The President Is Coming
Synopsis:
Halfway through the film, Satchit Puranik is aggressively defending his deeply problematic corporate tax strategies while wearing a lime green tie that honestly looks like it was bought on clearance at a train station, and everyone in the room is shouting over each other about George Bush and Indian identity and who deserves to meet the most powerful man in the free world. But to understand why a bunch of painfully awkward young professionals are sweating through their clothes in a drab Delhi conference room, you have to look at how this whole ridiculous mess started in the first place, which is that the American President is coming to India, and the US Embassy has decided to host a contest to find one young achiever to shake his hand, which sounds like standard corporate PR fluff until you realize it brings out the absolute worst in everybody. So then we meet the hopefuls, and let me tell you, the casting is spot on because Konkona Sen Sharma walks in looking like she's already rehearsed her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in front of her bathroom mirror every single day for the past six years, and she's got this super intense vibe that immediately makes you want to crawl under a chair. She's competing against all these other eccentric hopefuls who think they're the next big thing in the modern landscape of ambitious young Indians, and the movie wastes no time showing us how desperate they all are for this tiny crumb of validation from Western diplomacy. There is this one scene where a strict, no-nonsense bureaucrat played by Shernaz Patel stands by a whiteboard and explains the rules of the elimination rounds, and she is wearing this incredibly stiff maroon blazer with shoulder pads so sharp they could genuinely pop a balloon, and she just stares down her glasses at these grown adults whining about unfair point deductions like they're unruly toddlers in a kindergarten classroom. I honestly couldn't stop looking at the weird lapel pin she had pinned right over her heart, which looked like a tiny brass owl with missing rhinestones, and I spent a solid five minutes wondering if the prop department bought that at a flea market or if it was handed down from an actual government official. Anyway, they all have to survive a brutal series of rounds that test their general knowledge, their quick wit, and their ability to smile through blinding humiliation without crying. Vivek Gomber shows up as this smooth-talking corporate climber who thinks his Western-friendly vocabulary is going to carry him straight to the front of the line, but he keeps tripping over his own ego and saying the quiet part out loud.
Right after that, the competition narrows down and the questions get way weirder, forcing them to debate pop culture and politics while Ira Dubey brings this chaotic, unfiltered energy to the room that completely derails everyone else's carefully practiced talking points. She's talking about fashion and globalization and feminism with zero filter, and it drives Konkona completely nuts because you can see her twitching every time someone interrupts her monologue. They're all trying to prove they aren't typical products of a cheesy romance flick or singing backup in traditional bollywood songs, but rather serious, globally-minded citizens of the new millennium. They want to show that hindi movies have nothing on their actual real-life ambitions, even though they're basically performing like trained circus seals for a man who probably won't even remember their names. The funny thing is, the actual arrival of the President barely matters because the movie is really just an excuse to lock a bunch of pretentious overachievers in a room together and watch them tear each other to shreds over a photo op. People start forming pathetic alliances and then immediately betraying each other over minor infractions, and the whole thing turns into a chaotic shouting match about privilege and class and who actually earned their spot on the shortlist. Satchit tries to use his supposed grassroots appeal to sway the judges, but he just comes off as totally fake, while Vivek uses every dirty trick in the book to outmaneuver the competition. They're all sweating through their designer suits, and the air conditioning in the room clearly broke three hours ago, adding a lovely layer of physical misery to the emotional breakdown happening on screen. The President Is Coming isn't trying to be one of those sweeping dramas that changes how people view cinema, and honestly, it's way more fun as a quirky indie-style comedy that just pokes fun at the absurd lengths people will go to for a little bit of clout. The energy never really drops, even when the conversations go in circles and everyone is just yelling buzzwords at the top of their lungs. They argue about freedom, democracy, capitalism, and whether a proper handshake requires three pumps or two. It's totally ridiculous. Nobody learns a valuable lesson by the end of the day, and nobody undergoes any profound personal growth that makes them a better human being.
Konkona straight up glares at the camera while Vivek fixes his hair in the reflection of a glass water pitcher one last time before the final announcement is made.
