Indian Writing

This film is not quite sure whether it wants to be the new updated DDLJ, or a rugby version of Lagaan, or the Akku version of Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. But it does know that it wants to be allusive and clever. Thus, there are allusions to Kkk-serials, Purab aur Paschim, Lagaan, and even to the unreal ways of moviemaking itself. It also wants to be a diaspora-meets-heartland film - its tagline is “A funjabi boy meets a hinglish brat” (even if Akshay Kumar stopped being a boy a couple of decades ago). So it has a Taj Mahal moment, a bride’s drunken father moment, a runaway bride moment, and, lest we forget, a red lungi moment accompanied by a crude joke. It has a huge and giggly joint family back in Punjab, complete with desi ghee, tractor-dance and all. It has a cellphone with a Saare Jahan Se Acchha ringtone. It has a putting-the-’goras’-in-their-place speech, delivered in Hindi with English translation and jingoistically swelling music in the background. All this, under what is broadly a Taming-of-the-shrew template.

Oh, and it has several Himesh songs. Okay, I’m actually… quite fond of Himesh songs. I like the mixture of wails, yowls and low-intensity growls interspersed with words like Chakna Chakna. I won’t go out and buy the CD, but I can listen to the songs again, if they’re on FM. Without wincing.

And product placements - Bharat Matrimony, Western Union, Spykar Jeans - have rarely been done more clumsily. At one point one of the characters is actually telling the other that Spykar is the first Indian brand to have a store in London.

Sigh. Okay, Rishi Kapoor is cute. Blustering, noisy, often over the top, but okay - he’s cute. I know it could have been worse - it could have been Anupam Kher or Alok Nath as the father. Akshay Kumar is his usual freaky comic self - yes, I like the pink kurta, I like the epaulettes, I like the weird thing he does with the car battery wires without even having to look at them but managing to get the car to start again. And even Katrina Kaif has her cheery moments.

But such moments are few and far between. The plot is freaky - sorry to ask a humourless real-life question about a Bollywood film, but do these people not have jobs? I mean, other than the female lead, who’s engaged to her boss anyway, so how does the job matter. I know Rishi Kapoor’s character is supposed to be a lawyer (and I liked his bookshelf - books on art, home decor, fine wines, and also the last Harry Potter book). But the Akshay Kumar character - what, pray, is his revenue model? (That one is even asking these questions - instead of laughing, humming along with tunes, mentally filing away bits of dialogue - is surely a sign of how the movie fails as good Bollywood masala.)

On the whole, the movie illustrates another feature of Bollywood - the general inability to tell a story about different cultures without indulging in ethnic slurs, racist jokes, and the worst kind of stereotyping. The British boyfriend is called Charlie Brown - no, really - and he’s nothing like that little boy from Peanuts. On the other hand, this Charlie Brown is three-times divorced, quite the playboy, always trying to (gasp) smooch his fiancee. (He owns a yacht, though, and I think allowances should have been made for that.)

On the other hand, the good Indian husband himself closes the room door when he sees his wife dressed in a towel. The British man is shown as a racist, while the Indian is of course a liberal with a heart of gold. The British man makes an insulting racist remark to a woman at a nightclub, and then the Indian man dances with her to show how liberal he is. Not possible to feel good without making the other guy look bad, no?

(Outside in the lobby was a poster of the Halle Berry-Bruce Willis film Perfect Stranger. I overheard a couple arguing about Halle Berry’s looks - the man saying how HOT the actor is, the woman saying how ugh, how dark… And did someone say Indians are not racist?)

Bah. Vipul Shah should really spend some time watching his talented wife Shefali Shah’s best films, Satya and Monsoon Wedding, to understand what storytelling is about.

A~ has nothing to add because he didn’t see the film, he slept through it. It was the late-night show at Metro. He has this instinct, he can just doze off after twenty minutes of a bad film, while I just sit there and sit there hoping that it will get better, all the way up to the end, and it never ever does. A~ woke up midway, like the dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s tea party, just to see the Tara Rum Pum trailer, and then - scared off by Rani Mukherjee’s hair colour, or was it the saccharin? - he went back to sleep.