Got a Delhi Belly, go watch

Shit happens! It really does in Delhi Belly. More like toilet humour, literally.

There are several scenes in a dirty, dry, rundown Delhi toilet (beginning with the opening credits) and growling tummy and farting and blasts of wind and actual goo on the table!  

I haven’t seen a movie that is so obsessed with the nether parts of the body and how it acts and what it produces. Most viewers will obsess over Delhi Belly’s colourful language but those toilet scenes are what I recall the most. (It’s like a poor song that you hum and then gets stuck in your head and you can’t shake it off) They come at regular intervals, like it would for a man who has good digestion and envious bowel movement (these days, constipation is more the norm, I would believe).

And the man who provides all this sound and action is a Nitin Berry. Kunaal Roy Kapoor, who plays Nitin, is the liveliest thing about Delhi Belly (and this is minus his toilet antics). It’s his Delhi Belly (is there such an affliction?) that kicks off the ‘misplacement’ drama and eventually brings it to something like a closure. Kunaal belongs to one filmi family -- his elder brother being UTV Motion Pictures’ CEO and younger a Bollywood actor on the rise. But Kunaal is who I look forward to seeing more of.

Talking of toilets, many viewers might find this a great put-off, as I did while watching. But would Nitin have had a role to play, otherwise?

Delhi Belly is neither a bad nor a great movie. Going by box-office statistics peddled by the media, it’s a hit and the general opinion seems to be it’s a cult little movie. I disagree. Delhi Belly won’t stand the test of time.

The plot is thin, as thin as Nitin Berry’s stomach for the deadly pakodas of Delhi. What saves the day for DB are the performances, the underlying humour (though mostly uneven and sometimes crass), the music, the mix of English and Hindi (Hinglish, if you please) and the colourful language. Akshat Verma is lucky that his script found such great sponsorship and packaging.

The audience at the single-screen theatre where I watched DB was overwhelmingly 18- to 25-year-old. Most of them responded most vociferously to the abuse words, though these were not half as scandalous as the media made them out to be. Terms of ‘endearment’ like D K Bose have been used earlier in Bolly films, and stronger ones like M**** C**** or B*** C*** are conspicuously missing. So why is everybody going nuts about Delhi Belly’s language, or the lack of it?

What’s striking is the frequency of the ‘F’ word. I remember a woman colleague who used ‘F’ liberally at work. I often wondered if she had the inclination then to actually do it.

What works best in DB, contrary though it sounds, are the dialogues. This is actually the way youngsters of a certain age and milieu speak. But for that very reason, Delhi Belly will remain a niche film.

Though it is yet another in the recent series of Delhi-centric films, DB fails to capture the soul of the national capital. There was a moment during the screening, while the heroic trio and the heroine were making their great escape through the city’s bylanes, when I desperately tried to remember where the film was based. Thank god, it’s called Delhi Belly. I almost forgot.

The music deserves a mention. Ram Sampath, after that copyright row with the Roshans, has finally hit the big time. His D K Bose, of course, has become anthemic but the ’80s spoof song, ‘I hate you like I love you’, though apparently downmarket, is infinitely more catchy. The mock Saigal, ‘Duniya me’ (by Chetan Shashital) should give remixers some ideas (Imagine Saigal remixed for the 21st century). The background music is heavily jazz, as evident in the climax shootout. Hope to hear more of Sampath, or more from Sampath.

It is good to see the talented Vijay Raaz back in action and thankfully not in a crassly comic, sidekick role.

And Aamir Khan Productions’ obsession with the ‘phoren’ heroine is evident yet again in DB (after Monica Dogra of Dhobi Ghat). Los Angeles-based and Tunisia-born Poorna Jagannathan is a refreshing change from the busty, ceramic skinned, silken haired Hindi film heroine. She has the most mischievous pair of eyes seen in Bolly in a long time. And the passionate kiss (strangely, both times in a car, and the fake humping in the hotel) only adds to her sensuous charm. Not to forget, she was 37 when she romanced the almost-decade younger Imran Khan. But Poorna doesn’t look a day older than 25. (Madhur Bhandarkar should perhaps cast her as his ‘Heroine’)

If Delhi Belly is remembered in the long run, it would be in no small measure for the chances it has taken -- in using foul language unabashedly, using Hinglish without apologies, using a soundtrack that is overtly rock and jazz, not having a dominant hero, using an unconventional heroine and making toilet humour unavoidable.

So what the f***? Go watch Delhi Belly for the 8 on 10 it is worth.