REVIEW: Tere Bin Laden (2)

A GOLDMINE OF GREAT GAGS

In a very commendable first effort, Abhishek Sharma puts together a delightful film that is a goldmine of great gags and right on the ball in terms of the satire it attempts. When it comes to global terrorism, there is an over-riding atmosphere of political spin in which Americans are the primary victims and the Muslim world, in cahoots with any kind of jehadi agenda. Therefore it is very refreshing that a film like Tere Bin Laden comes along, with a fresh perspective and tongue firmly in cheek,  presenting what may not be nail-biting satire but something lightly provocative (and at times frivolous) which does end up making a kind of serious comment.

In the film, Pradhuman Singh plays the Punjabi-inflected poultry farmer who’s plucked out of his chicken coop to impersonate Osama Bin Laden in a video that is the brainchild of a small-time TV journalist, Ali Hassan (played by Pakistani pop icon Ali Zafar). He plans to sell it to a TV channel for an obscene amount of money, and thus fund his way illicitly to the promised land—America—after having had his visa clearance rejected for the umpteenth time.

Maybe it did take a bunch of Indians to present a Pakistani point of view that is irreverent and saucy, but this film isn’t culturally insular in any way. Though much of its humor is derived at the expense of its assorted lot of eccentric Pakistanis and loutish Americans, it doesn’t come across as insensitive (as the recent American-centric Sex and The City 2 was branded). Maybe that’s because it doesn’t come with an ‘outsider’ tag which is a testament to how its team manages to empathize with the very subjects that it seeks to parody. There is a measure of authenticity to the film because of the observational details that make the stock characters who populate the film’s little Pakistan ethos seem real and identifiable unlike the usual jingoistic comedy that panders to prejudices in order to make a laughing stock of the perceived ‘other’. Tere Bin Laden walks the tightrope of its brand of humor quite well.

Of course, there is a very low-end television quality to it all, and in many ways it is like an extended skit. This kind of treatment would possibly serve a stage play better, but it makes up with a crackerjack script and snappy dialogue what it lacks in terms of cinematic qualities (and for that we have the extraordinary Inception). Then there are the efficient performances from a cast of under-rated worthies who bring life to such characters as the henpecked head of a tabloid TV channel and his domineering wife; a makeup artist adept in creating alter-egos by such methods as slicing off an incriminating mole; and an America-hating voice-impersonator who ends up as a Coke-guzzling degenerate. Sharma even assembles a scruffy lot of Americans (with Barry John amidst them) and they have the right accents for a change and can burst into bhangra at the drop of a beat. Throw in a crowing contest featuring giant cockerels and you’re ready to go!

Ali Zafar is a charismatic leading man with perfect comic timing and the right intonation and maybe even the right dimensions to become a bonafide pan South Asian star actor. Shah Rukh Khan has been the official subcontinental guilty pleasure for more a decade—maybe it is time to get a shared cultural icon from the other side of the proverbial divide.

In the recent past, our collective fawning over America has been sent up deliciously in films like The President is Coming. We’ve even coaxed some inadvertent humor from the Bush and Osama portrayals in the ill-fated Mission Istaanbul (sic). But Tere Bin Laden is from another planet altogether. The film is banned in Pakistan because the censor board there thinks that by implication, people may believe that Osama is actually cooped up somewhere in Multan! That is exactly the kind of knee-jerk reaction to anything perceived as even slightly incendiary that this film tries to lampoon, and how.