Made In China is an utterly confused film. It is unsure about what it wants to focus on and achieve. It kicks off with enlightening the audience about the meaning of ‘aphrodisiac’. Soon after that follows the murder of some Chinese General Zhang who has been attending an Indo-China cultural summit in Ahmedabad. We then suddenly shift gear to the world of a failed Gujarati entrepreneur Raghu (Rajkummar Rao). Be it emu eggs, roti makers or Nepali carpets, he just can’t sell a thing but is suddenly sent off to China with his cousin for doing some random business deal and returns to start his own aphrodisiac business with some help from a sexologist Dr Vardhi (Boman Irani).
- Director: Mikhil Musale
- Starring: Rajkummar Rao, Boman Irani, Mouni Roy, Paresh Rawal, Gajraj Rao, Sumeet Vyas, Manoj Joshi
- Run time: 129.57 minutes
- Storyline: A Gujarati entrepreneur, with a bad run of luck, finally finds success selling aphrodisiac
The writing is painfully bad. The many strands are picked up and left midway, unsorted and unexplained; in fact there is glaring disconnect between the many strands. Random jumps in the narratives and characters that come and go at will. So there is one helpful business guru in China (Paresh Rawal) and a villainous one in India (Gajraj Rao) and one keeps wondering what they are doing in the larger scheme of things, other than confounding the already existing confusion. The humour is unfunny — the vital male organ being referred to as a child, for God’s sake — and the emotions never reach out. All in all, it is one big mess that even proficient performers like Rao, Irani and co can't make much sense of.
In the midst of all of this there is also a painfully self-conscious attempt at being radical. A wife smoking away while washing clothes and drinking on the sly in a prohibition state but later taking offence at her husband selling aphrodisiac. Is this what subversion is all about?
Coming quick on the heels of Khandaani Shafakhaana, Made In China, ultimately is yet another attempt to stress on the fact that sex is not “ashleel” (vulgar) and that sex education is the need of the day. Now how could that have been made in China?
