Sameer Sharma’s charming film Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana might be described as a love letter to life in rural Punjab (or a romanticised version of rural Punjab) but it begins in London with a montage of stereotypical images: the London Eye, Westminster Palace, a nightclub populated by gawking Asian men and white seductresses. Punjabi lads alternate between their own language, which they are clearly more comfortable with, and the facile slang they have learnt to speak (“It’s my dream, bro!”). Chinese men named Chang go “Beeyootiful” at the dancing girls. Then the cocky Omi Khurana (Kunal Kapoor) falls on the wrong side of a mean gangster, also of Punjabi origin, and is promptly packed back to India so he can collect the money to pay back a hefty loan.
All this happens in the first five minutes. Post-credits, the gloom of the nightclub – along with the edgy fusion music we were hearing all this while – gives way to the bright, sunny colours of the Punjab countryside, presented here as a vista of lovely fields, dotted with family-run dhabas. The visual change from the London sequence to the rural India one is startling, but what hasn’t yet changed is Omi’s watchful, knowing expression, his face permanently on the brink of a triumphant grin – it’s a pointer to the sort of life he has probably been leading all these years, surviving by his wits and smooth charm, sponging off the easily deceived.
This is clearly what he intends to do when he returns to the native village he had “escaped” 10 years earlier. Learning that his “daarji” (grandfather) is in hospital, he makes a perfunctory dismayed sound and the news-bearer is quick to assure him that the old man is alive and will be home soon; but we can tell that what really disturbs Omi is the realisation that this might make it more difficult for him to get the money he needs. He’s thinking of the “pound ka pedh” (tree of money) that is presumably growing here. But with no such pedh in sight, he finds himself staying on for longer than expected, and slowly becoming involved with the lives of the people he once knew, including Harman (Huma Qureshi), a resourceful doctor who is now engaged to his cousin Jeet. And he learns that his family is not so well off: the grandfather is now senile and the family dhaba had to be closed years ago.
This is of course a version of the prodigal-son story; in a way the whole film is a movement towards erasing Omi’s self-satisfied smile and teaching him about responsibility by reintegrating him into family and community life. And Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana sets out to do this with a determinedly feel-good tone and a highly idealised view of pastoral life. Once you accept this, it becomes difficult to nitpick too much about the film’s unwillingness to engage with the less savoury aspects of small-town existence. In Harman’s mindfulness about not letting Omi be seen too near her house when he drops her home late at night, one gets a sense of how the dictates of tradition might work even on an educated young woman leading a fairly “modern” and independent life. But showcasing such things is not the film's main purpose, and so they are glossed over.
What is constantly underlined is the merit in being rooted, being part of a benevolent family (and it is therefore a useful plot conceit that despite having survived reasonably well in London for a decade, Omi has absolutely no roots there – one gets no sense that he has left anything of value behind). Even a metrosexual young thug who travels to India to threaten Omi and remind him that time is running out then remarks that he will stay on for a while and head to his own village: “Bebe ki bahut yaad aa rahi hai.” (“I’m missing my mother.”) There are jovial nods to the uninhibited bonhomie of Punjabi families, as in a scene where a middle-aged woman blithely discusses men’s “kachcha” sizes and types, even as most of the household drones buzz around her. There are dialogues such as “Heat of the emotion mein keh diya” and sight gags like an agarbatti tray being waved in front of “Hunk” underwear packs in a shop; the flashbacks to past events in the village – including Omi’s youth – are in soft-focus, as if yearning for a more innocent time when the boy might yet have taken the “right” path.
Given this generally upbeat and nostalgic tone, there is never any danger of something really unpleasant happening to these people. The Khurana family has a dysfunctional side and squabbles a bit, but you know that everyone is good at heart and that all loose ends will ultimately be tied up – even if it means the ready acceptance of a widow with a young child as their bahu, in lieu of a much more socially desirable match. In one of the story’s sub-plots, we are initially led to expect that the dreamy-eyed, effeminate Jeet – reluctant to tie the knot – will turn out to be homosexual (something that might really have shaken this community up), but a very different revelation is made (in a wacky but also slightly cringe-inducing scene that toys with the notion that the gayest thing a red-blooded Punjabi man can do is to sing a Bangla love song). And the story ends on the rosy view that you can take a man out of Punjab and turn him into a gangster, but you can't take the colourful good-spiritedness of Punjab out of the man. All this adds up to an allegory about the all-conquering strength of family bonds and basic human decency. Even if you don't have complete faith in these things, you might well buy into the film's take on them.
****
Much of the pre-release publicity has centred on Luv Shuv being a “food film”; the dish mentioned in the title is the piece de resistance of daarji’s days as a leading dhaba-owner. As the narrative progresses, lovingly prepared home food becomes a metaphor for deepening relationships (as a corollary to this, consider an earlier line about the merits of communal flatulence: “Apnon ke saamne gas chhodne se pyaar badhta hai”) and the “lost” recipe of Chicken Khurana seems to stand for the loosening of ties in a world where youngsters are eager to get out and start anew somewhere else. During a brief montage, shot in the faux-documentary style of people speaking directly into the camera, Omi asks a number of people about their Chicken Khurana memories, and the variety of responses include one by a married couple whose “proposal” happened over the dish, and someone else who remarks that daarji used to put his own mitthaas (sweetness) into his cooking.
