Beyond the blindingly white Sikh temples and sleek highrises of Vancouver, voracious gangsters sporting hip clothes, spiffy shoes and menacing revolvers strut their stuff in broad daylight and in the darkness of night.
In Deepa Mehta’s bouncy and buoyant new feature film, Beeba Boys, which opens in Canada on October 16, this violent nether world of battling Sikh gangs springs to life against the backdrop of pulsating Punjabi music.
The bad guys here are Indo Canadian criminals who serve their bosses even at the cost of their own lives. Mehta focuses on six young men who do the bidding of their leader, Jeet (Randeep Hooda), a charismatic figure who still lives at home with his son and traditional Sikh parents.
A drug lord eager to expand into the arms trade, Jeet is ambitious, his aim being to unseat his older, more established Sikh competitor, Grewal (Gulshan Grover). It’s a turf war that will prove fatal to some, but Jeet relishes the challenge, knowing full well that success will bring him power, respect and loyalty.
Mehta made this boisterous film after reading about the sporadic gang warfare that has rocked Vancouver for the past decade and claimed the lives of 137 people.
As the movie opens, Jeet, the central character, sits in the back seat of a late-model black sedan cruising around town. Four of his foot soldiers/companions, including the driver, accompany him. They’re chatting and cussing. Manny (Waris Ahluwalia), Jeet’s resident humorist, is telling yet another sly joke.
Jeet is arrested and imprisoned, but his lawyer gets him off the hook. He meets Katya (Sarah Allen), a beautiful blonde manicurist, and both are immediately smitten.
Their chemistry is exemplified in a brief exchange:
“You still live with your mom?” she asks.
“Of course,” he replies.
“That’s so sweet.”
The film unfolds in digestible snippets.
On Jeet’s orders, Choti (Gia Sandhu), Grewal’s winsome daughter, is kidnapped. Upon being released, she starts a secret affair with Nep (Ali Momen), one of Jeet’s boys.
When Katya introduces Jeet to her Polish parents, she plies them with gifts, and he tries hard to ingratiate himself by saying a few token words in Polish. But they look down on him, considering him a “raghead,” a culturally alien brown-skinned East Indian who will never be good enough for their daughter.
Jeet’s attempt to eliminate the competition proves problematic, as a series of gory murders indicate. Grewal is determined to keep Jeet and his goons at bay.
Beeba Boys moves along at a fairly fast clip, barely pausing for breath. Mehta’s script is full of vim and vigor, and she adds flavor to the mix by injecting Punjabi into the dialogue. The cast doesn’t let her down. Hooda, who appears in almost every scene, smoulders with intensity. The actors who play his motley crew are by turns scary and charming.
Mehta, in her movie, examines the joys and sorrows of an ethnic community still adopting to Canada.