Phas Gaya Re Obama

Rajat Kapur is in great form after a long time,and Neha Dhupia is superb,way better than even her dark essay in Maharathi.

Om Shastri (Rajat Kapur) is,in American parlance,broke. In one month,he has to shell out a hundred thousand dollars to the bank to save his last asset his house. After 15 years of hard work,his profits have been washed away by the great recession. Desperate,Om leaves for his hometown back in India to sell off his ancestral haveli,now occupied only by his aged uncle (Surendra Rajan) who should not have any objections to the proposal.

But as Om proposes,God disposes. Back home,just as Om realises that he cannot sell the property as a whole lot of relatives are staying there with his uncle,he is kidnapped by the local don (Sanjay Mishra) and his gang (Amit Sial,Manu Rishi,Devendra Chaudhary,Susheel Pandey) who think that hes loaded. But thanks to the effects of recession,crime too has faced a slump and after negotiating,the gang is even willing to settle for a paltry sum as his ransom! Shocked when Om offers proof that he is penniless,the gang hatches a plan that goes horribly wrong. How the gang and Om progressively encounter tough don Alibhai (Sumeer Nijhawan),Munni aka female Gabbar (Neha Dhupia) and then a state Minister-cum-gangster (Amole Gupte) as they move from one predicament to another forms the rest of this comedy.

How American recession can adversely hit even the crime business in the hinterlands of North India is depicted with oodles of humour,a zany sense of fun and a complete lack of violence and cusswords a delightfully welcome break from the standard gangland fare as well as dark comedies. Though there are areas of crassness (like the ministers painful piles and the farting sequence),most of the humour is witty and often delightfully over the top (like the female don of the all-female gang naming all her acolytes after stars like Katrina Kaif,Preity Zinta,Rani Mukerji et al or the kidnapping racket carried out with immunity warranties on payment of ransoms!). The English coaching-class sequence is sidesplittingly hilarious,more so as it suddenly pops up unexpectedly. The initial sequences of the gang watching American television and Barack Obama is also great fun.

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Subhash Kapoors ingenious (and indigenous!) script pokes good-natured fun at the small-time gangs that consist of good human beings gone wrong,often with their own perfectly logical dreams and desires like a vacation in the snows of Manali or of dreaming the great American dream. Going several steps ahead of Tere Bin Laden,it has the skilled writing of Sankat City but again outclasses that film in sheer entertainment quotient.

Technically on par with its needs (Gautam Sens art direction and Manish J. Tipus background score rise beyond the brief),the film has no songs just an end-music video that is reasonably good. But Kapoor is as assured as any director would be when confident of a good script in his hands,which in this case,happens to be his own!

The performances are uniformly good: Rajat Kapur is in great form after a long time,and Neha Dhupia is superb,way better than even her dark essay in Maharathi. Manu Rishi and Sanjay Mishra are the scene-stealers Mishra is truly outstanding. Amole Gupte is correctly camp,and Mishras gang members are all very good in their roles.

Rating: ***

One star for the concept and performances and two stars for Subhash Kapoors genius. By the way,this film stands tall on its individual merits,so lets not get into the usual claptrap about small films now being better alternatives to mass entertainers. The audience needs such welcome diversions from the staple fare. Good films of all kinds are always welcome. Period!

rajiv.vijayakar@expressindia.com