(Mishqah
Parthiephal & Madhushan Singh)
The focus on Chatsworth and its Indian
community is praiseworthy. (Review by Patrick Compton - 4/10)
Hard as it sometimes is, it’s vitally
important not to view local cinema through rose-tinted spectacles.
We do our industry and cinema patrons no
favours if we are dishonest about the quality of our local product. Our film
producers, script writers, directors, technicians and actors deserve no special
favours or indulgence.
Sadly, the eagerly awaited comedy, Keeping Up With The Kandasamys, is a
lost opportunity and it’s particularly sad that this is the last movie produced
by the admired Junaid Ahmed who died in November last year aged 57. He deserved
a better legacy and filmgoers should rather remember his big hit, Happiness is a Four Letter Word.
There’s nothing wrong with this movie’s bid
for commercial clout, with the title’s reference to the Kardashians, however
crass that TV series is. With Afrikaans cinema doing so well, it’s
understandable that producers and sponsors want local black cinema to do better
at the box-office.
The movie focuses on two warring Indian
families in Chatsworth, or rather two matriarchs in adjoining houses whose
mutual enmity brings them together in a plot to ensure that the budding love
affair between the son in one family, and the daughter in another, is
destroyed.
The movie’s Romeo and Juliet-type material
is potentially serviceable, and of course the focus on Chatsworth and its
Indian community is praiseworthy. The problem lies not in the concept but in
the film’s wooden execution, and by that I mean Jayan Moodley and Rory Booth’s
stilted script and Moodley’s stiff direction.
The opening is promising, with panoramic
shots of the Durban coastline accompanied by a narrator’s voice telling us
that, contrary to what we might think, these images do not convey the essence
of Durban. For that, we are told, we need to travel inland to an Indian
township cheekily named in pre-democracy times after an ancient English family.
There are references to people crammed together in closely adjoining houses and
the fact that you can smell your next-door-neighbour’s cooking. Nevertheless,
we are promised, the community has made the best of a bad job and is vibrant
and functional.
So far so good, but it is when we settle
into the parallel lives of the two families that the film-makers fail to make
good on their promise. The two women who head up the families, Jennifer
Kandasamy (Jailoshini Naidoo) and Shanti Naidoo (Maeshni Naicker), completely
overshadow their shadowy husbands who have to make their personal friendship a
secret, playing golf (at Kloof Country Club) and giving themselves code names
for cellphone conversations.
It’s the women who wear the trousers and
neither of them is personable. Jennifer is the worst kind of upwardly mobile
snob and Shanti is a guzzling hairdresser who longs for her rival’s status.
The two women would, no doubt, have happily
continued to sneer at each other from across the fence but for one thing –
their children are in love. The beautiful Jodi Kandasamy (Mishqah Parthiephal)
and Prishen Naidoo (Madhushan Singh) are both students at the University of
KwaZulu-Natal. The thought of the Kandasamys and the Naidoos becoming “family”
if the two were to marry is clearly too much for the matriarchs.
So we have the irony of the two rivals
uniting in a common cause, a volatile arrangement that has its ups and downs as
the two families are wrenched this way and that.
As already mentioned, it is not the plot
that jars – we are, after all, familiar with a thousand versions of this
storyline on TV and in the movies – but the fact that the action is so stilted
and the dialogue so halting. The publicists’ promise of “hilarious,
rib-tickling” fun is simply not borne out as the film limps along.
The movie’s lack of flow and dynamism is
only underlined by its colourful ending when a touch of Bollywood at last
removes the dramatic shackles for a brief moment. If only there had been more
of this.
The two stars, Parthiephal and Naicker, do
their best with the material, but if you’re looking for impact, Mariam Bassa
delights as the comically grumbling granny in the Kandasamy household in a
cameo that’s straight out of The Golden
Girls.
Keeping
Up With The Kandasamys opened on March 3 at
Gateway, Musgrave Centre, Suncoast, The Pavilion and Galleria. - Patrick
Compton
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