To take potshots at the South Asian immigrant experience and the barrage of casual, unrelenting racism, a film needs levity, precision, and a deft touch. Mohana Rajkumar’s A Diwali Dilemma squanders its chances with an insufferably farcical tone. Whatever biting humor the makers intended as resistance collapses under misjudged execution and conceits that spiral out of control. The result is a film too thin, too short on ideas, to carry itself toward a satisfying or well-earned conclusion.
Set in the US, the film opens at a Diwali party held at the office for Mala (Priya Pappu) and the sole other Indian employee, Manoj (Levin Valayil). She’s least interested while Manoj keeps up his endlessly enthused self. He’s glad to jive along even as the clear, entrenched racism cuts through wherever Mala and he turn around. The boss exclaims about a diversity hire being emphasized while she confidently passes off Diwali as the festival of kites. Colleagues ask Mala if she’ll teach them to dance exotically.
She is thoroughly befuddled but contains herself before protesting. She’s been through this racist grind too much. Battered incessantly, she cares little about genuflecting to the whims of white folks, going along with their ignorance. Even as she is chided for not wearing ethnic, the work pressure on her doesn’t abate. She’s batted with reminders of everything that needs to be wrapped. Another colleague states insouciantly about Diwali being an Asian thing, so the same festival can apply to her Chinese neighbour as well.
The film is too schmaltzy and tacky to register an emotional punch or drive sobering depth. The writing is too lazy to pad up the emotional truths. The profundity of realisation the protagonist gradually veers to is trapped within a clutch of banal scenes littered by painfully glib dialogues. So, a spent Mala passes out at her office bathroom and is suddenly accosted by visions of dead people whom she has loved and who have been dear to her. For the heroine to rouse herself out of settled stasis, the mundane realm interrupts, visitors from the afterlife dropping in to dispense essential, urgent advice.
Mala is so unhappy and dissatisfied at her job that she cannot fathom a way out, a break from the habitual monotony. In fact, these fleeting visions prop her up, steering her towards what she must confront. Her grandmother and professor back from when she pursued her writing aspiration, show up. Initially, she’s bewildered, but they are more like signs beckoning her to get up and take charge of her life and destiny. How can she let herself slip into disuse and disarray, swerving away from the promise she had held?
She has long drifted off what she earlier sought to clutch on to. There have been dreams curtailed and suspended, a life held on till impossibility or delayed notice. How can she recuperate them when everything looks so bleak and insurmountable? To envisage a way out of drudgery becomes as imperative as desperately out of reach. She has been sunk in resignation in her miserable, sedentary life. Extricating herself out of a punishing stalemate has grown increasingly mired in self-negation. Happiness is all but an illusion, constantly pushed out of view.
To reimagine it, she has to jolt herself anew. There’s so much she has to break within in order to reconstruct with vitality and bloom. It’s a tunnel vision that traps and stultifies and denudes one’s deep potential. She must recognise it first before she can scratch out a way. However, the writing isn’t sharp or slicing enough to warrant a considered immersion. Dashes of heightened reality coagulate with the fantastical to bring forth much-needed epiphanies that Mala must embrace as inevitable.
To spin one’s life in a different direction calls for courage to walk into the unknown, be open to risk and uncertainty. The newness will be as overwhelming as hopefully rewarding. One has to prepare for a whole lot of vulnerability and readiness to face the unexpected. A Diwali Dilemma is waylaid by its insipid dimensions to strike anywhere, affecting. It feels like a bog of cringe-inducing stabs at earning pathos and sobering growth.
Where’s the sincere upsurge of a life turning? The intent of the film comes off short-changed by the manufactured design, the artifice in the visions. Any transparency ultimately washes away, saddled under the weight of hyper-designed fragments. Even the realisation of the other Indian as an ally, not someone to jostle against, is woefully tied up. This is a bland, garishly limited short peek into the tribulations and transcendence within the immigrant experience.
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