The themes bubbling under the frantic surface of Nikhil Advani’s Patiala House are enticingly complex: Patriarchal dominance, unfulfilled potential, familial discourse, reverse racial stereotyping and, of course, romantic longing. Personified here by an extended Indian clan establishing its own enclave in well-to-do London, they are universal concerns inherent to the immigrant experience and deserve due consideration in a major motion picture. Patiala House is not that film.
The house of the title is a multi-storey dwelling in Southall, in which the Kahlon family live under the passive aggressive shadow of the boisterous Bauji (a scenery-chewing Rishi Kapoor). An anti-establishment rebel in his younger years, he is now a manipulative, cantankerous bully who oversees a vast family, all of whom carry a festering resentment towards him. All that is, except his eldest son Gattu (Akshay Kumar), a once-promising teenage cricketer on the verge of a call-up to the national team but who had to forsake his dream to honour his father’s wish that his son never play for England over India. Now 34 (though looking all of Kumar’s 43), Gattu is a shell of a man – a convenience store manager by day, he sneaks to a local paddock at night to throw down his still-lethal fast ball in silent solace.
In a fanciful and ludicrous turn of events, Gattu is approached by cricketing great Bishen Bedi who, with the support of real life ex-captain Nasser Hussein (legends David Gower and Graham Gooch also appear), asks if he wants another chance at Test cricket glory. (In a sly stab at their bitter cricketing rivals, the Indian production suggests that there is no county cricketer who could fill the duties of a test match opening bowler better than a stooping store clerk who hasn’t played in 17 years.)
Though Gattu is reluctant to dishonour his father, his siblings (and his beaming romantic interest Simran, Anushka Sharma, and her rascal son, Zee, Devansh Daswani) convince him to 'follow his dream’. In an odd bit of half-hearted sub-plotting that borrows heavily from the infinitely superior German film Goodbye Lenin! (2003), the family plans to keep all news of Gattu’s Test match debut from Bauji; the concept never plays out convincingly.
A promising opening sequence establishes niftily both Bauji’s hostility towards his adopted country, and the match-winning form of a young Gattu (played by Swedish actor Usman Qureshi, a dead-ringer for the star). From there. the film plummets into meretricious melodrama. Patiala House is unashamedly pitched to the back row of the theatre, as it bombards its audience with a raucous scene that amplifies the already-heightened atmosphere of a pre-wedding household, a petulant clash between Bauji and some Bobbies, and a lurid dance number. From Manan Sagar’s rapid-fire editing to Jaimal Odedra’s garish costuming to Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s incessant music, Advani’s jittery, shrill approach never takes a breath to allow for any nuanced interpretation of the deeper issues present in the script (for which he shares writing credits with Anvita Dutt Guptan).
Patiala House reteams Akshay Kumar with his director from the love-it-or-hate-it comedy Chandni Chowk to China (2009), though both have gone on the record in a bid to dispel any preconceptions that this film is more of the same. One need only watch 10 minutes of Kumar’s performance to be convinced that much is true, so hangdog is his expression and downtrodden his demeanour; it’s inconceivable that his loved ones would not have intervened for what appears to be a debilitating case of manic-depression. Gone is the vibrant star of the recent hit Tees Maar Khan (2010), only to be replaced by a humourless Sikh version of Brad Garrett’s mopey older sibling Robbie in the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond.
The most disheartening aspect of the film for this old leg-spinner was the depiction of the great game of cricket itself, which is captured with a laughably OTT, Rocky 3-like intensity. Sorely underdone cinematically, the drama of a great cricketing contest is screaming out for a big-screen treatment; Ashutosh Gowariker’s revered classic Lagaan (2006) gets the refined intricacies and chest-swelling honour of the game just right, but few others have even tried. The use of clichéd slow-mo, alternating with a quick-cut shallowness, is as far from the essence of the sport as one could possibly get, and echoes the hollow emotions that dominate the rest of Patiala House.
