CAST: Venk Potula, Summer Bishil, Karan Soni, Sonal Shah, Meera Simhan, Sharmita Bhattacharya, Nirvan Patnaik, Tony Mirrchandani, Sujata Day, Aly Mawji, Maya Kapoor, Ravi Kapoor, Samrat Chakrabarti, Poonam Basu, Shivani Thakkar, Havish Ravipati
DIRECTOR: Ravi Kapoor
Everything about Four Samosas from the color palette, to frames to even poster design is Wes Anderson-ish. The opening scene of the movie is four disguised people storming out of Juneja Department Store after accomplishing a heist in Andersonian slow-motion.
Vinny (Venk Potula (Veep)), a terribly depressed rapper is struggling with a lack of inspiration after a bad breakup with Rina, the daughter of the owner of Juneja Department Stores. When Vinny comes to know that Rina (Summer Bishil) is now getting married to Sanjay ( Karan Soni), an Indian born successful boy, he decides to disrupt the plans.
He gets together with a group of misfits to plan a heist to rob Juneja ( Tony Mirrchandani) of his ‘dirty diamonds”. He gives the team a social cause to get their buy-in to his plans. “Reappropriation”. Why should people like Juneja enjoy illegal money whereas people like his mother sew dresses in a garage their entire life. And so starts a story of how in the process, they form friendships and each other.
Any story about Indians in America is a story of fitting in, acceptance and community. Four Samosa does well to speak to that aspect of the Indian immigrant story.
Each of Vinny’s team has a set of characteristics but we don’t get the time to dwell deeper than surface into them as personalities. Anjali (Sharmita Bhattacharya) is someone who speaks before she thinks. her ideas are outlandish and mostly impossible to execute but she fills the screen as a self-published journalist and an “under overachiever.” Anjali joins Vinny’s group because she likes his best friend Zak (Nirvan Patnaik), an ardent Bollywood loving chaat restaurant staff who dreams of starring in the sort of Ram-Shyam type bollywood roles where twins separated at birth find each other when they grow up but now they are arch-enemies and two ends of the moral spectrum. And then there is Paru (Sonal Shah), a “malcontent engineer” who went to IIT, loves to eat snacks, but sucks at her designated safe-cracker role. She probably is a few of those ones in Artesia because the rest of the IIT mafia – as she says, is in Silicon Valley. Sonal has great comic timing.
In any heist movie, the most important aspect is getting into the skin of its protagonists. However, the film does not help us go deep enough. The on-going feud between ex-boyfriend Vinny and current beau Sanjay is hilarious. Karan Soni (also co-producer) does Sanjay good.
The film is embellished with some really nice one-liners and it is a breezy watch. The story is about “finding your voice again” as Vinny says or about “saris”. The story is the story of Artesia and its neighborhood. It is also about Preeti and Co trying to create another American state called Aisetra just for South Asians or just a group of young people hosting ladoo eating contests, or cuz Nikki who cannot rap beyond Pizza.
It can be about any and all of those. But that’s not the point. The point is that it is about the people in story and their lives. However outlandish and quirky they may be, they stick it out together.
