Return from India (2003)
by LA correspondant abigail schwartz 

You’ve just been asked to bring an extremely sick girl back home. Let’s juice this up – you’re a handsome, successful young surgeon and you’ve been requested to accompany the hospital administrator and his seductively sexy wife to India, so you can save the life of his daughter and bring her back to Israel.

But because you live in reality, you’re not a surgeon and you’re not on your way to Bombay. Well, this isn’t the case for Dr. Ben Rubin (Aki Avni), a surgeon at Tel-Aviv Hospital.

Love, sickness, tragedy and reincarnation all intertwine in a mystical city in The Return from India, written by Menahem Golan and Chanan Peled and directed by Golan.

Ben is immediately attracted to Dori (the administrator’s wife), while she and her husband, Lazar, convince him to travel with them to India. Once at the monastery in Bombay, Ben performs an emergency blood transfusion and starts their daughter on her way to recovery. Complications arise which require her to stay in Bombay a while longer, and so Lazar surprisingly leaves his wife and daughter alone in Ben’s care because he needs to attend to work in Israel.

Ben and Dori’s physical relationship grows with the help of the mystical city of Bombay and Ben’s fascination in Lazar and Dori’s love for one another.

All affairs must come to an end, or at least to a halt for some time, and so, as the environment changes, from India to Israel, so does their relationship. Ben begins a serious relationship with Dori’s daughter’s best friend, yet still has feelings for Dori. In this love triangle without a third corner, the more Ben wants Dori, the further away she pushes him, convincing him to be with someone his own age, not twice his age.

Ben loves two women, yet when tragedy strikes, he believes that Lazar’s soul has entered his body and that he is destined to be with Dori.

The Return from India leaves us questioning if there really is something special and magical that a city can create for its tourists, or if it is something that we force ourselves to believe because of what we see there and want to feel back at home.

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