Dir. Avie Luthra, UK, 2009, 98 mins
Cast:
Meera Syal, Nitin Ganatra, Zubin Varla, Andrea Riseborough
Review by
Philippa Bradnock
Calling a film Mad, Sad and Bad must be asking for trouble. The title presumably describes the characters but it does indicate a little of the general negativity and sourness that seem to pervade Avie Luthra's British Asian family drama. Mother Usha (Dhingra) insists that her stay-at-home adult daughter Rashmi (Syal) do more to meet a man and start a family. Rashmi's brother Atul (Ganatra) chases his friend's bimbo wife and avoids confronting the disintegration of his relationship with Julia (Riseborough). Meanwhile, another brother Hardeep (Varla) exploits his position as a psychiatrist to try to seduce Julia .
Mad, Sad and Bad clearly wants to be part of the heart-warming British Asian family genre that found its apotheosis in East is East and Gurinder Chadha's Bhaji on the Beach and Bend It Like Beckham . The focus is on the family and the press ures of growing up with cross-cultural influences. But Chadha's films have a warmth and detail which endears the characters to us and softens their internecine bickering. By contrast, Mad, Sad and Bad is so preoccupied with family conflict that its characters become grotesque. We are obviously meant to care about them, but Hardeep is just a creep and Atul an adulterer, thwarted not by loyalty or last minute uncertainty but by his intended prey's lack of interest.
The film also falls back heavily on cliché to make many of its points. Rashmi is dowdy, single and middle-aged, and her career as a librarian serves only to codify these characteristics in the most dreary way. She finds herself not through the kind of dubious therapy offered by her psychiatrist brother but through an illuminating chance encounter in a bar with a peculiarly understanding stranger (in an exchange so oddly stilted it is painful to watch). And Atul's creativity, stifled by his job as a TV sitcom writer, is finally ex press ed, when he writes an awful musical about his love of cheese (a development exactly the same as the ending of Forgetting Sarah Marshall , where at least the character was a musician to begin with).
Mad, Sad and Bad feels like a story idea and emaciated characters not properly fleshed out. In many scenes the timing and delivery misfires badly. It is clear that lines are intended to be funny or sad but they simply aren't. The acting is patchy and many performances are on one note, shown up by Andrea Riseborough, who steals every scene she's in. Riseborough's more nuanced performance and artfully dishevelled beauty make Ganatra, in particular, seem lumpen by comparison. Much of this is due to the script, which requires actors to deliver lines at odds with their established characters. It is simply not believable that Tony Gardner's highly professional funeral director would say, ‘it's a new technique,' to a bereaved relative, who observes how beautiful their mother looks. The final scenes before the epilogue add an irredeemably bitter taste, and make Mad, Bad and Sad a hard film to swallow.
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