Madden: The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015)

Doubtless, there’s something tasteless about the Marigold franchise. The outsourcing of retirement to India, the over-the-top Indian accents and gestures, and the barely concealed colonial nostalgia are all pretty hard to take at times. For all that, though, there’s something powerful about the way in which this second film, in particular, modulates old age, drawing you into a sense of collective fantasy that’s peculiarly cinematic, and perhaps only really possible anymore when addressing the generation that the film depicts – the last remaining generation to continue to opt for the movie theatre over any other medium or platform. For perhaps that reason, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel doesn’t feel like a sequel to the first film so much as an intensification of its fantasy atmosphere to ever lusher and more opulent depths, an even richer communion with what it might mean to be old and still hopeful. Sitting somewhere between the Golden Age of classical Hollywood and the Golden Age of classical Bollywood - think The Thief of Baghdad meets Awara - it’s an extravaganza that aims to make digital cinematography feel as much like Technicolour as possible, decked out in an Orientalist palette that sets out to capture old age as something equally exotic and remote, a frontier as breathless and bracing as any other. Of course, it’s all grounded in a cosy story – or a cosy cast, adding Richard Gere to the team of Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton and Celia Imrie, along with Dev Patel as the hotel manager Sonny Kapoor, who’s faced with a bind when he decides to expand into new premises. At the same time, though, the fantasy atmosphere is almost too thick and lush for these characters to connect for any great length of time - and, even when they do, their backstories feel too full and private for them to really break out of their own mysterious reveries. That might sound tragic, or melancholy, but the result is something more like an emergent mood, or an emergent sense of connection, as everyone seem to be gradually reincarnated or reborn, dissolved more and more in the film’s Lethean atmospherics as they go, but not quite settled into a new or discernible shape by the time it finishes either. All of their traits and quirks feels provisional, temporary, destined to diminish - but in an upbeat, hopeful way, amidst an immersive flux that’s quite unsentimental about life and death, if only because it doesn’t draw much distinction between them. If it’s soporific and even anaesthetic at times, then, it’s only to draw you into a twilight state that’s surprisingly comforting – or at least takes comfort cinema more seriously than might appear at first glance.