My review was written in March 1993 after watching the movie at a Times Square screening room.
A severe case of first filmitis afflicts "Masala", a free-wheeling satire set in Toronto's subculture of residents hailing from India. Distributor's best shot is to find a cult following.
With targets ranging as wide as stamp collecting, real estate fanatics on TV, Canadian stereotypes and assimilation-prone Indians, debuting filmmaker Srinivas Krishna scores points for originality. Unfortunately his weakness with actors and overly aggressive visual gimmicks make "Masala" tedious in the extreme.
Krishna himself plays the thoroughly dislikable rebel named Krishna who feels guilty for being a no-show when his parents and brother were killed in a plane crash. He moves in with rich Toronto relatives, the Solankis, who run a clothing boutique.
Beautiful Bibi Solanki (Madhuri Bhatia) dreams of having husband Lallu (Saeed Jaffrey) corner the world market on saris. To this end she urges him to use the shop as a front for Sikh terrorists who promise him $500,000.
Krishna is attracted to BIbi but falls in love with RIta (Sakina Jaffrey), a highly assimilated daughter of distant relative Tikkoo (also played by Saeed Jaffrey as a nerd). TIkkoo is a stamp collecting postman who inadvertently receives a stamp worth $5,000,000, one the Canadian government is desperate to recover.
Numerous subplots include Krishna's obsession with retrieving the $800 owed him by drug addict former girlfriend Lisa (Jennifer Armstrong), Tikkoo's mom (Zohra Segal), who communicates with the god Krishna (third role with heavy makeup for Saeed Jaffrey) via magically interactive video cassette; Solanki's son Anil (Herjit Singh Johal) fated to an arranged marriage, and the Mounties plus SWAT team converging to bust the Sikhs.
Punctuating this messy stew (or masala) are a couple of misguided musical numbers meant to adapt the traditional Bombay musical to music video but merely stalling the action.
Krishna's mish-mash includes explicit sex (a full-frontal shot of himself that stamps this a vanity production plus highly erotic footage of Anil's betrothed Tova Gallimor)e that takes pic into the underground NC-17 range. He encourages his cast to overact and pull faces in closeup, resulting in hammy fun from Saeed Jaffrey bjut to many bug-eyed shots of Segal and Singh Johal.
Jaffrey's real-life daughter Sakina Jaffrey is appealing as the heroine, coming off as the most naturalistic thesp in context.
Colorful photography by Paul Sarossy is as self-conscious and distracting as the heavy-handed director evidently wanted it to be.