Originally posted on May 24, 2012 by Clara Bow

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Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. In the feminist world of my imagining those two names would be box office gold, pulling enormous crowds into the theater every time. These two women, whose careers have spanned decades, consistently choose roles that add to the variety of characterization of women on stage and screen. Both frequently choose roles where the character does not strive to be sexually attractive.

However, this is not the case with The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. What starts out as a layered journey of seven elderly Britans to an Indian retirement villa, turns into a sugar-laden romance fest. Dench’s character may have lost a husband, defied her children, moved to India on her own and gotten her first job in 40 years, but she still has to fall in love or apparently her journey is not complete. It’s as if there is no realization that losing one’s sexual attractiveness is one of the most freeing experiences of a woman’s lifetime. Aging elegantly should be marked by the increasing stinginess with one’s fucks or to rephrase, one doesn’t give a fuck. About anything. Especially one’s attractiveness.

I don’t touch much on racism, because it is more aptly done on other sites, but this movie reeks of it. There’s the good, old-fashioned, overt kind when Maggie Smith’s character refuses to be treated by an African-American doctor and remarks, “no matter how hard he washes he won’t get that color out.” There’s what I think of as the romanticizing racism, where all representations of people of color are exotic, colorful and perpetually smiling. And let’s not forget the depiction of Indian culture as hopelessly archaic. The manager of the hotel is forbidden by his mother to marry the woman he chooses and must abide an arranged marriage.

It is as if the movie’s makers were appealing to a generation of women already dead and gone. The generation attached so closely to a man that they had trouble defining themselves without him. Not the generation who came of age in the sixties with the burgeoning women’s liberation movement. It is rare to see a movie with an elderly ensemble cast; I’m having trouble thinking of one since Cocoon. It’s too bad they didn’t use the opportunity to make a more nuanced film with all of the power and strength of which it’s lead actresses are capable.