‘The First Film Where I’ve…’

Badmaash Company, the only film that Archana Puran Singh’s husband Parmeet Sethi directed, is too smart for its own good. The main characters, four friends bonded by the collective will to grow rich overnight, go through a series of caper experiences. Not all of it is either convincing or even interesting. After a point, we know exactly where this quartet is heading. And the slide out of moral degeneration is never touching enough to make us shed a tear for these misguided over-reachers.

The doom comes none too soon, and then the narrative proceeds without a proper graph. By the time Karan (Shahid Kapoor)’s spunky girl Bulbul (Anushka Sharma) leaves him, the script begins to look like one of those subverted morality tales from the house of the Bhatts where the heroes talk with clenched fists and heroines weep in their pillows as their companions come home in a drunken stupor.

We’ve been here before. But wait. There is a sense of intuitive cockiness about the narrative which sees the film’s improbable mixture of the trendy and the trite (in how many ways will the upright father ask the devil-may-care son to leave home as the mother bites her lips and wrings her hands???) to the final stretch of predictable moral redemption.

There is a sense of the predictable and yet the unpredictable in the storytelling. Debutant director Parmeet Sethi’s screenplay is one of those things that you want to believe merely because it sounds so smart on paper. But not all of this makes complete or even incomplete sense. The climax about colour-bleeding shirts being sold to America as the Next Best Thing is much too far-fetched to work even as a part of a con caper.

Nonetheless, Badmaash Company has a lot going for itself. The first half, when Karan meets Bulbul, Chandu, and Chang to create an instantly materialistic energy, gets you interested in these out-of-control lives. You don’t quite empathise with their overweening goals. But at least they seem to know their minds, even if on occasions the plot doesn’t seem to know what it’s doing.

There’s something pitch-friendly about the four actors and the way they tackle the plot—material which never seems fully sure of itself. It’s sometimes cool, sometimes over-reaching itself.
If the film holds together, it’s because of the bona fide enthusiasm and unconditional surrender to the proceedings of the actors.

Shahid Kapoor pitches in another perfectly poised and subtle performance even though his character’s graph gets blurred towards the end. You can’t stop caring for Karan’s character because Shahid doesn’t let go of his centre even when the narrative gets shaky. Anushka Sharma, in a stunning makeover, conveys her character’s spirit and spunk through her well-toned body language and that twinkle in the eye. Tragically, a lot of her speech and morality, and this goes for a lot of the film’s careless periodicity, is not 1990s (the film’s setting) at all.

Vir Das, as the film buff with a roving eye, negotiates his character with gentle care. Here’s one actor who knows what he’s doing even when his character doesn’t. And Meiyang Chang, as the chinky-eyed alcohol-guzzling Gangtok guy, seems made for his character.

Badmaash Company is an extremely smart and smart-looking film. But its sassy, all-knowing tone cannot hide a certain bankruptcy of genuinely inventive ideas. This is a fatally flawed film about seriously flawed characters. The packaging is glamorous but not overdone. The dialogues convey a ring of truth without bending backwards to be cool.

And though guilty of extravagant flights of fancy (the way our quartet of protagonists plunder the American Dream can only be called wishful thinking), Badmaash Company has enough going for itself to make it an experience worth our while. And never mind the blind spots. Whoever said life in the movies was meant to be a bed of roses?

There’s a longish sequence in an American eatery in the second half of this deeply flawed and yet refreshingly cool urbane, casual, and yet highly cinematic work where Shahid Kapoor’s Karan, by now on the road to seemingly irredeemable moral degeneration, is told by his partner, played by newcomer Vir Das, that he wants out.

The way that sequence progresses and the manner in which the two actors play out a conventional friends-falling-apart moment, just makes you forgive all the excesses of inflated self-worth that the script suffers from in the last ninety minutes of this endearing, though exasperating, experience.

Shahid Kapoor spoke to Subhash K Jha on the various aliases he assumes in Badmaash Company. “Badmaash Company is the first film where I’ve so many disguises. In about twenty minutes of the film, I change into various disguises. We didn’t know what I should look like. So we tried all kinds of stuff. My favourite disguise is that of a bald guy. No one could recognise me, not even my co-stars Anushka Sharma, Meiyang Chang, and Vir Das. It’s not like I am the Badmaash, but they are the company. All four of us are equally important in the plot. I think one matures with every film. When I read the script of Badmaash Company, I thought it’d take me into a new space as an actor. I had never done a con caper or an ensemble piece. I think all of us make a great team.”

Shahid said he enjoyed working with Anushka Sharma. “We were all very young in the cast, and we did a lot of outdoor shooting together. I think it’s very important to get along with the people I work with. Anushka, Vir Das, Meiyang Chang, and I got along well. I got myself a Harley Davidson in the US and rode all over the place all on my own. I love biking on my own. I often take off in Mumbai on my bike during the night. Sure, I get recognised on the streets. But no one bothers me. And really, you can’t stop doing what you have to out of the fear of being recognised. Riding my mo’bike relaxes me. I like going out riding on my own anonymously. It helps me unwind. I think every actor likes to be alone. In any case, I am not a group person. I don’t move around with 25 hangers-on. I have 3-4 close friends. They are the ones I spend my time with besides my family.”