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A large gooey slice of masala pizza
Piyush Pandya's American Desi turns the Diaspora on its head
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Subhash K Jha
The Indian Diaspora never seemed more desirable. Films about the NRI experience made by savvy, intelligent and sharp-witted filmmakers are piling up. Even before we finish saying East meets West, another director Piyush Dinkar Pandya is out with his own sharp shimmiying take on disoriented sensitivities.
American Desi pokes fun at the young 20-something NRIs' deep contradictions and conflicts. It also goes hammers and tongs over filmi conventions, both in Bollywood and Hollywood. So here is the ultimate Bollywood-meets-Hollywood film, painted with strokes of humour that Gurinder Chaddha (of Bend It Like Beckham) would chuckle at.
Our protagonist in American Desi is Krishnaswamy Reddy (Deep Katdare), a product of Indian parentage born and bred in the US scoffing at his parents' nostalgic attachment to 'home'. When Chris (that is what Krishna calls himself) steps into the big wide world of American campus life, he is in for a shock. His roommates at hostel are three Indian Americans.
The kooky predictability of the plot does get in the way sometimes. Watching American Desi we often feel as though debutant director Pandya mixes his meter force. The urge to bring together these products of the Diaspora in a celebration of that great Hollywood tradition known as the romantic comedy is as ambivalently ironic as trying to bring in elements of a high school prom into a garba gathering.
But the magic masala works! Most of the time Pandya projects a sparkling wit that penetrates the very heart of relocated Indians' confounding genealogy. Kris (played with deep subtlety by Deep Katdare) looks down on everything India. But he happily agrees to sit through Raj Kapoor's Sangam, just to win the girl Nina (Purva Bedi) whom he loves.
The characters are amusing in their searching transparency, except when they don't plunge into embarrassing exaggerations. This is true of the South Indian engineeering instructor Rao who slurps sambhar in the canteen on the American campus and stumbles sozzled into a girls' hostel.
At times like these, the humour gets too broad to accommodate the train of ideas on cultural disaffection that run through the narration. Salim's (Rizwan Manji) smug selfworth is systemtically dismantled when it comes face to face with the feisty traditionalism of the freespirited Farha. This is the most romantically reverberent track in the film, and one that needed more development than the predictable Kris-Nina liaison that's predictably interrupted by the priggish Ajay who mocks his rival suitor Kris's lack of Indianness by suggesting he watch the collected works of the Hindi-film comedian Johnny Walker.
At such times, Pandya turns the diaspora on its head, ridiculing the patriotic NRI yuppie while exonerating Chris for his sins of cultural omission.
Many moments in this blithe spirited comedy sparkle with inventive ingenuity. The four Indian room mates look like a complete unit, each character complementing the other while remaining true to itself.
Kris and his room mates preparing an Indian meal for Nina to the sound of Mere sapnon ki rani, or Kris, willing to bend backwards (as backward as touching his Indian roots!) to win the charming Nina practising the Dandiya with her, are magical moments. Throughout, the Bhangra disco songs come on with unerring precision igniting the screen into flames of luscious lucidity.
More than the surehanded direction Pandya excels as a writer adding syntax, punctuations and footnotes to the main text until the dish puffs up with parodic pride. The performances, though a little too 'American' in surface demeanour, flow with the foamy-for-you intentions of the film.
Deep Katdare as the conflicted Krishna/Kris, Ranobir Singh as the patriarchally persecuted Sardar who wants to be an artiste but is forced into engineering, Rizwan Manji the rigid Muslim who thinks Indian girls in the US are 'loose' in character and the oddball Ajay who is amalgammated rap music into his Indian persona --- these are people who come alive as a giggle-inducing gallery of characters as real as the the last gooey bite into a slice of masala pizza.
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