Film Impressions

REVIEW: Badmaash Company (3)

FINALLY A WELCOME SUMMER BREAK FOR AUDIENCES

First a confession. If you are a style fiend, you will cringe at the clothes and shoes and sunglasses (so many of them!) that look great, but do not belong to the period the movie is set in. If you have traveled Air India in the 90s, you know they did not have blue blankets in cattle class, they have always used burgundy. I decided I will NOT look at styling in the movie after seeing the 2003 Takashi Murakami designed Multicolor Monogram Louis Vuitton shirt on Archie the smuggler in 1993/4.

REVIEW: Badmaash Company (2)

THOSE WERE THE DAYS

Not so long ago, before the retail boom, foreign goods came at a premium in India, and every area in Mumbai had a friendly neighbourhood smuggler, who provided goodies like jeans, t-shirts, branded shoes, watches, chocolates and cheese. The modus operandi was to send ‘carriers’ to Bangkok or Hong Kong, smuggle in these in-demand goods, in cahoots with the customs guys. The flourishing business came to an end with Manmohan Singh’s liberalization policy. It’s a very interesting social phenomenon, but a Badmaash Company in a film, smuggling shoes, doesn’t make for very exciting cinema.

REVIEW: Badmaash Company

MONEY RULES

Parmeet Sethi’s directorial debut, Badmaash Company operates in a warped moral universe. Its principal characters, a bunch of four friends, start off as ‘carriers’ of smuggled goods from Bangkok, then graduate to slightly bigger scams of their own, move base to the US, get carried away by different vices and part ways on a sour note. The protagonist, Karan (Shahid Kapoor) comes back to India, to suddenly realise what the ‘izzat’ that his not-so-rich father (Anupam Kher) has been talking about intermittently (but in a rather muffled voice, I think) means, and goes back to the US to earn an honest living.