After a screening of Shashanka Ghosh’s Quick Gun Murugun, I ran into a former colleague who’s now a television reporter – and she wanted what she called a “byte.” She wanted to know if there was anything in the film that was hurtful to Tamilians. “Absolutely not,” I assured her, and walked away — but an instant later, I wondered if I shouldn’t have turned back and made a few politically correct noises, especially in the aftermath of the 'Kaminey' controversy, wherein a decades-old reference to masturbation was interpreted as a brand-new insult to Lord Jagannath.
Have we really become such a prickly, sensitive lot that the merest attempt at a joke (affectionate or otherwise) makes us break out in a rash? Whatever next? Will the Marwari seths of Chennai demand to be recompensed for the way their staccato speech was ridiculed in the Tamil films of a certain era? Will the Sardars follow suit, frothing at the mouth at being reduced, by Bollywood, to shoulder-shaking “balle balle” stereotypes? Quick Gun Murugun will no doubt set a few tempers aflare — but the audience I was with, thankfully, appeared genuinely tickled (a lot more than I was, I admit). Early evidence that the director had a screw amiably loose was strewn throughout his Waisa Bhi Hota Hai: Part II, where he earlier aimed his pointed (but never poisonous) darts at the Parsi and the Sardar. He now targets the Tamil masala film hero, embodied in the endearingly ludicrous person of the eponymous “South Indian cowboy.” The small problem, however, is that what was funny as a throwaway bit in the earlier film gets quickly wearying when stretched to feature length.
After about a half-hour of laughing at the loud clothes and the ridiculous names (Rice Plate Reddy and Mango Dolly and, in particular, the Molagapodi Boys; the gamely hammy cast includes Dr.
Rajendra Prasad, Nasser, Rambha and Raju Sundaram) and the priceless “punch” dialogues, you begin to wonder, “Is that all, or is there going to be anything else?” The plot, so to speak, revolves around the efforts of the villain to get his grubby hands on the recipe for the best mother-made dosa, and the feel that Ghosh is going for appears to be the sambar Western (say, the Jaishankar starrers directed by the Tamil cinematographer Karnan, or Rajinikanth’s Thaai Meedhu Sathiyam) as filtered through the trippy stylistics of Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, where an innocuous Japanese spy thriller was rendered ridiculous through hysterically offkilter (dubbed) English dialogue. (The latter film was even about the quest for the most perfect egg salad recipe — go figure!) Ghosh follows Allen’s template faithfully by having most of his dialogues in Tamil and subtitling them with the appropriate amount of absurdness.
Several of these lines are sidesplitting, as are many of Ghosh’s choices. And yet, after a while, it becomes awfully hard to shake off the feeling that you think you’re enjoying this comedy more than you actually are.
Tamil audiences, however, are likely to have themselves a lot more fun. It’s not just the pitchperfect reproduction of the cherished traditions of Tamil cinema — say, the “minor chain” on the villain’s neck. It’s also the South Indian hero’s refusal to kill the North Indian villain before educating the latter about the intricacies of the Tamil letter “zha,” as also the subtitles that are doubly hilarious when you remember the original lines from a hundred older Tamil films. (“Is she an ancestral property of your father?) What thrilled me most was the inclusion of an old TM Soundararajan number from Sivaji Ganesan’s 'Neela Vaanam'. “Oh little flower, see your lover,” it goes, and it’s a small stroke of genius to have included this instance of a “pop” song that, like the films spoofed here, must once have seemed oh-so-cool but is so laughably dated today. What, though, will a non-Tamil audience make of all this?