This endearing Bollywood film came out in 2007 and takes place in trains, homes and in the Himalayas, starring two fresh-faced young people with the high energy and lack of self-knowledge you’d expect from people their age.  As I write that, I rather shudder, thinking that calling them “young people” puts me outside that jurisdiction. And yet, I think that is how the film works, by allowing the viewer to feel like a more knowledgeable person, to sense the inner sentiments of the actors long before they themselves figure it all out. The audience has the experience of simultaneously knowing where this is all leading and watching it unfold. It’s like going through your own youth again, without the pain and uncertainty. Disapproving parents, mistaken feelings, song and dance numbers and beautiful costumes and scenery round out the usual Bollywood Calgon-take-me-away routine.

Aditya, a young man of great wealth but little happiness, is played by Shahid Kapoor. I don’t know why but I was completely won over by the spectacles he wore, which seemed to symbolize his emotional vulnerability and his ability to look out but not in. Kareena Kapoor plays Geet, a girl whose impulses are completely ungovernable, whose overdone eye makeup suggests that she does everything with over-great enthusiasm, an assumption not disproved in the film.

As the film opens, Aditya’s “true love” marries someone else and he leaves his friends, his business, and his home in Bombay and gets on a midnight train going, as the song says, “anywhere.” He meets Geet and finds her so irritating that he decides to get off in a whistle stop town somewhere in the Indian countryside — it’s dark, so you never know where they are — and she follows him against his wishes.  They wind up in a number of amusing situations, such as with a crazy taxi driver with dashboard cartoonishly embellished with garlands, or in a hostelry, the “Motel Decent,” which rents room by the hour, the significance of which Geet completely misunderstands.  By the time Aditya brings Geet to her family home in North India, they are friends but nothing more and Geet plans to elope with someone else. Nevertheless, her grandfather, when he meets the two, acuses Aditya of being Geet’s love interest, and says sternly, “When you’ve reached my age, you can always see what’s going on.”

In the rest of the film, the viewer gets to find out if the grandfather is indeed right. The movie seems to subscribe to the philosophy that “some things are just meant to be and will happen whether you want them too or not.” In this context, that’s a comforting, not a disturbing notion. I recommend this film to all romantics anywhere who can get subtitles in their language.