Delhi Belly | Film Review | Slant Magazine

FILM MOVIE REVIEW

A scene from Abhinay Deo's Delhi Belly. [Photo: UTV Motion Pictures]

Delhi Belly **

by Simon Abrams on June 29, 2011 Jump to Comments (3) or Add Your Own

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In spite of its conspicuously crude sense of humor, Delhi Belly is much more family-minded and innocent than it would like its young target audience to believe. Unlike Mumbai Diaries, a mediocre but curiously atypical indie drama produced by Aamir Khan and Kiran Rao, Delhi Belly, also produced by the husband-and-wife team, is only nominally rebellious. As a film that's rather vocal about its playfully anarchic stance, Delhi Belly pokes fun of anyone that vaguely resembles an authority figure and features a lot of unfunny scatological humor (its central conflict arises after a stool sample is accidentally replaced with a package containing some mysterious illicit product), but it also emphatically embraces Bollywood films' cheerfully naïve tendency of cherishing family and happy heterosexual coupledom above everything else.

The fact that Delhi Belly is so meek allows Khan and Rao to cover their asses since their production company's tagline is "clean, family entertainment"—but it only serves to neuter the film. Then again, while Delhi Belly isn't as obnoxious or offensive as the film's PR campaign would have viewers believe (Khan called the film an "adult comedy"), it's at least stridently unique. Tashi (Imran Khan), a young reporter that only wants to pursue serious news stories, is tasked by his oblivious girlfriend, Sonia (Shenaz Treasury), with delivering the aforementioned mystery package to a man that Sonia doesn't even know and for reasons that are never sufficiently explained. Tashi then asks Nitin (Kunaal Roy Kapur), one of his two uncouth roommates, to deliver the package for him. Stricken with the titular stomach virus, Nitin hands over both a stool sample he wants his doctor to look at and the package to Arup (Vir Das), roommate number three, who winds up giving an angry criminal a canister full of shit by accident. Everybody then chases everybody else so they can get their hands on the package first.

Screenwriter Akshat Verma tries very hard to impress you with Tashi and his roommates' improper behavior. Most of the time, the jokes in Delhi Belly are too cartoonishly innocent to be worth taking seriously, like its copious poop jokes and the hardly scandalous subplot where Nitin tries to blackmail his landlord with photos of the landlord visiting a prostitute. The film's wildly uneven comedic sensibility, if anything, suggests a raunchy Bollywood version of Looney Tunes. For instance, after Arup finds out the girl he's dating is engaged, he daydreams a musical number where he breaks up the impending marriage by publicly announcing that the bride-to-be once gave him a blow job.

It should be noted that, with the exception of a momentary glimpse at runny stool, almost nothing too crass is ever visualized in Delhi Belly, not even when evil gangsters torture the man that gives Sonia the package by shoving a lit stick of dynamite up his ass. Then again, the most boorish of the film's jokes is a suggestive, proudly un-PC joke made at the expense of Menaka (Poorna Jagannathan), one of Tashi's colleagues. Menaka is called a "lesbo" simply because she doesn't act phased or particularly alarmed when a friend of hers calls a mutual acquaintance a "lesbo" too. The viewer can't even imagine the transgressive behavior that's being alluded to by that joke because Verma is too afraid to offend anyone to actually earn the squirms he's striving for with even a small girl-on-girl kiss. It's a teasing homophobic gag that's actually all the more offensive for how accidental and wispy it seems.

With the exception of the "lesbo" joke, Delhi Belly is by and large too concerned with not offending its audience too much for it to ever even be that shocking. (Spoilers herein.) For instance, Arup's landlord is eventually let off the hook and the incriminating photos are never delivered, giving him the opportunity to keep the trust and love of his happy, clueless wife. Furthermore, Tashi may not wind up marrying Sonia, but he does hook up with Menaka, proving that she's not in fact a "lesbo." Hetero-normative balance is restored in the end, reducing Delhi Belly's events to a series of meaningless antics with an inexplicably moral conclusion. Here's hoping Rao and Khan do better at shocking audiences with their next "adult" comedy.

Director(s): Abhinay Deo
Screenplay: Akshat Verma
Cast: Imran Khan, Shenaz Treasury, Vir Das, Kunaal Roy Kapur, Poorna Jagannathan
Distributor: UTV Motion Pictures
Runtime: 104 min.
Rating: NR
Year: 2011

Comments

gwackk on July 2, 2011, 02:06 AM

"cheerfully naÏve tendency of cherishing family and happy heterosexual coupledom above everything else"

"the most boorish of the film's jokes is a suggestive, proudly un-PC joke made at the expense of Menaka (Poorna Jagannathan), one of Tashi's colleagues. Menaka is called a "lesbo" simply because...."

"Hetero-normative balance is restored in the end"

I think you are fixating on the homo-hetero thing way too much. It's not even an issue in the film. The fact that you decided to latch onto it like a leech & even cheekily term a man-woman kiss as a restoration of "Hetero-normative balance" tells a lot about your psyche.

Or perhaps with equal rights being the flavor of the month with the passing of New York's same-sex marriage law, you just felt a compelling need to salvage your good-for-nothing review by making it a bit more "culturally relevant". Well, guess what, Simon? It didn't work.

lotus plaza on July 14, 2011, 03:16 PM

@gwackk, my gleefully offended Indian friend, I think your criticism of the above fixates on sexuality way more than Simonever intended!

@Simon, while I agree with much of your criticism, I must point to the development of certain exclusicely Indian cultural sensibilities while addressing anything bollywood. Unfortunately the context for much of the cinema here lacks a global, or even remotely western standards quite in contrast with asian film practices. Delhi belly is probably as "adult as bollywood gets! We only recently discovered kissing on screen!

Probably indebted to thinking simultaneously in "up to" 2 disparate languages, we have successfully developed a peculiarly schizophrenic threshold to cinema. celebrating both arthouse and bollywood in the same breath.

asTer0id on August 1, 2011, 01:27 PM

So essentially the biggest criticsms you level upon this movie are that a) it doesn't offend enough b) it reinforces heteronormative roles.

Firstly, i'm not sure the point of the movie IS to offend. I suspect the point of the movie is to entertain, something it did for me in heaps, but apparently if jokes aren't taken far enough, its not possible for you to laugh. Perhaps it will take an Indian South Park to please you? I also suspect that some of the humor, rooted in South Asian pop culture escaped you. For example take the Bollywood dream; it was actually satirical and served to poke fun of the traditional "moral" hindu values group that pretend that sex on the whole (leave alone non-missionary versions of it) doesn't exist by not talking about it. Many a wedding would in fact, be ruined by proclamations of the type he makes in his dream sequence. It also spoofs popular 70s bollywood themes of disco dancing action heroes, which made it very funny for me.

As for the "heteronormative-ness" of it all. To me it was very refreshing that the female lead didn't care about breaking up an existing couple, didn't care about being labelled a lesbian and didn't really care for typical female gender roles in Indian society. She was outspoken and did what she wanted, which is more than your average bollywood heroine would ever dream of doing. Keep in mind that this is a country that has just gotten rid of the sodomy law, has just begun to speak of sexuality, leave alone homosexuality. From the point of view of an audience that is used to seeing the camera pan away to two roses when a heterosexual kiss would occur on screen, simulated cunnilingus, lesbian references and crude language is enough to qualify it as an "adult comedy".

You judge the film by a distinctly western point of view, and anything that doesn't fit those sensibilities is immediately deemed as inferior. I would counter by saying that a majority of western films reinforce the very same heteronormative values you abhor so much.