India Sweets & Spices(Amazon Prime Video)
Starring Sophia Ali as Alia Kapur,Manisha Koirala as Sheila Kapur.Adil Hussain as Ranjit Kapur,Deepti Gupta as Bhairavi Dutta,Rish Shah as Varun Dutta,Ved Sapru as Rahul Singh
Written & Directed by Geeta Kapoor
Rating: * ½
Geeta Kapoor’s diasporic megalo-drama is so pedestrian,predictable and puerile, I wondered why anyone would sit though it. There is of course the resplendent Manisha Koirala. She is reason enough to bear any atrocity. Koirala,in the most powerful role of the vapid film is an NRI in the posh locality of Ruby Hill in New Jersey, well-settled in her life of endless parties and gossip session with friends who behave like the witches of Macbeth , or closer home, the wives in Karan Johar’s Hollywood Wives.
Manisha looks bored with the company. I suspect it is also to do with the tedious script that has been thrust on her. The screenplay is so filled with stereotypes and clichés , it seems to have been written by an aspiring screenwriter attempting to write something during a boring family vacation.
Manisha’s discernible distractedness could also be attributable to the fact that her screen-daughter looks nothing like her . The two women look more like distant cousins than close mother-daughter and behave like they would like to be anywhere except in each other’s company.
The daughter Alia(Sophia Ali) has many distraction,two to be precise. There is the rich and privileged Rahul(Ved Sapru) and there is the poor (by whose standards?!) and still privileged Varun(Rish Shah).Alia seems unsure of which of her two love-interests interest her. And very frankly, we really don’t care whom she chooses as long as she does it quickly without wasting any more of our time.
As far as diasporic romcoms are concerned I’ve seen some pretty dreadful products of the genre, but nothing compared with this braindead take on the diasporic cinema. While the film’s insultingly bland tone is sufficiently offputting, its attitude to the NRI community in the US is even worse. The women are show to be endlessly gossiping and serving/eating samosas at parties where My name is Sheila blares till kingdom,and cops, come.
Having been an NRI for many years I could vouch for the fact that parties are not about gossip and bitching. There is plenty of intelligent conversation mainly to do with various customs and rituals which families abroad like to follow carefully fearful of slipping up by their distance from home.
In Geeta Kapoor’s film every character is a caricature. It’s as though she set out to make a Ruby Hill version of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, changed her mind midway ,decided to follow Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham and then changed her mind again to do an Indian version Of To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before.
But sorry, the mishmash works on none of the levels it aspires to. India Sweets & Spices is neither sweet nor spicy enough to define the lives of diasporic Indians. Its caricatural expanse of an inherently barren landscape screams for some subtlety and humour. All it get is cardboard characters who are as boxed and brittle as the laddoos in those plastic dabbas in the Indian departmental store where the (good) poor grocers eke out a living by bearing the insults of their snobbish customers.
This is Bobby and West Side Story, without the charm and gaiety of either.