Assumption: The median age for marriage in urban India is much lower than the median age of marriage in urban United States of America
Hence, romantic comedies in hollywood, usually end up having characters who are older than corresponding comedies made by Bollywood. Thus, Hollywood romantic comedies can be made to be more mature than corresponding Bollywood romantic comedies.
Data point: Serendipity was remade as “Milenge Milenge”. I was watching the latter movie a few days back (couldn’t sit through more than five minutes of it, as I kept comparing each scene to the corresponding scene in the original). In Serendipity the protagonists are around 35, and thus show a maturity that corresponds to that age. You can see that in the way they behave, go about things, etc. And here, in Milenge Milenge you have Shahid Kapur and Kareena Kapoor singing and prancing around like Jackasses. You can’t watch too much of that, can you?
Tailpiece: My all time favourite romantic comedy (across languages) remains Ganeshana Maduve, starring Anant Nag and Vinaya Prasad. I’ll talk about the virtues of the movie in another post but I can’t think of any other movie that even comes close to this one. Meanwhile, if you haven’t watched this movie, get hold of a subtitled copy of it and watch it. Now.
it depends on where in the USA you’re talking about. average age of marriage increases along with education levels, usually. red states have a lower average age of first wedding than blue states (and higher rates of divorce).
i also see a lot of married grad students at my univ. they either got wed right after undergrad or sometime during grad school. when indians hear about these weddings, they can’t seem to stomach the fact that someone can get married while still being a student. that possibly has to do with your post of a while back where you talked about how people get married only when they are able to achieve by themselves the level of comfort they got in their parents’ house…. looks to me like indians worry about that, whereas that doesn’t seem to figure for a good proportion of americans.
also… everyone in bollywood has to act like they are in their twenties, and bollywood is possibly not ready for a mature rom-com… and i doubt bollywood is an accurate reflection of society.
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