Just when you thought, the past was dead, it comes alive in the opening scene of Delhi Belly. A plane lands and we see a man striding to the tune of an RD Burman track from Hum Kissi Se Kam Nahin. We remember the way we were once. But then the man walking to the groovy beat turns out to be not the hero who once made a grand entry in films. He is a secondary character and the RD song is just an aside playing on the airport television. But wait, there is a subtext here. The man is carrying diamonds and as we will figure out, the whole film is a chase against time to find lost diamonds. Just as Hum Kissi Se Kam Nahin was. Smart, eh? Very. 

 There are many such moments in the film like when the three protagonists are dealing with a conniving diamond dealer in his office, the song playing in the background is, “Duniya mein logon ko dhokha kabhi ho jata hai.” What fun! You are also reminded of the three friends in Sai Paranjpay’s Chashme Badoor when the film first shows us how Imran Khan, Vir Das, Kunaal Roy Kapoor live in a room together. Only there is no Mehndi Hassan playing in the background. No one is a Ghalib fan here. There are no pictures of Vivekananda and Gandhi. The three live in an unspeakably dirty room, with a butt crack showing along with some cracks on the ceiling. They live here maybe because they are too lazy to move just as they are too lazy to fill the bathroom bucket during the two hour water supply in the morning.

 A cockroach makes a meal of the remains of a half-eaten pizza and even though a tongue-in-cheek voice mimics  KL Saigal in the background, you know the past is just a reference here, not the mainstay. For those who watched Rakesh Bedi speak in refined Urdu in Chashme Baddoor, more internal tremors are in store as Imran Khan’s Taashi gets up to open the door amid a rain of expletives you would hear either from Delhi police  or during a road rage induced  fight between two truckers on a high way. But the burst of laughter in the hall when the first expletive is spoken, proves that another Aamir Khan production is on its way to becoming a cult hit. If mainstreaming questionable fringe impulses is what it takes, than director Abhinay Deo has got it.  

The argument the Delhi Belly team has put forth during the publicity of the film is that this is how the young speak. Well, but where?  In schools, colleges, offices, canteens, their homes? In certain episodes of Emosanal Attyachar? The three boys in question are media professionals but they talk as if they have been bred on cuss words pertaining to mothers, sisters, private parts and sexual acts. Would the film have been as entertaining and smart as it is now, even without the language that almost everyone in the film speaks right from the urban young to the gangsters? Yes, but maybe it would have challenged the dialogue writer to actually write some dialogue but then as Anurag Kashyap says in a national newspaper today, the era of dialogues is over. 

So RIP Salim Javed and lets get on with the new glorious chapter in the evolution of Hindi films, shall we? But before we get on with it, lets get past the stomach rumbles of our boy Nitin (Kunal Roy Kapoor) who spends a large part of the film defecating in different loos, some revoltingly dirty and even without water. There are fart sounds and explosions that don’t let you reach out for your popcorn during the film. The sample of his stools (we will refrain from using the Hindi word that is used liberally in the film) is  a character in the film almost and actually makes an appearance when a gangster (Vijay Raaz, his absolutely brilliant self as always) expecting a consignment of diamonds, empties a bottle. Yes, very funny. Everyone in the hall thought so. They did something similar in Kamal Hassan’s Pushpak but they did not show you any excreta. But then ofcourse shit happens and our filmmakers  have every right to show us just how. I spent a few long minutes looking away from Roy Kapoor’s adventures in the toilet but am just being a spoil-sport.

But now for the parts that really are funny without the indigestion and the casually spoken gaalis. The Jaane Bhi Do Yaron reference when the three boys, on the run from the gangsters wear a burqa and take to the crowded gullies of old Delhi. Or when the roof falls because someone is dancing on it and someone is hanging from a fan below it. The film has real humour and moments where you laugh your misgivings out. Like a bullet that leaves a ring of smoke around a gun on a poster. A cow making eye contact with a harried driver. And many more that the Double Dhamaal franchise would never think of.

The actors hit the right keys and  Poorna Jagannathan is a real find not just because she looks really intelligent and sassy but because her character lets her show us her smarts.

 The songs are famous now (take a bow Ram Sampath) for not just their tunes but their insinuations.  And if I can’t shake off the sunlit innocence of Miss Chamko and her romance with an Economics topper in Chashme Baddoor, it is my fault. I just happen to be from a generation, filmmakers do not make films for, anymore.

Reema Moudgil is the author of  Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/b/books/perfect-eight-reema-moudgil-book-9380032870?affid=unboxedwri )