3 Idiots

3 Idiots (2009)

tags: college comedy

Release date:Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Cast

Aaamir Khan Madhav Boman Irani Kareena Kapoor

Like Dead Poets' Society, 3 Idiots deals with a repressive educational system, only this one's more immediately practically-oriented: *these* students endure the heckling, the arcane traditions, and the vicious professors in order to graduate and directly get jobs as engineers. The money and the prestige is what they *seek* -- or what their parents seek for them -- not what they already have in order to attend.

The film takes place both in the present-ish, and 10 years from now. Our story opens as a bet is called in: the characters reunite 10 years after graduation. The guy who made the bet in the first place, and initiates the call, is Chatur, a fatuous, self-important asshole (played with slimy fabulousness by Omi Vaidya). He's that guy you love to hate, the school's number-one brownnoser who's mean to his classmates and will do anything to get ahead.

The good guys are the round-faced Farhan (R. Madhavan) and the slightly desperate-looking Raju (Sharman Joshi) -- but our real hero, Rancho (short for Ranchhoddas Shamaldas Chanchad and played of course by Aamir Khan) is nowhere to be found. His best friends haven't seen him in years, in fact -- but Chatur says he knows where Rancho is! is So the road trip begins, while we watch, in flashback, how their story began.

The subject matter is heavy -- the price of repressive education -- but, like Hirani's Munnabhai films, the treatment of that subject is light. Light not because the director *makes* light of serious events (quite the contrary), but because our heroes are funny people. For example, when describing Raju's family, our narrator Farhan says that they're like a 1950s black and white Hindi film: destitute family, mother who loves to complain, chubby unmarried daughter, and father who became paralyzed and had to stop working. As he's describing this, the director switches to black and white for the rest of the scene (and for every scene thereafter in the house). It's funny -- but it's not over-the-top slapstick funny, either; after all, it's a terrible situation! There's gallows humor mixed in, and we all know it's supposed to be there. Hirani stays on the right side of the line.

Similarly, the villain is just ridiculous enough to be funny in that boarding-school "let's all mock the schoolmaster" way, but he still retains enough status to be terrifying. Played by Boman Irani,* who also played the unhinged mobster villain Lucky Singh in Lage Raho Munna Bhai, professor "Virus" has poofy hair and a bushy moustache, a huge gut over which he pulls his white pants, a pronounced lisp, and a permanent snarl. His obsession with competition and efficiency starts out as a hilarious quirk, but quickly proves to have terrible, serious consequences for his students.

There *are* moments of over-the-top filminess, but they're on purpose when the characters are feeling silly, like the big "Bollywood" number here. (This movie is so new there's not much on YouTube -- gasp! -- but here's a preview.) Featuring Our Hero and his love interest Pia (Kareena Kapoor), who turns out to be Virus's daughter -- doh!