There is a specific kind of sweat that comes from wearing bad polyester in an air-conditioned room that is either broken or cranked too low, and it coats the first twenty minutes of The President Is Coming with a greasy, entirely authentic office-party sheen. If I'm honest, the film starts so aggressively low-key that I spent the first ten minutes trying to figure out if I was watching a lost pilot for an Indian adaptation of The Office or a stage play shot on three digital cameras from 2008. It doesn't look expensive, and it doesn't care that it doesn't look expensive. The production design is basically a conference room table, a water cooler that hums too loudly in the quiet stretches, and posters from motivational seminars that were probably salvaged from a dumpster behind an outsourcing firm in Gurgaon.
Kunal Roy Kapoor directs this thing with the frantic, restless energy of a theater kid who just discovered the zoom lens on a rented camera and decided to use it every single time someone blinks. The screenplay, adapted by Anuvab Pal from his own play, has that dense, overlapping dialogue where nobody finishes their sentence because the person next to them is already shouting about their MBA from a tier-two business school or their uncle who once shook hands with George Bush. It feels like being trapped in an elevator with six people who have all recently read Dale Carnegie and want to prove it to you while the oxygen runs out. The camera cuts too fast from a sweating forehead to a nervous twitch, sometimes lingering just a beat too long on a background extra who is trying very hard to look like they are typing an important spreadsheet into a blank Microsoft Word document. It's a small thing, but that recurring wide shot of the water cooler really bugged me after the fourth time we had to stare at its plastic blue jug.
The entire plot hinges on a ridiculous premise: George W. Bush is coming to India, and the US Consulate in Mumbai is holding a contest to find one young Indian citizen to shake his hand. This brings together a clutch of ambition-poisoned stereotypes who become magnificent monsters under the fluorescent lights. Satchit Puranik plays a groveling, tie-straightening bureaucrat’s nightmare with such precision that you can smell the clove cigarettes and cheap Brut on him. Then there is Vivek Gomber, playing a smug, Davos-attending venture capitalist who treats the entire contest like a hostile takeover of a failing poultry farm. He doesn't just walk into a scene; he invades it, dropping English business jargon like confetti at a retirement party for a middle manager who embezzled the pension fund.
Konkona Sen Sharma shows up and immediately tilts the room on its axis, playing a sharp-elbowed, unapologetic careerist who makes every single person around her look like they are wading through wet cement in snowshoes. She brings a specific, terrifying kind of corporate hunger to the film that reminds me of her work in Page 3, that same unblinking observation of people who will step over their own grandmothers for a byline or a corner office. Opposite her, Ira Dubey and Shernaz Patel weave through the chaos with a manic glee, screaming about feminism and globalization and family wealth in a way that feels uncomfortably close to every dinner party you have ever endured in Bandra. They are all chewing the scenery so hard you can practically hear the dental work grinding down, but the energy never dips into camp because they play the desperation with dead-eyed sincerity.
The cinematography by Rafey Mahmood relies almost entirely on tight, unflattering close-ups that trap these people in their own narrow ambitions. There are no sweeping crane shots of Mumbai here, no romantic tracking shots through rain-slicked streets, just a whole lot of glass walls, venetian blinds, and harsh overhead bulbs that make everyone look five years older and ten pounds sweatier than they actually are. The soundtrack is mostly a clunky mix of corporate elevator jazz and synthetic sitar riffs that occasionally threaten to derail the scene entirely, reminding you that this was made during a transitional era when indie hindi films were trying to figure out how to exist outside the shadow of traditional studio formulas without any actual money in the bank. It is noisy, abrasive, and frequently repetitive, much like the characters themselves.
Beneath the mockumentary setup and the frantic gag rate, the film is actually a rather mean-spirited little satire about the specific brand of American worship that infected urban India during the mid-2000s, when everyone was suddenly talking about outsourcing, the flat world, and getting a green card as if it were a ticket to heaven. These people do not want to meet the American president because they love democracy or foreign policy; they want to meet him because a photograph with the leader of the free world is the ultimate LinkedIn profile picture in a society that had recently decided success could be quantified in stock options and foreign currency. It avoids the cozy, feel-good resolution that usually poisons mainstream bollywood movies of this vintage, refusing to let any of these terrible people learn a valuable lesson about friendship or humility.
They are just as awful, just as greedy, and just as desperate when the credits roll as they were when they walked through those glass doors, and the film is better for refusing to redeem them. It is rough around the edges, occasionally repetitive in its joke structure, and stubbornly small in its ambitions. Yet it captures something genuine about the awkward, sweating panic of trying to prove your worth to an empire that barely knows you exist.