On demand: "Band Baaja Baaraat"

One of the last blessings producer-deity Yash Chopra bestowed upon the Indian film business before his death in 2012 was handing breaks to two newcomers who would re-energise the industry in the immediate wake of his passing: director Maneesh Sharma and leading man Ranveer Singh. Allocated one of those always eyecatching "Introducing" credits, Singh begins 2010's Band Baaja Baaraat as he meant to go on, making generally idiosyncratic choices: he delivers his first lines of dialogue through a mouthful of food, and still demonstrates the instant magnetism certain people are lucky indeed to possess upon being set before a camera. A star was well and truly born here. The film around him, directed by Sharma from a Habib Faisal script, now looks somewhat like a response to the Hollywood wedding comedies of the preceding decade (deep breath: The Wedding Planner, Wedding Crashers, Wedding Daze, plus a dash of Bride Wars, if we must), albeit one articulated with greater smarts and visual zest and far fresher sexual politics. Singh's barber school dropout Bittoo fumbles his way out into the world by supporting the ambitious Shruti (Anushka Sharma) in her aim to become the #1 wedding planner in all India. Towards the end, for reasons of plot (and movie love), Bittoo is obliged to replicate Shah Rukh Khan's iconic open-arms gesture, a nod - or an extension of hands - to the illustrious tradition into which Singh was being launched. For the best part of BBB, though, Singh can be seen working towards a slightly different kind of characterisation: not a hero per se, but an ally - or, rather, a hero and ally simultaneously, a man whose heroism derives chiefly from his attention/devotion to a winning partnership.

Teamwork makes the film work, in other words. If BBB's narrative ups and downs would be guessable from an early stage, the first half also offers the conspiratorial pleasures of watching two plucky kids building something from scratch - a business, a relationship, maybe even a future together. We get more of a sense than we did from those American movies of the sheer effort involved in staging the 360-degree spectacle of the wedding ceremony (the Indian work ethic dies hard) while the director, who went on to make 2016's mega-meta Fan, initiates some discourse on/defence of traditional Bollywood forms via the rivalry Bittoo and Shruti enter into with a successful snob in the same line of work. The latter dismisses these upstarts as loud and tacky; yet the editorial line the film advances is that even if you dismiss what the pair do as kitsch, you cannot deny the industry (and, yes, love) that goes into it. (And besides, as Bittoo insists, "not kitschy, stylish". No wonder Karan Johar and Sanjay Leela Bhansali would subsequently race to sign Singh up.) Yet as a cineaste, Sharma also comes over as the type of moderniser the business might have needed in a post-Chopra universe. He lets his scenes and players run loose and free, and not forcing the plot allows him time to feel out truthful intimacies, as well as neat symmetries and reversals that suggest a creative mind scanning a century's worth of romance plots to see what still works. Better yet: it allows us time to hang out with people whose aspirations, hang-ups and mistakes we recognise, and to note how two lovebirds can sit side-by-side and seem so right for one another and still be in very different places. In this task, he found his own allies. Anushka (no relation) combines the expressivity of the classic Bollywood heroine with a newly game determination, making such a strong case for Shruti's independence in the final reel that the conventional happy ending no longer feels such a foregone conclusion. Singh, meanwhile, pours himself into every scene with the effervescence of a Coke, and may be just as much the real thing: these weddings weren't the last movie parties he would help go with a swing.

Band Baaja Baaraat is now streaming via Prime Video.