should add 'nocturnal casino lurking' to your '100 things'.

lucy tartan said...

She writes for the Age sometimes. I'm not a fan. She's a chancer.