DARK HORSES

Dilli Dark is the first Delhi caper with an African hero. A sleeper hit on the festival circuit, it opens in the city's theatres this weekend. Check it out for the laughs, its artful 'dark outsider' stereotypes, and what Delhi's first female queen Razia Sultan has to do with it.

- PARAMITA GHOSH

MICHAEL Okeke, the protagonist of the film Dilli Dark, is young, dark-skinned and African. He smarts as Delhi looks at him as an outsider, and then realises that the outsiders are already here—as neighbours, in history books, and in the subconscious of every "Delhiite" who got here before he did. It is not personal, it is a reflex. As his friend Debu says: "It's not ok, just the way it is." Debu (played by actor-writer Shantanu Anam, a Delhi boy), for instance, as a Bengali, will always be suspect in the eyes of his north Indian landlord for his non-vegetarianism. Mansi (Geetika Ohlyan, who played the cop with tantrums in Soni) the godwoman's life will always be precarious in the city until she attracts big-league devotees and gets a spot on the slick chat shows. As for Yakut, the Abyssinian lover of Razia Sultan, whom Debu suggests Okeke adopt as role model, he was top gun only for a while when he had the heart of Delhi's queen and roamed around with her on a big white horse.

Dilli Dark is Dibakar Das Roy's first feature. He has directed films in various formats. And he may well turn out to be a worthy inheritor of Dibakar Banerjee's mantle of being the director par excellence of 'Delhi films' —Khosla ka Ghosla, Oye Lucky Oye, LSD, and so on. He has the potential. His sense of comedy is spot on; he now only needs to make his storytelling and character-building more layered. Dilli Dark created quite a buzz on the festival circuit last year, and is set to have its release in Delhi theatres this weekend.