Om Shanti Om

More Bollywood! Foreign film night tonight ensured so. This week's offering was Om Shanti Om. It's 1977. Shah Rukh Khan (!) plays a minor actor (or "junior artist," as they're apparently called) named Om, who has a crush from afar on a megastar actress named Shanti. Om manages to score a night out with her, but later overhears a conversation between her and the producer of her next film, whom we'll call Mike, because that's what everyone will call him in Hollywood once he goes Hollywood, though his real name is Mukesh. So Mike, yeah? 

Turns out that Mukesh and Shanti are actually married secretly, which makes his wanting to marry the daughter of some other studio exec (and inheriting the studio for himself) kind of a big deal. This is all a big twist. Further turns out Shanti is pregnant. This is also a big twist. But we're not even halfway through the movie yet, so the spoilers ain't bad, because I haven't even gotten to the real plot yet. (Here I should mention that the film getting produced, in this film Om Shanti Om, is itself called Om Shanti Om.) Shanti wants a public wedding ceremony so that they don't have to hide the marriage anymore, and a few days later (which Om spends moping around after the news) Mike takes her to the set of Om Shanti Om, a huge ballroom constructed just for the movie which hasn't begun filming yet. We'll get married in here, underneath this chandelier, he says, but nope he's actually lying and brought her there just so he could catch the place on fire with her trapped inside. Om tries to rescue her, but is beat up by Mike's dudes, burnt badly, exploded out the window, and hit by a car rushing to the maternity ward of the hospital. Taken to the hospital himself, he dies there at the same time the baby boy is born, and is thus reincarnated as the child, who is also named Om, also played by Shah Rukh Khan, and who grows up to become a famous actor, living the dream that Om I envisioned for himself.

It's now 2007, and Om "OK" Kapoor is turning 30. He's extremely pyrophobic after his encounters in his previous life, and meanwhile receiving other mysterious flashes of his previous life, especially when they visit the burned-down studio from 30 years ago as a filming location. Also there's this crazy lady who claims to be his mother, (which is actually true because she's the mother of his previous incarnation)? His memories of his past life come to a head during the star-studded afterparty of the award ceremony he won, when he encounters Mike (back in India after spending the past 25 years in Hollywood) for the first time, and remembers all that happened and how his beloved Shanti died. Mukesh came back to India for one reason: to produce an OK movie, that is, a film starring Om Kapoor. OK agrees on one condition: the film they produce is to be a revival of the planned Om Shanti Om from 30 years ago...

From here, the plan is simple: OK Cinderellas a Shanti lookalike as his costar, so that he can Pygmalion and Vertigo her in order to Gaslamp Mike in order to Hamlet him, Something in the Air-style (or Phantom of the Opera-style, really, which they don't even try to hide.) 

Sounds like a good idea to me.