Namaste Wahala (Netflix)
Starring Ini Dima-Okojie, Ruslaan Mumtaz
Directed by Hamisha Devyani Ahuja
Rating: **
If clothes maketh a movie as they maketh a man, then this Indo-Nigerian cross-cultural romance would top the list of things-you-must-do-before-you-die. Of course this film is no such earthshaking occurrence. At the most, it is a mildly enjoyable cute confection with a boy-man-meets-girl-woman-in-Nigeria plot as predictable as humanly possible.
Sparks fly, etc etc. Within ten minutes of the film’s fast-flowing fluff feast Handsome Indian Investment banker Raj(Ruslaan Mustan) tells Pretty Nigerian Lawyer Didi(Ini Dima-Okojie) she is the girl he’s going to marry. There is no dramatic conflict here, not when both the families are super-privileged and invested in looking their Sunday-best even when they roll out of bed on Monday arrives.
The bad-vibe drama begins when Raj’s mother Meera(Sujata Sehgal) lands up at her son’s doorstep(after a lengthy “comic relief” sscene with a taxidriver at the airport that should have been declared dead on arrival). Soon the Indian mom is having a food feud with her future daughter-in-law, and hurling insults at her son’s Nigerian girlfriend and her family who, by the way, are no walkover.
Didi’s father runs a huge legal firm where heir-apparent Didi doesn’t want to work in. She would rather use her legal skills to help abused women.
Awwwwww! So sweet. Privileged daughter with a conscience. It’s all a very streaming-of-conscience OTT formula. Except the leads , Ruslaan and Inni who look good together and apart, and act suitably bemused at the formulistic goings-on, the rest of the cast takes its OTT responsibilities very seriously. Everyone is over-acting all the time. Or maybe the Africans are more expressive than Indians. There is an actress playing the heroine’s ‘manizing’ bestfriend(the other side of womanizing) whose face is a miracle of multi-expressions. She rolls her eyes, wriggles her lips and is constantly…ummm..acting?
Everyone talks as if they are reading out the lines from a teleprinter, and trying not to laugh while promoting Coco Cola at every given opportunity. But it’s not all a lost case . There’s some fun to be had in the festive colourful bright bouncy aura and the best sequence comes after the end-credits (after the Big Fat Bollywood Wedding-Dance) where the hero’s Indian mother asks the heroine’s Nigerian father for dahej.
But the best dialogue in the entire run-of-the-treadmill fare is between the heroine’s mother and heroine’s bestie. Mom puts her hands on man-preying bestie’s buxom chest and counsels, “Nobody buys the cow when he can get the milk for free.”
Touche.
