Yes! Bollywood made suicide bomber's comedy with singing and dancing

Yes, Bollywood has made a comedy about suicide bombers, and yes, it really does feature a man singing and dancing while fitting a vest with explosives. Praise be, then, that critic-turned-director Karan Anshuman approaches his task with smarts and sensitivity.

Anshuman knows he’s handling incendiary material; equally, he grasps that fundamentalist freedom fighters appear to be fighting fundamental freedoms, not least our right to sing, dance and laugh. His response updates Chris Morris’s Four Lions via the methods of last year’s Aamir Khan megahit PK: working beneath a chador of broad comedy, he sneaks out sly, satirical points about the ill-informed rage with which the world now burns.

The eponymous backwater divides up along recognisable real-world lines – rocky North Bangistan is a Muslim stronghold, the more prosperous south home to Hindus – while permitting no comparable separation of church and state: each faction is tied to political parties for whom stirring up religious tensions (and fears their land will be overrun) has become expedient. Anshuman’s overriding gag is that these sides are so alike they should arrive at the same idea: to dispatch a young supporter wearing the other side’s traditional garb to the World Religious Conference in Krakow, in order to carry out an attack that will discredit the enemy.

Though Muslim Hafeez (Riteish Deshmukh) and Hindu Praveen (Pulkit Samrat) are established as stooges, Anshuman demonstrates an understanding of the ways in which the young come to be radicalised. For Hafeez, the mission is an escape from the drudgery of a call centre chiselled into North Bangistan’s mountains (one of several production coups here); for preening, privileged drama student Praveen, it’s an opportunity to give the eye-catching performance he’s long dreamed of – and here, we might see how fundamentalism can warp the revolutionary urge in frustrated creatives, driving them away from acts of creation and towards destruction.