Dame Judi Dench in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Here’s a curious idea. If things such as call centres have been outsourced to developing countries for financial reasons, how about taking it a step further and outsourcing care, by sending older people to countries such as India to retire? It’s a thought that sprung to author Deborah Moggach’s mind, and turned into her book These Foolish Things, the central story revolving around an entrepreneur who sets up a retirement home in India. The film adaptation called The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel opens this month. Directed by John Madden, best known for Shakespeare in Love and Mrs Brown, it boasts a stellar cast of a certain age, including Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Celia Imrie and Ronald Pickup. They play a motley collection of pensioners who find themselves facing an uncertain retirement in England. For various financial reasons all are persuaded, or in some cases obliged, to embark on an unsure future in a ramshackle guest house in India, where their care has been ‘outsourced’.
The filming took place 70 miles outside Udaipur in Rajasthan, where a local tribal chief’s palace had been transformed by Madden’s team into a down-at-heel metropolitan hotel-cum-care-home. For the street scenes in Jaipur, the camera crew quickly gave up any idea of trying to control the madding crowds. In India you just have to go with the flow and dive in with no second takes.
Filming was, by all accounts, a big experience on many fronts, from the searing heat and affable mayhem of rural Rajasthan right up to the off-set debates provoked by the inescapable relevance of the subject matter itself: retirement.
I still have a huge amount of energy. I'm certainly not ready to be packed away somewhere and told to put my feet up and go to bed at a certain time."
‘I don’t really want to retire,’ said 77-year-old Dame Judi Dench firmly. ‘I intend to go on working as long as I can because I still have a huge amount of energy. I’m certainly not ready to be packed away somewhere and told to put my feet up and go to bed at a certain time.
‘As anyone who’s visited one of these homes knows, you just cannot put people into a circle of chairs and have them watching television all day – it’s inhumane. After my father died and Michael [Williams, her late husband] and I got married, we bought a house in Warwickshire and we and my Ma and Michael’s parents all lived together. It’s the way they do things in the Mediterranean countries and of course in India, but by the very nature of what it is, it’s not easy. However, the pluses outweigh the disadvantages by a considerable margin. For example, my daughter now remembers her grandparents very vividly and fondly.’
Read More: http://www.saga.co.uk/saga-magazine/2012/february/dame-judi-dench.aspx
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