Il 16 febbraio 2012 The Guardian ha pubblicato l'articolo India: best exotic movie hell?, nel quale Sukhdev Sandhu illustra la percezione che i cineasti occidentali hanno dell'India, e analizza la novità rappresentata da Marigold Hotel di John Madden e Trishna di Michael Winterbottom. Vi ricordo che Dev Patel e Freida Pinto, i due giovani attori esplosi con Slumdog millionaire, interpretano rispettivamente il film diretto da Madden e quello diretto da Winterbottom. Inoltre Anurag Kashyap e Kalki Koechlin offrono un cameo in Trishna, la cui colonna sonora è composta dal talentuoso Amit Trivedi. Di seguito un estratto dal testo di Sandhu:
'A new generation of western directors are bringing their outsider perspective to India. But can films such as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel avoid the cliches of poverty and spiritualism, chaos and capitalism? (...)
That difficulty - to say nothing of the challenge of depicting India in more than just western terms - led Louis Malle to name the first section of his six-hour Phantom India (1969) "The Impossible Camera". Yet, even though "India" in its teeming multiplicity may be as much a conceit as "the west", many directors have stepped up to this challenge. Jean Renoir's The River (1951), Roberto Rossellini's India: Matri Bhumi (1959), Fritz Lang's The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959), Pier Paolo Pasolini's Notes For A Film On India (1967), Werner Herzog's Jag Mandir (1991), and, yes, Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008) are just a fraction of the films that have sought to make their outsider perspectives a virtue.
Now joining that list are John Madden's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Michael Winterbottom's Trishna. (...) In some ways, these films are poles apart. (...) It's precisely this fascination with India as a place in flux that the two films have in common. Historically, outsider artists have tended to portray the nation as old, spiritual, rural, in thrall to tradition. For some, this was its appeal, for others, a curse. In Dick Fontaine's Temporary Person Passing Through (1965), a melancholic James Cameron (the veteran journalist, not the director) laments: "There's too much of everything, too many people, too many cows, too many problems. Too much India, really." Now, in 2012, when Indian politicians are increasingly embracing neoliberalism and boasting of the country's Bric status, it's more likely to be depicted as a modern, urban, entrepreneur-friendly tiger economy. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (...) shows an India that's the dynamic antithesis to - even the cure for - a Britain defined by failed internet ventures, hip-operation waiting lists and cramped bungalow homes. (...) For Winterbottom the transformations in India serve to cast a cruel spotlight on Britain. (...)
Is there a danger that this fascination with the turbo-economics of the east becomes a new kind of orientalism, one in its own way as romanticising as Eat Pray Love's ascription of superior wisdom to India? Ashim Ahluwalia (...) believes it is: "In order to understand with any depth what it means to be Indian today, we should stop endorsing the collective fantasy of 'India Shining' - this laughable state of mind in which many modern Indians imagine a new incredible India that looks and feels like a first-world nation. (...) We've always been eating brains in Indiana Jones films or stammering awkward English sentences in various other western productions, so I don't think we have high expectations".'
