Dollar Dreams

But what is interesting is the way Shekhar Kammuli persists with his mostly avoidable, anti-exodus 'dollar' obsession. The clean-shaven, American-returned dude is satirised for frowning at unsealed mineral water bottles, and sadness sneaks in some portions of the deadpan, dialogue-to-dialogue cutting. A comic take portrays the social worker as a queer, oblivious deliverer of samosas and kindness to the needy. But this appears as so routine an exercise that people care a damn about the socialist or her bewildered poor.

Once in a while you feel like sitting back and enjoying the raillery but the lack of interesting situations gets tedious. The major problem of the '90s marka, new wave Indian yuppie realism begins to surface. There are too many wisecracks. The irreverence, which pokes fun at Mera Bharat Mahan type of things, stands compromised because reasons for staying back are couched in sentimental terms. And built-in possibilities of the impressionistic, plot-less narrative style are marred by an over-confident, amateur cinematic sense.

Shoddy camera work goes in the name of cinema veritŽ - casual, unnecessarily pithy shots supposed to capture the pulse of reality end up revealing the blandness of all existence. The script makes you think that Indians are good mainly at everyday nonsensical banter. The slang and streetsmart raunchiness exhibit a 'Bombay Boys-mtv-Split Wide Open' view of the Indian road tamasha. It reminds one of the tiredly prankish, ants under the skirt, club-school humour of an Arundhati Roy pre-God of Small Things script.

The English-speaking, rootless Indian is obviously trying to go indigenous and funny. But he (or she) probably needs an authentic tryst with the pain of the youth, the machinations of the dalals, the suffering of the social worker - and yes, the haramipana of the streets.