Kunal Kemmu’s Vibe: Inside the slacker comedy aiming to make India laugh, not reinvent Bollywood

Dubai: Ask the cast of Vibe whether they were slackers at school, and you get three very different answers.

Kunal KemmFu, who wrote and directed the comedy and also stars in it, insists he wasn't. His alter ego, on the other hand, has been sprawled on the sofa for years.

Newcomer Vanshika Dhir is almost offended by the idea. "Definitely not," she says. "I was very competitive. We would all ask each other, 'What did you get?', and I would never want to be the one that didn't do well."

And Sparsh Shrivastava? He quietly reached for his phone.

"I'm just searching what 'slacker' means on Google," he confesses.

If that isn't a vibe check, I don't know what is.

Trust me, Vibe, out in UAE cinemas now, is one of the films I've been low-key counting down to. We need a feel-good, unapologetically silly comedy right now, and Kemmu isn't pretending to be anything grander.

"The idea is to make people laugh and give them an entertaining film at the end of the day," he says. "I'm hopeful that people will turn up in theatres, and I can promise them a good time."

His cast seems to agree. Shrivastava has already watched the film four times, and the joke, he says, still hasn't worn off.

"We were actually discussing, why are we not getting bored? We have seen the film almost four times now," he says. "I think it's so well made by Kunal bhai, and the audience reaction is keeping us also engaged."

Even Dhir's friends in England, who don't speak Hindi, are sold.

"They watched the trailer, and of course there were subtitles," she says. "They really enjoyed it, and they're looking forward to watching it."

The slacker who never was

For Kemmu, the film's lazy, lovable hero is a kind of permission slip.

"I'll tell you honestly, I wasn't a slacker," he says. "But I think my alter ego has always been of a slacker. If I had to write exactly how I am, that would be boring."

That alter ego, he explains, is everything he thinks but never does.

"He is those private thoughts and intrusive thoughts that I have, but I never act on," he says. "I can live vicariously through him, basically."

So where did Vibe come from? Not, he insists, from a grand plan to shake up Bollywood comedy. It came from his own watchlist: Dumb and Dumber, Superbad, the Seth Rogen-James Franco capers, This Is the End, 21 Jump Street.

"They're bizarre yet funny, but they're serious in what they do," he explains. "I felt that if these films were talking to a boy in India and entertaining him so much, could we have a film of a similar tonality but Indian in its nature, which could travel well in the world also?"

He isn't claiming to have reinvented the wheel either, much as he didn't with his directorial debut Madgaon Express.

"I won't say that it's something you've never seen before," he says. "It's just the way I want to tell the story."

The answer, it turns out, was refreshingly simple.

"I just wrote what I thought I would enjoy watching, and I went ahead and made it."

Box office, but make it family

Vibe arrives in a crowded month, with Meghna Gulzar's Daayra among the competition. Kemmu, to his credit, doesn't pretend to be a saint about it.

"While I might say that I wish that everybody does well, because that does well for the industry, I have to somewhere be selfish and say I really hope mine does the best," he laughs.

Then comes the diplomatic save. It helps, of course, that the rival camp is practically family: Daayra stars Kareena Kapoor Khan. And he is, he adds, a Meghna Gulzar fan himself.

The real problem, he argues, would be a shortage of screens, and India isn't there yet.

"If we only had 10 cinemas playing 10 shows, then it would be a problem," he says. "We are going to be in theatres for a long time, inshallah. If you feel like today you want to see a comedy, then please come and watch Vibe. But if you want to see something thought-provoking, I'm a Meghna Gulzar fan myself."

He still remembers catching Rangeela and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge on back-to-back days as a young moviegoer.

"If I want to see a film, I will see it," he says. "If I don't want to see a film, then it can be the only film that's releasing that day. Doesn't mean I'm going to show up."

Fair point.

Cancel culture? Not on his radar

I spend a lot of my free time at stand-up shows in Dubai. It's my biggest stress buster, and comedians here push the envelope hard. So in an age when careers get cancelled faster than you can say "vibe check", was Kemmu nervous about offending anyone?

Not really.