Omi and Harman (whose tentative relationship, very nicely played and paced, balances out some of the cutesiness and tomfoolery) bond over food too, as she helps him negotiate the basics of cooking, including cutting onions and tomatoes. This may beg the question: how did he survive those 10 years in London? By munching on canapés in nightclubs? But why be churlish and dwell on such comparatively irrelevant plot details?
All this happens in the first five minutes. Post-credits, the gloom of the nightclub – along with the edgy fusion music we were hearing all this while – gives way to the bright, sunny colours of the Punjab countryside, presented here as a vista of lovely fields, dotted with family-run dhabas. The visual change from the London sequence to the rural India one is startling, but what hasn’t yet changed is Omi’s watchful, knowing expression, his face permanently on the brink of a triumphant grin – it’s a pointer to the sort of life he has probably been leading all these years, surviving by his wits and smooth charm, sponging off the easily deceived.This is clearly what he intends to do when he returns to the native village he had “escaped” 10 years earlier. Learning that his “daarji” (grandfather) is in hospital, he makes a perfunctory dismayed sound and the news-bearer is quick to assure him that the old man is alive and will be home soon; but we can tell that what really disturbs Omi is the realisation that this might make it more difficult for him to get the money he needs. He’s thinking of the “pound ka pedh” (tree of money) that is presumably growing here. But with no such pedh in sight, he finds himself staying on for longer than expected, and slowly becoming involved with the lives of the people he once knew, including Harman (Huma Qureshi), a resourceful doctor who is now engaged to his cousin Jeet. And he learns that his family is not so well off: the grandfather is now senile and the family dhaba had to be closed years ago.
This is of course a version of the prodigal-son story; in a way the whole film is a movement towards erasing Omi’s self-satisfied smile and teaching him about responsibility by reintegrating him into family and community life. And Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana sets out to do this with a determinedly feel-good tone and a highly idealised view of pastoral life. Once you accept this, it becomes difficult to nitpick too much about the film’s unwillingness to engage with the less savoury aspects of small-town existence. In Harman’s mindfulness about not letting Omi be seen too near her house when he drops her home late at night, one gets a sense of how the dictates of tradition might work even on an educated young woman leading a fairly “modern” and independent life. But showcasing such things is not the film's main purpose, and so they are glossed over.What is constantly underlined is the merit in being rooted, being part of a benevolent family (and it is therefore a useful plot conceit that despite having survived reasonably well in London for a decade, Omi has absolutely no roots there – one gets no sense that he has left anything of value behind). Even a metrosexual young thug who travels to India to threaten Omi and remind him that time is running out then remarks that he will stay on for a while and head to his own village: “Bebe ki bahut yaad aa rahi hai.” (“I’m missing my mother.”) There are jovial nods to the uninhibited bonhomie of Punjabi families, as in a scene where a middle-aged woman blithely discusses men’s “kachcha” sizes and types, even as most of the household drones buzz around her. There are dialogues such as “Heat of the emotion mein keh diya” and sight gags like an agarbatti tray being waved in front of “Hunk” underwear packs in a shop; the flashbacks to past events in the village – including Omi’s youth – are in soft-focus, as if yearning for a more innocent time when the boy might yet have taken the “right” path.
Given this generally upbeat and nostalgic tone, there is never any danger of something really unpleasant happening to these people. The Khurana family has a dysfunctional side and squabbles a bit, but you know that everyone is good at heart and that all loose ends will ultimately be tied up – even if it means the ready acceptance of a widow with a young child as their bahu, in lieu of a much more socially desirable match. In one of the story’s sub-plots, we are initially led to expect that the dreamy-eyed, effeminate Jeet – reluctant to tie the knot – will turn out to be homosexual (something that might really have shaken this community up), but a very different revelation is made (in a wacky but also slightly cringe-inducing scene that toys with the notion that the gayest thing a red-blooded Punjabi man can do is to sing a Bangla love song). And the story ends on the rosy view that you can take a man out of Punjab and turn him into a gangster, but you can't take the colourful good-spiritedness of Punjab out of the man. All this adds up to an allegory about the all-conquering strength of family bonds and basic human decency. Even if you don't have complete faith in these things, you might well buy into the film's take on them. ****
Much of the pre-release publicity has centred on Luv Shuv being a “food film”; the dish mentioned in the title is the piece de resistance of daarji’s days as a leading dhaba-owner. As the narrative progresses, lovingly prepared home food becomes a metaphor for deepening relationships (as a corollary to this, consider an earlier line about the merits of communal flatulence: “Apnon ke saamne gas chhodne se pyaar badhta hai”) and the “lost” recipe of Chicken Khurana seems to stand for the loosening of ties in a world where youngsters are eager to get out and start anew somewhere else. During a brief montage, shot in the faux-documentary style of people speaking directly into the camera, Omi asks a number of people about their Chicken Khurana memories, and the variety of responses include one by a married couple whose “proposal” happened over the dish, and someone else who remarks that daarji used to put his own mitthaas (sweetness) into his cooking.
Omi and Harman (whose tentative relationship, very nicely played and paced, balances out some of the cutesiness and tomfoolery) bond over food too, as she helps him negotiate the basics of cooking, including cutting onions and tomatoes. This may beg the question: how did he survive those 10 years in London? By munching on canapés in nightclubs? But why be churlish and dwell on such comparatively irrelevant plot details? 
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