A FRIEND and I went to see a Bollywood film at a cinema in East London last week and it was unlike any cinema I had been to before. It was an old ABC theatre turned into a cinema specialising in Indian films.

There was a giant chandelier hanging above the staircase and Bombay Mix selling at the confectionery counter.

We paid £3 each to see a three-hour film and entered a loud and stuffy auditorium. Maybe it's a cultural thing but mobile phones were humming and teenagers sat chatting to their pals with one eye on the film, passing the phone on to their mothers sitting beside them to finish the conversation.

There were also groups of fat aunties who had come laden with home-made goodies oozing out of tupperware.

After the initial bustle, I focused my concentration on the plot, which was fast leaving me by. Three men meet up for reunion drinks. Initially, they pretend to each other they are living happily with their respective wives but soon they admit to the misery of married life. Then the stupid one gets this bright idea: they should all have an affair and report back in a month.

We see them go off on their merry way, full of hopes for infidelity.

At this point, they begin fantasising, with lots of dancing and singing and at least one wet sari scene. Cut to a month later when they meet up. Each begins telling the other about having fallen in love with a wonderful woman. They all pull out a photo of her and find, to their horror, that they have all seduced the same woman.

Next thing you know, their mistress walks in and demands a ransom of 3 million rupees if they don't want their wives to see the compromising photos she has had taken of them with her in her bedroom.

The men turn up to meet her after having extracted the blackmail money from their rich wives but they find her dead in the car.

The men panic and drive off. They manage to dump the body but decide they must break into her flat and destroy any more photographs she has of them which could link back to them, before the police get there. They break into her flat but they hear another man come in. The man seems to know where they are hiding and tells them he is the woman's murderer and blackmails them for 3 million rupees if they do not want the police chief to see the photos of the men with the dead mistress.

I cannot take you through all the twists but in the end, they find out that the dead woman is not really dead and that it was all a big trick engineered by their wives to bring them back on the straight and narrow. So what happened to the much loved Bollywood formula of boy-meets-girl-and-ends-up-marrying-her? Times sure have changed.