Some movies come out of the blue one fine day and surprise you with their entertainment quotient. I had not heard of The President is Coming till Saturday when a friend rang up and recommended this one as a ‘must-watch’. I was skeptical till she said that this one is as good as Loins of Punjab. After that I had to watch it!
The President is Coming is a combined spoof on George Bush, reality TV and us Indians! It is based around Bush’s visit to India in 2006. Before Bush’s visit the US Consulate hires a PR agency run by two women to run a competition and find 1 extraordinary Indian youth who will shake hands with George Bush at the US Embassy. This starts a nationwide search of ‘extraordinary’ Indians which closes with 6 short listed candidates. All 6 candidates are invited to spend a night at the US Embassy for the final round of the competition. The final round is a reality-TV contest where all 6 candidates will be put through different kinds of tests throughout the night. One by one the weak candidates will be eliminated and the one who survives till morning will be the lucky one to shake hands with the President the same morning.
The 6 shortlisted candidates are:-
Maya Roy - A Bengali novelist with a secret agenda.
Kapil Dev - A Gujrati stockbroker who is sure that everything and everybody has a price.
Ajay Karlekar - A Marathi, khadi-clad social worker who is ‘proud-to-be-Indian’ and has amazing double standards.
Archana Kapoor - A self-proclaimed Paris Hilton of India who is proud to be running a Rs. 5 crore company which took only Rs. 3 crores to start (with Daddy’s money of course).
Ramesh S – A South Indian, sleazy executive who tries to seduce women at every opportunity and is also a closet gay.
Rohit Seth - An wannabe yankee who runs a accent-training company which teaches American English to call centre executives.
These 6 land up at the Embassy and from there starts the reality TV contest judged by the two women entrepreneurs of the PR firm (one of whom is a kleptomaniac!). The 6 contestants are willing to do anything to win - bribing, back-stabbing, seducing, manipulating and last but not the least, performing. The different tests are just as crazy as the contestants. One by one, the contestants are eliminated. Who wins the ‘handshake’? Don’t want to give that away…….
The story sounds crazy? It is! And the best thing is that the movie unapologetically celebrates its craziness. The characters are over the top. The situations are completely unrealistic. Yet the movie works because it has an intelligent core. The spoofs are well supported by good performances. The idiosyncrasies of each character coupled with the funny situations and hilarious dialogues kept me in splits throughout the movie.
Specially hilarious is the ‘test’ where all contestants are asked to repeat some famous speeches of Bush. That scene alone is worth the price of the ticket!
The actors are perfect in their roles – most of them are new faces, the only known face being Konkona Sensharma.
The downside is that the movie gives the feeling of watching a play since the whole movie takes place in a small building. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is adapted from a theatre play. There are a lot of sexually explicit and double meaning dialogues which make it unsuitable for the family audience. Also I felt that with an ensemble of such weird characters, the movie could have been funnier than it is. The production values are low but it doesn’t really matter. There are no songs which is a good thing here.
This movie is in English, and has a running time of 1.5 hours. It is clearly meant only for the multiplex audience. If you enjoy such movies, I would strongly recommend this one.