Deepa Mehta tackles gangster film with ‘Beeba Boys’

TORONTO – Deepa Mehta tackles a genre usually handled by men with her gangster film “Beeba Boys,” and she’s doing it her way.

The fiercely focused director acknowledges this violent portrait of an Indo-Canadian gang is a bit of a left turn, but says it’s far more than just a “men with guns” tale.

“Thematically for me, this film reflects all my concerns that are there in all my films,” Mehta says in a recent interview at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“Those are concerns about identity, assimilation, immigration. How do we become visible in a society that’s relegated us to be invisible?”

The crime story centres on cocksure gang leader Jeet Johar, played by Bollywood actor Randeep Hooda, and his ostentatious but loyal crew of drugs-and-arms dealers.

They include the jokester Manny, played by designer/actor Waris Ahluwalia; the muscle Harry, played by Steve Dhillon; newcomer “Lovely” played by “Bomb Girls” actor Gabe Grey; and the two-faced Nep, played by Toronto-based theatre actor Ali Momen, whose character is feeding information to a rival crew.

They’re clearly seduced by money and power, but are driven to extremes in a bid for attention and respect by a racist and dismissive society, says Mehta.

“You can really feel it as a brown person and as somebody who came to this country as an immigrant,” Mehta says of the ways immigrants are marginalized.

“We all want to be Canadian and we can’t. We always continue to be hyphenated. I’ll always be an Indo-Canadian. Perhaps it’s not so bad in the States where there is that melting pot. This is ghettoization.”

Cast members took part in an intensive 10-day rehearsal where Mehta drove home the film’s emotional beats through an exercise drawn from an ancient Indian treatise known as the Natya Shastra.

Calling it Mehta’s “secret sauce,” Momen says the process opened his mind while knitting the cast of onscreen brothers together.

“I think Deepa is a humanist … she kind of understands the nuance of just life,” Momen says of her approach, while calling the shoot the most “amazing” and “difficult” experience of his life.

“You realize right away that Nep isn’t just a cookie-cutter gangster. That Nep is sad. And Nep is perhaps also sensitive and Nep has the world on his shoulders. And how do you bring that into every scene?”

Ahluwalia says he was attracted to the project by Mehta’s vision.

“I’ve had the good fortune to work with some incredible directors but never a female director and never an Indian director,” says Ahluwalia, whose credits include Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “The Darjeeling Limited” and “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.”

“It’s the first time I’ve been fully immersed within my own culture. It took Deepa to do that. And that was great. But to tell that story, and to be part of changing that landscape of cinema and culture (was important). Because we’re not all doctors or lawyers. Unfortunately some of us are gangsters, too.”

He credits Mehta with charting her own way through a well-tred genre, which included a bold costuming decision to put preening gang members in brightly coloured suits.

“She really wanted to own the genre,” he says. “She was like, ‘No, I want to do a gangster film like a Deepa Mehta gangster film.’ She created her own subsection within the genre, the look being a huge part of it.”

Mehta says she also took pains to make sure the saga extends to the women and children in these gangster’s lives — notably Jeet’s wilfully blind mother, played by Balinder Johal; his lonely girlfriend Katya, played by “Remedy”‘s Sarah Allen; and his impressionable son Peter, played by Sami Amarshi.

“Maybe that’s why it’s different than other gangster films, is because female characters actually have an arc and have something to say,” says the Oscar-nominated director of “Water.”

“I am a feminist … I don’t want to compete with men, why do I have to?”

“Beeba Boys” opens Friday across Canada.