Fun movie

Just watched a newly released offbeat satirical-comedy movie titled Phas gaya re Obama. The story-line can be found here. NRI businessman loses everything in the 2008 American economic meltdown, desperate to raise money quickly, comes home to sell off his ancestral haveli, has qualms of conscience about throwing out a lot of dependants, then kidnapped by a series of increasingly more menacing roughnecks who are all slavering over the imagined ransom he would fetch – ending up with a powerful state minister who is aspiring to be CM – and using his wits to get out of their clutches, while simultaneously getting them to pay over all the money he needs to save his house back in New Jersey, then taking the first flight back, presumably forever.

It’s no great shakes, but I liked the movie for a number of reasons. It does not depend on a star cast and big-yawn ‘item numbers’, it avoids sleaze almost entirely, it ruthlessly mocks the cow belt political class as well as the now-ancient Indian obsession with Umrica and big bucks (one young man has an epiphanic moment near the end), as well as the way we (including our so-called English teachers!) are mangling the English language beyond recognition in our mad bid to get smart, it uses wit of fairly good quality (by which I mean something better than slapstick) effectively, it portrays Neha Dhupia as someone who can sometimes rise to things better than being a modeling bimbo (here, a female Gabbar Singh), it manages to convey danger and fear without resorting to crude and bloody violence on-screen, it depicts low-level goons as rather sympathetic, or at least pitiable creatures (everybody is down at heel thanks to the recession, even kidnappers!), and it lets Rajat Kapoor play the finest role I’ve seen him in since Bheja Fry: a basically good man though he is a businessman, who, floundering in an alien and hostile environment, is nevertheless ready to fight tooth and nail with everything he’s got to save himself and his family when put into a nearly hopeless situation, but who never gets greedy, never seeks vengeance, and even discovers imaandaari among his tormentors, and pays back in the same coin. Also, the use of Barack Obama’s now-famous ‘Yes, we can’ speech as the background leitmotif is both clever and entertaining. No matter what the box-office figures might tell you, it’s worth watching.