Comic Guru fails to enlighten

10 April 2012

The surprise is to find this shabby, shoddy, grubby little offering coming from the British company Working Title.

The people who brought us such smartish Anglo-Saxon-Mid-Atlantic comedies as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones's Diary and About a Boy show another side when they go lip-smacking in pursuit of the gross-out audience that the Farrelly brothers have already plumbed to the depths of high-school prurience: would-be raunchy, heavy with innuendoes, sleazy set-ups and characters who are simply the sum of their private parts.

Producers Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan should desist from lowering themselves to Adam Sandler's level, however much paydirt he's picked up: they have no talent for it, and it'll exhaust their prestige, as has already been indicated by 40 Days and 40 Nights - their offensive "water cooler" comedy about randy office workers setting out by hook, crook and Viagra to seduce a colleague from his Easter vow of chastity.

The Guru is just as tasteless about Hindi holy things. Like Steve Coogan and Ali G, the Working Title hero of The Guru is a British telly comic, Jimi Mistry, playing a naive New Delhi dance teacher in New York who thinks porn movies offer a short-cut alternative to his 12-step plan for Hollywood stardom. Flunking the test of "Get hard or get going" when got up as a grass-skirted Tarzan directed to rape his suspenderbelted Jane, he stays on long enough to make a profitable connection between the state of erection and the state of enlightenment and, coached by Heather Graham's porn star ("My pussy is the door to my soul"), he's soon in demand as a drawing-room guru among Manhattan's rich and tacky.


He introduces them to nudism, genital massage and other techniques for relaxing their bank accounts. It is feeble in the extreme: it even looks crude, which is something of an unenviable first for the eminent cinematographer John de Borman. Mistry, present in nearly every scene, can just about carry a plate of chicken tikka masala, and that's the extent of it.

Most of the supporting cast, American and Indian (or "native American" as the inevitable gagline has it) have the look of outofcondition small-part players who've been passed around a lot by their agents. Even Marisa Tomei, playing an airhead socialite who's forever throwing transcendental hissy fits, is brought down to the level of this tawdry company.

The director is Daisy Von Scherler Mayer, who once did a passable version of Madeline, Ludwig Bemelman's children's classic. Her take on the "adult entertainment" trade (aka porn) is not convincing: let's leave it at that. I confess to laughing once: at a film clip of Grease showing what a great Bollywood star John Travolta makes when dubbed into wailing Hindi.

Guru
Cert: 12A

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