"I am who I am," he says. "Even when I'm writing, I've never felt that I'm going to offend someone, because the intent has never been that."

His only real battles, he admits, are with the censor board.

"Sometimes I might be at a point of saying that I don't think this deserves this kind of a certification, because I don't think this is offensive," he says. "But then that's a struggle."

What he really wants is to bring back the single-screen chaos he grew up on: the popcorn, the samosas, the whistling and the booing.

"When a song would come up, people would dance. It was one of those community watching experiences that you would look forward to," he says. "Going out to a restaurant for a meal and going out to a theatre for a film was a feeling that you looked forward to. In some way, I'm just trying to recreate that in whatever little way I can."

The Googling co-star

Kemmu's casting instincts are just as unfussy. He didn't write the part with Shrivastava in mind. But the actor best known for playing small-town boys in Jamtara and Laapataa Ladies kept coming back to him.

"I really think he's a gifted actor," says Kemmu. "He always came across as an actor who could mould himself into something else. I thought it would be a great thing to bring him into this corporate world and show him as a properly polished good boy."

Once "slacker" had been translated into "backbencher", Shrivastava was all in.

"Being a backbencher is always fun," he says. "But then life pushes you in ways that you have to come to the front seat and act. I think through movies, we get that chance to just relax in life."

His real worry on set was how to address a man who was both his co-star and his director.

"I was pretty scared before, because I have to work with an actor who's also directing the film," he says. "Should I address him as a director? Should I address him as a co-actor?"

The fix came during the first few readings, when the pair agreed to treat each other as the friends they play on screen. Shrivastava took it seriously. He even saved Kemmu's number under his character's name, and kept it that way "for a good long time".

"Kunal bhai was very much giving me that space to be comfortable with him," he says. "That's how the chemistry got built."

The newcomer who didn't freeze

For the female lead, Kemmu knew exactly what he wanted.

"I specifically had a character in mind, and I knew that I wanted to cast a new girl for it," he says. Dhir, he adds, fit the part "like a glove".

His real test came on day one of the shoot.

"For a newcomer, when you're in the middle of those 300 people on set and the camera starts rolling, you can freeze," he says. "But she surprised all of us on day one. She did it like a natural. That was a big weight off my shoulders."

Dhir herself is refreshingly clear-eyed about her big break.

"The chances of this happening to someone are extremely slim, so I'm very well aware of that," she says.

Her backstory has its own delicious twist. She lived in Punjab until she was nine, then moved to England barely able to speak English.

"I didn't know how to speak three words of English, so I really struggled when I first went there," she says. "And now I almost have the opposite problem."

That posh accent means the Queen's English now comes more easily than Hindi.

"I wouldn't say I struggle with Hindi, but I do have to keep doing diction and working at it, because I do have a certain way of talking and it's difficult to break that," she says.

So, what's the vibe?

I'll confess: as a millennial, every time someone suggests a "vibe check", I'm quietly lost. Kemmu, a fellow millennial, insists the title isn't just a nod to Gen Z.

"Even for millennials, I remember when you entered somebody's house, you'd say, 'I get a negative vibe here,'" he says.

"If you choose to have an English title, a lot of people ask, will you alienate some kind of an audience? So I thought, here is a title which everybody knows, despite the fact that it's English."

It also suits the film's four very different leads.

"Each and every character has their own personality," he says. "Because these four personalities kind of come and collide in this film, Vibe was the title that suited it best."

Shrivastava is simply enjoying the bragging rights.

"We kind of flaunt it nowadays," he says. "I'm a part of a film which is called Vibe. How cool is that?"

For Dhir, a short English title was a quiet relief.

"I was thinking it's going to be very difficult to explain a really long Hindi title to my British friends," she laughs. "They were like, 'Oh, it's easy to remember.'"

Show me the money

As the call wraps, I can't resist one last nudge to Kemmu about reviews.

"You can't say you don't care, because they definitely do affect someone," he admits.

Critical glory is a minefield, I tell him. These days, half of them are one-word verdicts, possibly written by AI. Just show me the box office.

He hesitates, then plays along.

"All right," he says. "I'll take your advice."