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America calling

Suparn Verma

A still from Chalo America. Click for bigger pic!

Chalo America is director Piyush Jha's debut film. He worked with a small budget and focussed on the big dream of Indian youth with a foreign fixation.

Sunny (Aashish Chowdhury), Akshay (Mandar Shinde) and Rajat (Deven Bhojani) have one idea fixed in their heads -- to get to the US of A, the land of hamburgers, where every beach is a Baywatch set and where the tap water is cleaner than Bisleri.

With this thought in mind they go about their efforts with a fixity of purpose that would have been admirable in any other enterprise.

So they go to the passport office where they hope to endear themselves and get a visa by saying 'I love America'. One corny plan after the other fails, including one that involves getting married to an NRI girl -- shades of Aa Ab Laut Chalen, but cheaper. They even try making their way through the Castro Visa Consultancy whose owner sports a beard like Fidel and smuggles across illegal immigrants to the US via Cuba.

The trio fails at conning some American tourists into sponsoring them and then land in jail trying to smuggle themselves aboard a cargo ship headed for the US.

Director Piyush Jha. Click for bigger pic!

After many failures, the loss of Rs 10,000, two wristwatches and their dignity, they are about to give up when Sunny's father asks an uncle settled in the US to sponsor him.

Despite working on the promising base about the craze for all things foreign, the film has quite a few problems.

Let's start with the characters, Sunny, Rajat and Akshay. They just want to have a good time and the US is an answer to all their problems. Not quite representative of the competitive bunch who have their minds set in foreign lands.

They come across as buffoons who think any trick can get them a visa and who go gooey-eyed when Sunny drinks from a can of Coke or smokes a Marlboro. It doesn't come across really, particularly since both these products are available at the neighbourhood panwallah these days. Or maybe it just panders to a certain outlook about native aspirations to American dreams.

Three jerks want to go to the US. That's about all there is to the story. And to fill in the remaining time of the film that costs just Rs 7.5 million a few episodes are thrown in, some funny, some not.

A still from Chalo America. Click for bigger pic!

The protagonists' fixity of purpose is amazing in that despite being the dissolute types they are made out to be, they keep their minds strictly off women. There isn't one in the movie and none mentioned either.

It's hard to hold up a movie with such a thin and stilted plot. And with such a narrow vision it is proved pretty hard to hold together a film that lasts two hours plus. The songs aren't great shakes and the actors are clearly raw.

Hyderabad Blues and Bombay Boys had an amateurish touch to them but Chalo America looks like a school play by comparison.

The film has its moments, like when Rajat resigns himself to taking up his father's scrap business if he doesn't make it to the US. That leads up to a discussion of how in America he could make millions by just selling scrap.

The film could have been a light-hearted spoof on misguided youth who think Utopia is anywhere outside India. Instead, it deals with flat two-dimensional characters who move about purposelessly and appear too lazy to be worth the attention.

And so, this film ends up being another cheap wannabe, just like its characters.