Plenty of pasta preparation for curry-killer film

Goldy Notay, centre, is a spinster whose mother is desperate to find her a husband in <i>It's a Wonderful Afterlife</i>. Photo / Supplied

To play the plump heroine in new rom-com It's a Wonderful Afterlife, actress Goldy Notay had to eat. A lot. She ended up putting on more than 12kg.

"Goldy was a little plump already, which is why I had her in mind," says the film's writer-director Gurinder Chadha, best known for 2002 box-office hit Bend It Like Beckham. "But when we met, Goldy was as skinny as anything. She'd gone to the gym, desperate to look like what she thought an actress should look like.

"And then I said 'um, er, I need you to go back to what you used to be'. She was great about it. And her husband is Italian so I think he was even more grateful because finally she could eat pasta until the cows came home."

Newly curvy Notay plays Roopi, a 30-something Indian woman living in England, whose widowed mother, Mrs Sethi (veteran actress Shabana Azmi) has been trying fruitlessly for years to get her married off.

Here's where the plot wildly diverges from standard rom-com recipes. When she can no longer stomach the rudeness of families who refuse her daughter, Mrs Sethi becomes the Curry Killer.

Victims are force fed to death, stabbed with a kebab skewer, or ... well, you get the picture. Returning to haunt Mrs Sethi, the ghosts end up helping her try to get Roopi married off. A cross between My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Shaun of the Dead, this film is a definite genre-bender. Chadha, 50, who co-writes her movies with Japanese-American film-maker husband Paul Mayeda Berges, intended it to be a horror film but "it took on its own life".

As a a comedy which plays with the conventions of horror, the ghosts are simply fodder for a gently comic treatment of generational, not just ethnic, tensions in Indian family life. Chadha, an OBE, produces films that explore the lives and challenges of British Indians, from fitting-in, to cultural alienation and arranged marriages.

"When an Indian girl like Roopi reaches 33 or 34 and is still single, it's a big deal for families. Parents feel their daughter is unfulfilled, incomplete and that they haven't fulfilled their responsibilities."

Chadha says it's just a very silly film about having a laugh, albeit with a strong female antagonist. "You don't really realise how many films aren't from that female perspective until you see one that is.

"There are very, very few films which show a girl who can be who she wants to be, have dreams and achieve them without having to be skinny like a model or celebrity."

Roopi, who has a fulfilling career, holds on to her cultural traditions and doesn't become skinny to get the guy, is a role model. Much like Chadha herself.

"I'm so comfortable and confident with my own cultural identity as a British Indian, and I know my audience around the world is part of a diaspora. By that I don't just mean Indians, I mean any people whose parents or grandparents or great-grandparents came from somewhere else ... .

"Those are the ideas I love to play with. Still, sometimes I feel like people want me to make Bend It Like Beckham over and over again."

She understands why: so many people loved her feel-good film about a soccer-mad Indian girl rebelling against her parents' traditional expectations. Likewise, Chadha rebels against expectations and pigeonholing in her work.

"I always try to do something a bit different: Bollywood musicals, British social realism, coming-of-age. But I always return to the same themes, as in Afterlife."

Look out for her cameo as the lady in orange at the wedding banquet at which the bride throws a tantrum - and food flies around the room - in a homage to Stephen King's Carrie and the Bollywood tradition of a wronged woman morphing into the Goddess of Destruction.

"It was absolutely hysterical to film. There was an elderly Indian woman who gets covered in food and that's my Mum. Then there's a boy who walks around with an orange stuck in his face and that's my nephew."

In her own Indian tradition, she breaks a coconut at the start of every shoot. "It's a way of bringing us all together - launching a ship. It's such a privilege to spend your time doing something you love so much. I'm hugely lucky. The best thing about my life is I don't have to get up to an alarm clock."

Her beloved lie-ins vanished when her now 3-year-old twins, son Ronak and daughter Kumiko, arrived when she was 47.

What's it like living and working with her husband? "It works brilliantly as long as he does what I say! Being the director, I always have the last word and he knows that. But politically, culturally we're the same, so we laugh at the same things. So it works really well.

"The hardest thing is balancing the care of the twins but I've got to say motherhood makes you use your time better. Since they were born, I've made two movies and written a script for my next movie [Freedom At Midnight].

"It's a historical feature on India's independence from Britain in 1947, based on new evidence of what went on.

"I feel what I'm doing is creating a legacy," she says. "I'm recording and documenting lives: generally on the margins, not mainstream and particularly from a female perspective. I'm looking at the world, our history and our realities from this perspective. And I'm looking to have some kind of effect on people, whether it's charity or social action."

And if all people take from It's a Wonderful Afterlife is that you don't have to lose weight to get the guy - washed down with a good laugh - she'll be happy.

*It's A Wonderful Afterlife is in cinemas from Thursday.

-Herald On Sunday / View