Film Review (D): Namasté London

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Namasté London is a tedious film: it seeks to readapt Manoj Kumar’s “Purab aur Paschim” [East and West] to our times but the outcome is a yarn based on highly improbable and unbelievable premises.

For one thing, no first-generation NRI-Londoner [Rishi Kapoor] can possibly trick his remarkably liberated and fiercely independent adult-daughter [Katrina Kaif] into marrying a desi Punjabi [Akshay Kumar] while ostensibly “taking a journey across India to see the Taj Mahal”. Moreover, no self-respecting hot-blooded desi Punjabi is going to hang around London watching his ‘wife’ paint the town red with her fiancé- a spoilt and thrice-divorced heir of a British tycoon- in the hope that she will eventually come running back into his arms. As things turn out, that is exactly what happens.

Only two sequences stand out: first, the family’s hilarious interviewing of suitable matches for their daughter, including a lap-top yielding software-analyst from Hyderabad who demands to have a premarital ‘physical compatibility’ test with the prospective bride-to-be, and another loony from Delhi who thinks he is a character in an Ekta Kapoor soap-opera; secondly, a quiet family scene at the dinner table, which stands out for Rishi Kapoor’s efforts at suppressing his laughter. Apart from this, there is nothing else to the film.

Watch it only if you haven’t got anything better to do. Or, as in the case of the incorrigible Mohit Singhania, if your world begins and ends with Ms. Kaif!

AJ