Monday 20 June 2016

Brahman Naman, Cineworld, Edinburgh Film Festival

When a film starts with a man having sex with a fridge, then lets the titles roll to the sound of Jethro Tull's Locomotive Breath, you know it's going to be tasteless and fun.  So far so good.

Set in 1980s Bangalore, Naman, an upper class college student, is a genius when it comes to quizzes, but failing at life otherwise.  Especially when it comes to the one subject that obsesses him more than any other - girls.  He and his friends have only two goals.  To win the All-India college quiz championship, and to get laid.

But these are teenage nerds, adept at creating fantasies and boasting of them to their friends, but with no idea how to talk with actual real life girls.  They want them to be like the women they see on the pages of their porn mags, and can't deal with a the complications of girls who thing they're pathetic, or those who prove their intellectual superiors.  And then there's the pressures of adhering to the social system they have been brought up to respect.

It's very funny at times, in a puerile teenager kind of a way, and Naman gets a few life lessons along the way, which he may, or may not, be smart enough to recognise.  And it's certainly fun, with excellent use of a fish-eye lens, some great animations and the characters bursting into off-key singing from time to time, backed up by a buzzing soundtrack.  There's a playful relationship with the audience, seven quiz questions appearing throughout, with the answers, shown upside down, appearing at the end of the credits.  But the film is at it's best poking fun at the iniquitous superstitions of the caste system and it's pernicious complication of human relations.

Enjoyable (if tasteless is your thing).

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