Delhi Belly - A Review (* * * 1/2)
Abhinay Deo’s ‘Delhi Belly’ is a brash, irreverent comedy that is so hilariously indecent, it must have set some sort of standard for bad taste in Bollywood. Say what you will about the film’s affection for all things gross, it all fits rather smoothly into the scheme of a caper. There’s a scene where a jar of turd provides the pivotal twist. If the very sound of that puts you off, you’re not the intended audience for ‘Delhi Belly’. To others, I say watch the scene and try telling me that wasn’t even mildly funny.
The plot: Our heroes Tashi, Arup and Nitin are regular 20-something blokes who share a dingy flat somewhere in Delhi. Their bachelor pad is a victory of production design, evoking a cross between a dumpster and a Railway washroom. Tashi (Imran Khan) is a reporter who aspires to strike gold covering some good breaking news story, but is stuck on the bottom rung interviewing starlets and the likes. Nitin (Kunaal Roy Kapur) is the far more content photographer assigned to him and the sleaze of the trio. Arup (Vir Das) is a cartoonist who works for, I think, an advertising firm and we see a dartboard with his Boss’ face on it to indicate his job satisfaction.
Things suddenly take a turn for the worse. Arup gets dumped, Tashi runs afoul of his beautiful colleague’s roughneck of an ex-husband and Nitin, well, comes down with a horrible case of Delhi Belly. The fact that the trio’s flat is always without water provides some of the loudest laughs in the film.
More sinister events are put into motion when Tashi’s girlfriend Sonia (Shenaz Treasurywala), an air hostess, hands him a mysterious package she picked at the airport at the request of a friend, to be delivered to its intended recipient. Fans of Guy Ritchie & Quentin Tarantino films would be quick to realize that the package is the McGuffin and thus it’s sorta crucial that there is some mix up delivering it for the film to work. A series of unpleasant developments sets our boys up against a gangster, played to perfection by Vijay Raaz. By this time the plot has sucked in Tashi’s colleague Menaka (Poorna Jagannathan), the trio’s landlord and a slimy jeweller played by that brilliant character actor Rajendra Sethi (remember him as the ‘Sansani’ reporter in ‘Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye’?).
The screenplay by Akshat Verma is clearly inspired by Guy Ritchie films and perhaps the biggest leaf it picks is to introduce conversational chemistry between the lead characters. Tashi, Arup and Nitin speak that peculiar Delhi lingo that’s random, zippy and (ahem) robustly profane. It’s not exactly Hinglish but, as the certificate says, mostly English with a bit of Hindi. Acoustically speaking, the dialogue evokes our own desi version of the cockney sound in Ritchie films.
Watching ‘Delhi Belly’, I was reminded of Krishna DK & Raj Nidimoru’s excellent ‘99’, a superior crime caper because it was quieter, had better stakes and featured more fleshed out characters. But as far as capers go, I suppose audiences prefer quirks over depth and a capacity for going over the top. And that kinda says something about Aamir Khan’s knack of helming successful productions. You have to hand it to that guy. If this film doesn’t work for you, wait till you see him slip into his disco shoes and butt pads & try telling me that wasn’t even mildly funny.
