Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/The Guru

Movie Guru Rating:

Unconscious (1 out of 5)

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The Guru, unwrapped

by Jack Neely

The Movie Guru would be remiss if he didn't view the movie, The Guru. He's obliged to see this movie. You aren't, and should be grateful for that fact. That's all you really need to know, but we've got a half-page to fill here. If you've got nothing better to do, read on:

Okay. Ramu, an innocent young Indian immigrant from a sheltered traditional family arrives in New York aspiring to be an actor, but gets a job in a sleazy porn movie. He's so naive that he learns his lines without realizing the role calls for him to remove his clothes and have sexual intercourse with another actor on camera. However, seemingly within a matter of days, he becomes a much-sought national star as America's Sex Guru.

The other main character is Sharonna, a beautiful young blonde, fit, well spoken, perhaps even educated, mentally balanced, and drug-free. However, through circumstances not explained, she is also a porn star so prolific that she's recognized by both priests and barflies. Still, she has heroically managed to keep her entire career a secret from her longtime fiancé, a conservative FDNY fireman, who has never been intimate with her. Meanwhile, she in turn doesn't seem to notice that her own crush, the naive Indian whom she's somehow giving a chaste "lesson" in porn, has become the Sex Guru, advertised on the big screen in Times Square.

Ramu is an accidental guru, first recruited to replace an aging swami of the after-dinner-entertainment variety. He seems to have no insights of his own, but merely parrots what he hears first from others, first his turbaned predecessor, then from his porn-star crush. Sharonna's appealing philosophy is that spirituality and sex are pretty much the same thing. Or, as she says, "my pussy is the door to my soul." Ramu takes that sentiment and runs with it, leading legions of affluent New Yorkers to enlightenment.

If any of that makes sense to you, or if you're really stinking drunk, this might be just the movie for you.

The absurdities pile up. To be fair, some of the dopiness is deliberate homage/parodies to Indian popular cinema; "Bollywood" is ridiculed in the West for its sometimes incoherent combinations of traditional folk dancing and old-fashioned Broadway bombast. But you can't watch 20 minutes of The Guru without suspecting that most of its silliness is home-grown American idiocy. It may have been meant as an attempt to introduce Indian-style cinema to mainstream America, but The Guru's greatest service to cultural interchange is that it makes Bollywood look sophisticated by comparison.

The director is Daisy von Scherler Mayer, who may be best known for her fair adaptation of the kids' classic, Madeline, but otherwise for wacky stinkers like Party Girl and Woo.

Jimi Mistry, the Indian actor (East Is East), is an appealing fellow and may prove himself better than this movie. But some of his co-stars, notably Heather Graham (as Sharonna) and Marisa Tomei (as Lexi, a yuppie devotee) seem undirected in some scenes, blankly mouthing their lines as if they're memorizing them on screen. Filling out the cast is a weird where-are-they-now pageant of former TV actors, from Rob Morrow (in a brief, dull, pointless, and amateurishly shot scene) to Sally Jesse Raphael.

Worst of all, though, is Tracey Jackson's script, which sounds like a first draft, perhaps penned by a committee of tipsy bank tellers gathered for after-work margaritas at O'Charley's. (You can almost hear them: "I know! I know! Let's say the fireman Sharonna's engaged to is really gay, and he's in love with his hoseman!")

I should take that back, because it's not quite fair. It wouldn't be margaritas that inspired our screenwriters; it would have to be Budweisers. Product placement in The Guru is so overbearing—Bud is referred to, at one point, as "the Maharaja of Beers"—that the movie could, in some scenes, pass for a pay-per-view beer ad.

There are several scenes that will bring laughter, or nervous titters, from the audience. Chief among them is a dinner scene where urbane, middle-aged guests who are left alone with the charismatic guru for only about four minutes are found to have removed their clothes. At its best, it's a wacky old Love American Style skit without TV censors. When Lexi's mother (Christine Baranski, the character actor who always plays sexually repressed society types) mentions to her husband that they haven't been intimate since the Reagan administration, he responds heartily, "It's Bush time!" It probably sounded hilarious at O'Charley's.

This is, in short, the dumbest movie I've seen in a theater since Howard the Duck. The memory of that experience gave me the courage to walk out of the theater without shades and a phony beard. Though if I'm ever required to see another movie by Daisy von Scherler Mayer, I'll bring them.