Dir.
Vijay Singh, France/India/UK, 2005, 90 mins
Cast:
Vikram Chatwal, Gabriella Wright, Trevor Stephens, Smriti Mishra
This is a very odd dish, a mélange of broad comedy, Bollywood musical, with a splash of classical Indian dance and a touch of tragedy, where the ingredients never quite blend together into a satisfyingly tasty whole. Written and directed by Vijay Singh, an Indian born novelist who lives in Paris, this is his second feature film. Vikram Chatwal plays Nishan, a young Indian who arrives in Paris seeking political refuge, though it's not clear from what exactly he is running away. With the help of his new friend Fixer (Trevor Stephens), so called because that's just what he does, Nishan sets himself up as a mobile curry stall holder and then, undeterred by the fact that he's a rotten cook, creates a fake identity as the latest in a long line of top maestros of Indian cuisine - "The Maharajah of Indian Chefs". He also meets an ambitious young journalist Nathalie (Gabriella Wright), who offers him a room in her flat and wants to do a television story about him, enabling him to penetrate French media society, peopled with unconvincing French actors. His romance with the beautiful Nathalie goes swimmingly, until his fiancée from India (Smriti Mishra) turns up - a simple village girl, who appears to have a totally professional grasp of classical Indian dance.
It's all a bit of an inconsistent mish mash, switching styles and plot directions and introducing and dropping characters in an arbitrary manner, almost on a whim and when in doubt, bursting into song and dance. Nishan too suffers from an unconvincing inconsistency - naïve, sweet country boy one minute, philandering liar the next, with no attempt to meld his actions into the lovable rogue character that I suspect he's intended to be. The acting is patchy and frequently wooden and a lot of the jokes fall flat Stephens however is good as Fixer, though doesn't have enough to do, and Gabriella Wright as Nathalie makes an appealing heroine. Although set in Paris among what one assumes are French and Hindi speaking people, the dialogue is largely in English, which at times appears to be standing in for Hindi, plus a few scenes in French with subtitles. I'm really not sure who its intended audience is. However we're told it has been received enthusiastically in Paris and India , it's certainly colourful and the dance numbers are fun. But it is a long way removed from the now considerable body of British Asian movies from "My Beautiful Launderette" to "Bend It Like Beckham", which have made such a serious contribution to our culture.
Carol Allen
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