Vir Das and Kavi Shastri’s film is not a comedy but a full-blooded farce, giddily performed, gleefully unmoored from realism, sharply written, and refreshingly uninterested in macho posturing
One of the most common mistakes made by modern-day critics and lay audiences alike is the inability to distinguish between comedy and farce. At least in the context of films/TV, the two are mistaken all the time for each other. In my view, comedies mine humour from situations and characters that are largely realistic and adhere to (at least) a baseline level of ground reality — even if the mannerisms, attire and vocabularies of these characters are exaggerated. On the other hand, a farce makes no such attempt to anchor itself to any lived reality, and therefore, its degree of ‘pure invention’ is much higher.
The outlandish, the profane and the extreme are the staple tonality of the farce and in the 21st century, most farces are not just deeply self-aware, but also quite attuned to the media atmosphere they operate in. Hrishikesh Mukherjee made comedies whereas the Priyadarshan of the mid-2000s largely made farces. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart make news comedy whereas a TV show like South Park has been successfully converting headlines into farce for nearly 30 years.
Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos, co-directed by Vir Das and Kavi Shastri, had been marketed as a straightforward comedy but I think the trailers under-sold the film. It is in fact a smartly written, giddily performed farce that will have you rolling in the aisles with laughter. It has a madcap plot, a genuinely likeable cast, six-jokes-a-minute pacing, and a surprisingly earnest coda tying the whole thing together. On the whole, it is a good-natured, well-intentioned ‘small’ comedy, the kind that Bollywood makes too few of these days, if you ask me.
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Happy Patel (Vir Das), the 34-year-old adoptive ‘failson’ to two white British ex-spies, finds himself tasked with a covert mission by Mi6 (the “entrance exam” to which he has failed seven times, we are told). Happy, who knows only how to cook and how to dance, has to rescue a British scientist from the clutches of a Goan gangster called, quite simply, Mama (Mona Singh) who has the residents of Panjor (the Goa neighbourhood where much of the film is set) in a vice grip. The two are linked by their fondness for food and cooking but also in true Bollywood potboiler fashion, through the circumstances of their respective childhoods. Happy is aided on his mission by a ragtag bunch of Panjor locals, chief among them the street-smart, slap-happy Rupa (Mithila Palkar) and the dopey but resilient Geet (Sharib Hashmi).
Footloose foodies
The film extracts a lot of humour from Happy’s British-accented Hindi and the resultant malapropisms. “Rahul, naam toh tsunami hogaa”, he says, imitating Shah Rukh Khan’s signature arms-open-wide gesture. Das performs these jokes well and to some extent, they draw on the kind of stand-up material he used to perform in his early career. Y’know, “weird ass” sounding like “Vir Das” in an American accent and so on. But I was equally impressed by Das’s unironic British accent, during the first 15 minutes or so of the film, which are set in the UK.
It’s a genuine delight to have a hero and a villain who are both, in very different ways, deeply attached to their own cooking. Mama happily whips up sorpotel and vindaloo while Happy routinely churns out French toasts and scrumptious-looking salami sandwiches. Happy also keeps his trusted spices on his person at all times, upgrading the meals of his friends and co-conspirators (with the ‘Salt Bae’ flourish made famous by the eponymous meme).
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The deliberate, entrepreneurial Mama’s fridge has two distinctly labelled boxes of her signature dish: “Good Work Cutlets” and “Special Cutlets”. The former is when an underling genuinely pleases her with his work and the latter box — laced with poison — is for occasions when said work.... falls short of her expectations. I liked the fact that the film trusts its instincts and doubles down on this connection between hero and villain, including and especially with the third act which features a cameo by Sanjeev Kapoor to boot.
Well-written parody
I also enjoyed how Das and Shastri embrace the visual language of food-centric shows like Master Chef. Every time we see Happy cooking something new, an infomercial-like singsong voice-over takes over the screen for a couple of seconds, the camera whirling around the plated dish at a leisurely pace (the ‘showcase’ shot in most food shows). The Sanjeev Kapoor clips intelligently used throughout the film are a parody of the generic nature of his lines. During the actual Kapoor’s cameo in the climactic sequence, a TV presenter (Meiyang Chang) even urges the veteran food show host, “Sir, thodaa aur generic!”
That visual attentiveness and knowledge of different visual styles is apparent in other places as well. The song ‘Banda Tere Liye’ is a deliberate rebuttal to the ubiquitous Bollywood ‘item song’, flipping the equation by having Das gyrate non-stop while his love interest, played by Palkar, is seated resolutely in her chair. When Happy first asks ‘who’s Mama?’ in a crowded Panjor line, everybody queued up turns around and shushes him in unison before turning around, street-play style (if you have ever seen a ‘nukkad naatak’ in your life, you know exactly what I mean). These are all techniques used to achieve the ‘suspension of disbelief’ that a good farce both depends on and deals in.
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Well-written parodies are only possible when the creators have, at some level, a deep affection for the source material being lampooned — and it’s obvious that Das and Shastri are eager, attentive students of Bollywood tropes. A fight scene where Happy’s fight choreography draws on Bollywood dance moves — sounds too precious on paper, but you have to see the film to realise how well this creative decision works in the moment. Aamir Khan and Imran Khan pop by for spicy little cameos on either end of the film, underlining the throwback to Delhi Belly, where Das and Imran were the principal players, with Aamir on producer and cameo duties again. Imran’s character, a supermodel, is called “Milind Morea”, an amusing portmanteau of real-life Indian supermodels Milind Soman and Dino Morea.
Happy Patel utilises the creative freedoms offered by its farcical storyline with diligence and enthusiasm. And the result is one of the funniest Bollywood films in years. In fact, over the last 12 months or so, there has been only other time I have laughed this often at an Indian film — that was the Malayalam film Alappuzha Gymkhana. The two films share a certain aversion for alpha male tropes (Happy Patel even has a whole song called ‘Alpha Male’ parodying these tropes) and a softer, gentler, more hopeful vision of what masculinity means. Perhaps this is part of the secret sauce of Happy Patel — it’s a film where men are allowed to be soft and silly and funny. And I think Bollywood could use much more of this in our ongoing era of extra-macho leading men, muscular nationalism and ‘ghar mein ghus ke marenge’ et cetera.
