Bhaji on the Beach Reviews

First-time feature director Gurinder Chadha has called Ken Loach her most important influence, and BHAJI ON THE BEACH, a charming comic drama about women of Punjabi heritage living in urban England, is comparable to the best of Loach's realist comedies. In a middle-class, mostly Indian neighborhood of Birmingham, housewife Ginder (Kim Vithana) has fled her abusive husband Ranjit (Jimmi Harkishin); she's persuaded by social worker Simi (Shaheen Khan) to join a group of Asian women on a day-trip to the nearby resort town of Blackpool. Along for the ride are Hashida (Sarita Khajuria), a pre-med student who has just discovered she's pregnant; Asha (Lalita Ahmed), a middle-aged newsagent; elderly gossips Pushpa (Zohra Segal) and Bina (Surendra Kochar); and a pair of giggly, assimilated teenagers, Ladhu (Nisha Nayar) and Madhu (Renu Kochar). Ranjit, however, discovers their destination and is soon in hot pursuit. With remarkable assurance, BHAJI ON THE BEACH sketches a large number of characters who are both universally recognizable and plausible as the product of a particular subculture. Chadha sees herself as primarily a British (as opposed to Indian or female) filmmaker, and BHAJI, like her 1989 short subject I'M BRITISH BUT..., is deeply concerned with expanding popular notions of what it means to be British. The film is punctuated with delightful parodies of the Bombay commercial pictures that serve as a cultural umbilicus to Indians across the globe. Asha's consultation with a fearsome statue of Rama quotes the classic costume picture BAIJU BAWRA (1952); scenes of a sluttish Hashida insulting her elders refer to PURAB AUR PASCHIM/EAST AND WEST (1970), a melodrama decrying the insidious influence of Western culture on Indian youth.