Review of Salaam Namaste

There is this scene where Arshad Warsi tells a drunk Saif ‘….Its 2005’. Thanks for the reminder. Till that moment, I thought this movie is shot in the year 2500 AD.

To make the long movie short, Preity is a surgeon-cum-RJ for guess what, ‘salaam namaste’ station, Melbourne. Saif is a head-chef in a restaurant. They start with a jagada (as all hindi films should), meet each other in a marriage, saif ‘thinks’ he had fallen in love at the end of marriage. He successfully persuades her to move with him to a penthouse, so that he could decide whether its love indeed. To ‘verify’ love, there must be one, right? So they make love for the next two months! She becomes pregnant. Now he refuses to take responsibility for the child (marriage), but still loves her. She is pissed off, but refuses to leave. In the end a baby video, a few self help books and expert advise from from subordinate cook changes his mind and to quote a cliché, all’s well that ends well.

If you are wondering where our ‘salaam namaste’ Indian culture fits in, join the club. I am a conservative tamil Brahmin, but the movie would have made even those pepsi/beer drinkers- who speak english in their tongue tips and frequently twist their fingers and scream yoyo!- agape. A lot of Saif’s antiques reminded Friends, so it did for those Shah rukh-college student Rahul-movies but atleast the underlying thread there was Indian.  May be this is how the directors take Indian cinema to a higher plane.

In a country where sonography test to find the sex of prenatal baby is banned, the film potrays a prenatal video positively, to promote the motherhood message. Saif’s recipe for controversy? (forgive the pun!)

Saif played his part well, except for the overuse of ‘crap’ that made me calculate the mean time between arrivals! Preity looks ravishing in the title song, but its tough not to notice her sagging cheeks in a few scenes - she almost resembled a cute bulldog.

Javed jaffry’s English grammar evokes laughter at times, yawn other.

The refreshing aspects of the film- Arshad warsi as his friend, a caricatures-rid comedian and Abhishek Bachan’s comedy in the last scene.

If you are unperturbed by logic (which we are anyway) but more importantly unperturbed by culture shocks, Salaam Namaste might just be your money’s worth.