French ‘Fry’
The indie comedy Bheja Fry came out the week I left Bombay, and I just got around to seeing it this weekend. It’s a decent if lightweight timepass. The poster of Rajat Kapoor throttling Vinay Pathak (Manorama Six Feet Under) struck me as a village comedy, but it’s anything but — it’s an urban sitcom, a remake of the French film Le Dîner de Cons (Dinner With Idiots).
The gimmick is that a wealthy man selects and brings a fool to a weekly dinner where the performer has no idea the guests are making light of him. So, basically, high school with the volume turned down. The elite is benched with a strained back, the idiot complicates the situation in his home, and everyone is tidily redeemed in the end.
Typecast as an amoral corporate bastard, Kapoor is the Indian Daniel Auteuil. Ranvir Shorey, one of my favorite comic actors, plays a Muslim tax examiner who ‘eats here but cheers over there’ for the Pakistani cricket team. He can’t really pull off surly, but Pathak is genius. He, Shorey and Boman Irani (Khosla Ka Ghosla, Being Cyrus) make me want to stand on my seat and cheer every time they pop up in a movie.
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Daniel Auteuil |
Dîner’s stone-cold manipulativeness reminds me of Neil LaBute’s brilliant, chilling The Shape of Things (Rachel Weisz, Paul Rudd). Its cruelty of class conflict was later aped by Auteuil’s Mon Meilleur Ami (My Best Friend) and La Doublure (The Valet), both fun but forgettable:
There is another French movie made in a similar style to My Best Friend. Francois Verber directed Le Dîner de Cons… an alternating crass and stereotype-ist contraption that was also hysterically funny as well as cynically cruel… My Best Friend is from a similar strand of French culture and is an utter contrivance. It seems to be made up of the discarded jottings of Dîner… a diluted, less barbed version of the same idea. [Link]
Bheja Fry’s plot hinges on a man desperately calling his wife’s exes after an argument to find out where she’s fled. That liberated situation, lifted verbatim in this movie, doesn’t really work in the France-to-India transplant. Or maybe I don’t know Bombay’s film fraternity well enough :P
Here’s the trailer:
on Monday, March 24th, 2008, 4:29 pm in Film, Video clips › 
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I like the movie a lot and I have not seen the French original. BTW Vinay and Ranveer used to have a show on Channel V many years ago and that was very funny as well.
Manish, thanks much for the heads-up. Le Diner de Cons is one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. I would also never have thought that the various premises in the original would travel so easily, and warrant a believable remake like Bheja Fry. Then again, it’s Bombay!
Dubbing the original in Hindi should itself have proved highly commercial. Do they bother with things like that any more, or are remakes somehow more privileged under IP rules, I wonder?
I’ll put it on my must-see.
You know, my wife and ultimately better 9/10ths watched this about a month ago and frankly, it was worth the mid week viewing. I completely agree with you that Vinay Pathak is the bomb in this movie. He solely carries the movie and that’s what makes it worth watching really.
Imagine my dismay when Night at the Museum was dubbed in Hindi. You lose so much when you lose the original actors’ voices.
He’s gone from small character roles to major ones. What a joy.