Housesitter
                       
Director: Frank Oz
Year: 1992
Rating: 6.0
I was curious to see how this film differed from the Bollywood remake, Chori Chori, that I saw a few months ago. Other of course than this one has a lot fewer songs. So, a plus for the Bollywood version. Every romantic comedy should make room for a big dance number or two. The plot is very cute. The man - in this case Steve Martin - brings the woman he loves to see the lovely house he has built for her and asks her to marry him. She says no. He is heartbroken. He goes back to his architecture job in the city where one night at a party he meets a waitress and ends up at her apartment. He tells her his sad story and leaves a drawing of his dream house on her floor and leaves. She - in this case Goldie Hawn - decides to go live there. She is a storyteller. A fabricator par excellance and lies mount on lies till her life is a fantasy that she begins to believe. She has the whole small town believing she is his wife. Then he shows up but realizes that the woman he loves - in this case Dana Delany - is getting jealous and so they continue the charade.

 

Very similar in plot to the Bollywood one. A few differences though. In this one the night Martin takes her back to her apartment they have sex. No way in the world would that happen in a Bollywood film. Especially with Rani Mukerji as the woman. Mukerji is as clean as an unused bar of Dove soap. And her co-star Ajay Devgn is always so serious and honorable that it could never happen. Hawn meets his family who live close by and it is just the father (Donald Moffat, who is wonderful here) and mother (Julie Harris) while the Bollywood version has a big old jolly eccentric extended family living together who welcome Rani like a lost child come home. In this one they never tell his family that the whole thing has been a made-up story - while in the Bollywood version of course they do in order to pile on the melodrama like an Italian pastry.

 

The main difference though is in mood - this is much more of a comedy - Martin can dance circles around Devgn when it comes to comedy - while the other has lots of dramatic moments. Hawn is fine but I will take Mukerji any time. She bursts with charisma though Hawn is much better at spinning lies that feel like it is coming from her and not the script.  Both are decent films though fairly middle brow. This is as best as I can tell an ignored Martin film. It is directed by Frank Oz who perhaps works better with puppets than people, but his two other Martin films are among Martin's best - Bowfinger and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Interesting just to see how two film industries treat the same story differently.