Seven British pensioners provide both laughter and tears as the first guests at a newly opened yet totally unfinished hotel in India. "For the elderly and beautiful," says the hand-painted hoarding outside.
Blending Calendar Girls and Ladies in Lavender with Carry On Abroad, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is an unashamedly British exercise, twinkly with sentiment and colonial cliches yet lovable all the same. Much of this is due to the cast of old troupers who all get their turns.
Dame Judi Dench is the stand-out (she always is, however exalted the company), playing Evelyn, a woman reeling from her husband's death and the surprise debts with which he has saddled her. Tom Wilkinson is Graham, a retiring High Court judge who, to the shock of his long-standing colleagues, can't wait to begin a new life in India; Celia Imrie is a flirtatious woman still on the hunt for yet another husband and keen to test out the expat community. They're joined by Maggie Smith, playing a cockney, racist, former housekeeper who now needs a hip replacement, an operation which has been outsourced to Jaipur.
Also among the Marigold's first guests are Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton, a couple left impoverished by their daughter's unsuccessful internet start-up business, and Ronald Pickup as Norman, an old rogue looking for passion in his dotage.
Seeking escape
None of these individuals knows any of the others and director John Madden introduces them through a series of careful vignettes. Each of these characters is seeking an escape from the insulting scrapheap they see as retirement in Britain.
This opening is beautifully orchestrated, culminating in all the characters nervously sitting next to each other on one of those benches at the airport, unaware their fates are about to intertwine. Unlike us, they haven't seen the poster for their movie.
The trouble with multi-stranded storylines is that each character must get his or her full arc, and it always feels as if we're heading toward resolution.
Ol Parker's screenplay, based on Deborah Moggach's novel These Foolish Things, is warm and generous, but it does mean a rather rigid structure amid the colourful chaos of Jaipur, or at least the cosy version of it we glimpse in this film.
Heart and soul
The other principal character, apart from India itself, is the hotel's eager young owner, Sonny Kumar, played by Dev Patel, the young actor from Slumdog Millionaire now giving it the full "by gosh by golly" Indian comedy performance. Patel commits to the role with undoubted heart and earnest soul, but I couldn't help feeling uneasy about such a broad characterisation. Yes, Patel can at least claim to be Indian, but he is actually from Harrow.
As Dench's Evelyn writes her blog and gets a job in a call centre, Imrie's Madge gets to know the Jaipur Polo Club, and Smith's wheelchair-bound Muriel begins a tentative, Hob Nob-fuelled friendship with the "untouchable" housemaid, there is certainly plenty of warming, gentle comedy to enjoy.
Wilkinson's Graham, in particular, has an emotional private journey to explore; one that, I couldn't help feeling, might have been better served by having an entire film to itself.
Indeed, in the current climate of high-quality TV drama, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel might have worked as a television series, giving the characters room to expand and making their conversion to lives of adventure rather more plausible. There are no surprises in the film and no big laughs, but it has an uncynical, almost naive hopefulness at its still-ticking heart that it would be unfair to dismiss.
If Marigold does what it says on the tiffin tin, then that's because I guess we want our film stars to do what they're best at.
Don't miss it
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is released in cinemas across the UAE Thursday, March 29.
