The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

A sweet, charming, heartwarming and different kind of movie. Different in being centered around all older characters; a bunch of 60+ year veterans from England, who come to spend their last years in India, mostly for economic reasons, rather than from any spirit of adventure, but who yet find change and adventure in life.  

                                         

While they make their plan based on a well presented, historic, palace hotel, they arrive in Udaipur to find that it's a run down, decrepit version of the apparently photo shopped picture on the brochure. But then, they have no money and have one way tickets.... it's about how they fit in and grow through the experience.

Dev Patel is the owner of the hotel, totally passionate about making the hotel work, and it's endearing how he believes in his dream and this group enables it to come true.

There's Judi Dench, newly widowed and newly finding herself....realizing that she'd allowed her own self to be completely subservient to her husbands for all of forty years based on a trust he didn't necessarily deserve.....maybe she could think better than him you know

Maggie Smith, extremely racist, who is here for a surgery, and how it takes an uneducated untouchable poor Indian woman to enable her to open up and find herself. 

Tom Wilkinson searching for closure on a gay relationship he had in India during his youth, and which had continued to haunt him ever since... both have lived their respective lives and continued to remain in love

Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton a couple disillusioned with each other, but together out of a sense of loyalty and respect, and how they see that those are not necessarily good enough foundations for a marriage...how they accept that their marriage was long since over, and so part ways. 

It's about how each of them is at that stage in life when they've seen it all, are more open to honesty, willing to apply the lessons they've learnt..... so there are relationships which get built, which break...... basically about how that's a journey that goes on.

And the breaking of the barriers of age.... it's actually easy to see the whole age bias that society is pretty much caught up in...... to in fact see that possibilities actually get higher as you grow older. Just last week, in the car, was this peppy Bryan Adams number playing.... ..Eighteen till I die. And I was telling Diksha, "that's no way you know....left to me,  I'd want to be forty till I die " :)