Couplings: "Mittran Da Challeya Truck Ni"

Bickering has become a central component of the Punjabi cinema: men bickering with men, women bickering with men and one another, bickering between families, bickering within families. Where the Tamil and Telugu cinemas have typically brawled out their differences, the characters in Punjabi films - and Punjabi comedies in particular - delight in squabbling and sniping, convinced there's nothing that can be done with fists that can't be more wittily expressed with crossed words. The squabbles writer-director Rakesh Dhawan initiates in Mittran Da Challeya Truck Ni begin with those between a divorced dad (Hardip Gill) and his unmarried adult son (singer-turned-actor Amrinder Gill) who collectively run a trucking firm, which permits them to take their domestic disagreements out on the road every now and again. Sometimes they team up to lambast their lumbering vehicle, which spills almost as much grain as it delivers; the "All Over India" legend adorning its front becomes ever more ironic, as the truck barely seems capable of going a mile or so without stalling or otherwise breaking down. In such moments, deprived of a mutual enemy, the pair invariably default to longer-running arguments, centred on dad's slovenliness and uselessness around the house, and the son's inability to find the bride he's so desperate to marry. A little further up this road, however, two eminent contenders await: Jindi (Sunanda Sharma), herself living in a one-parent household on the truckers' route, and Moumita (Sayani Gupta), a waitress at a truck stop being pressured into marriage with her landlord's brother. The questions that hone into view are twofold: one, which of these dames will best hold their own in the inevitable marital disputes, and two, whether the boys' truck will hold out long enough to carry everybody in the right direction.

At this junction, I should insert a caveat, which is that the English subtitles only sporadically match the speed of these back-and-forths: they catch and convey an essence of each conflict, but - like that cargo - some of the spark goes missing in transit, and the subs vanished entirely five minutes before the conclusion of the public screening I attended. Still, the film's virtues are self-evident, and require only sporadic mitigation. The first half is sincerely engaged with grain truck driving as a world with its own routes and pressures, ups and downs, and Dhawan cares enough to feel out what it is to drive long hours through the night with only your belching father sat alongside you for company. (In doing so, he explains the son's yearning to settle down even before the ladies pass into view.) It's not The Wages of Fear exactly, puttering modestly around the same handful of rural backroads, and then, after a pump blows, parking up on one street in particular; a shrugging intermission block promises similarly gentle fun to come after the break. What it has is a credible understanding of transient blue-collar life, turning a sympathetic eye on folks with limited prospects trying to improve their lot, on their routines and rituals, and on what happens whenever these are disrupted. Conflict is so hardwired into this cinema's syntax that character has to be revealed though complication, wrinkles in destiny: sudden deaths and hastily engineered couplings, a woman appearing in the middle of a long-male household. Personality is revealed, too, although the film has plenty of this from point of departure: the larger-than-life Gill Sr. chuckling fondly at his son's romantic failings, Gill Jr. demonstrating some of that everyman charm Chris Pratt had before Marvel sucked the life out of him. Sharma is good casting in the girl-next-door role, with the kind of goofy laugh that can only ever endear us to a performer, and Gupta combines a touching wide-eyed vulnerability with an inner fierceness that suggests she'd have the upper hand in any subsequent argument. They're the polestars of an unusually unpredictable love triangle, obliging our hero to commute between a woman who's an obvious match and one who's arguably the more interesting character, and a challenge besides. You'd ride along with any of them, in any combination - Dhawan conjures visual pleasure from the recurring two-shot framing driver and passenger, separated by a novelty wooden moustache glued to the windshield - and the film proves more reliable than the truck in one respect: it's consistently transporting.

Mittran Da Challeya Truck Ni is now showing in selected cinemas.