ONE DOLLAR CURRY
Director’s Creative Intention
One Dollar Curry is a film about an Indian immigrant who comes to Paris. Far from treating a morose and hopeless reality, the film is light-hearted and funny, where the lead character readily uses imagination, humour and his sense of optimism to overcome “destiny”.
But what makes me give One Dollar Curry, a film on an immigrant’s life, an overriding "comic" form, where sense and meaning are seen lurking behind gentle laughter? There's a reason for this. It is true that the world of immigration is bleak, reeking of deprivation and discrimination. However, it is equally true that humour, perhaps as "black" as racism itself, is part and parcel of immigrant lives. The sound of laughter and black humour in these unfortunate quarters might sound out of place, but it is incontestably real. Perhaps, in the worst moments of pain, deprivation and isolation, an immigrant conserves in himself a grain of humour, which is his sole self-defence weapon in a strange land? I might also add another fact little known in this part of the world : as a community, Sikhs (Nishan is Sikh) are co-terminous with toil and humour. "A Sikh without laughter is not a Sikh," they say in Punjab. That's how One Dollar Curry was conceived of as an "immigration" comedy...
In his battle for survival, Nishan is helped by Nathalie, a young French researcher who first shows some signs of affection towards him, then becomes his foremost accomplice. The relationship between them is meant to be more than just a passing fancy between a man and a woman. Metaphorically, their "romance" conotes cultural assimilation between a third generation cross-cultural immigrant become French and an Indian of our times. "Nothing bridges frontiers better than love can," reveries Nishan on their first night of love. In this sense, Nathalie doesn't only represent love, she incarnates the very goodness of the host culture. Their relationship is a bridge over cultural frontiers and an ode to the human capacity to build something beautiful beyond the confines of our own cultures
Nathalie's willingness to help Nishan subvert the system and to concoct lies on his behalf shows the strength of a love which is willing to contest one's own culture and country in the interest of another world, which is perhaps better than the one we have built. In this sense, One Dollar Curry uses the comic-form to create a terrain, where love and humour can work together to give birth to a new form of “integration”.
Visually speaking, in terms of the distant vision of the style that I might have in mind, I intend adopting a progressive, slightly "mixed" shooting method, which does not preclude nervous, feverish, handheld camera movements for the comic scenes in the film. But, again, what is obviously crucial is that the style or the mixture of styles must first and foremost capture the overall essence and rhythm of the film.
Music will undoubtedly play a central role in the film. A bit like in the case of my earlier film (Jaya Ganga), I have a broad notion of the melody and the rhythm that I would like to share with the composer. This music, which of late has been named Indo-European rap and which has earned a worldwide popularity (à la Khaled), is full of beat and bounce and la joie de vivre. To start with, we will have the film’s “theme-song” composed, before recording several instrumentalised versions of the same music, each piece endowed with a specificity of its own. Music will thus reinforce the essence of the film, apart from the fact that certain scenes in the film are even shot against this music.
Since location play an important role in determining the visual meaning of a film, I have set the film in a rich variety of places - riverside Paris, the immigrant quarters (le Sentier), the slightly posh buildings, a chateau for the TV shoot on a great "colonial" chef, a river for the cremation ceremony and for the final shots of the boat-restaurant, and, finally, a glimpse of the Indian locales in the UK....
I feel films are about creating a real emotion in the audience. No matter what style you adopt, a film must ultimately bring home the truth of this emotion, which, in the case of One Dollar Curry, takes the form of a meaningful laughter.
Vijay Singh