Practised to deceive

My Mirror column:

The new Ayushmann Khurrana starrer Dream Girl turns a promising gender-bending premise into a shallow comedy that’s disappointing on multiple fronts.

Dream Girl comes to us as the latest in the now-established Ayushmann Khurrana genre of Hindi films: gently comical lessons in sexuality that also take the necessary swipes at masculinity. Having variously played a secret sperm donor in 2012’s Vicky Donor, a husband who feels saddled with an overweight wife in Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015), a bridegroom afflicted with erectile dysfunction in Shubh Mangal Savdhan (2017), and the embarrassed adult son of 50-something parents who find themselves expecting another baby in Badhaai Ho (2018), Khurrana has helped many a conversation out of the closet. His role in Dream Girl – as an unemployed young man who becomes inordinately successful working a phone chat hotline in a female voice – might have been a way to challenge deeply entrenched ideas of feminine and masculine.

But director Raaj Shaandilyaa seems completely uninterested in the potential of his own material. He gives us a character with a perfect backstory, even a cultural context: Khurrana’s Karam is that young man in every Indian small town who does the female roles in local theatrical productions.

The interiority of female impersonators has been a subject of some thoughtful filmmaking in recent years – Ananya Kasaravalli’s 2017 Kannada feature Harikatha Prasanga (Chronicles of Hari) explored the complicated sexuality of a Yakshagana artiste, while Jainendra Kumar Dost and Shilpi Gulati’s superb 2017 documentary Naach Launda Naach gave space to the cross-dressing male performers of the Bihari naach tradition, associated with the Bhojpuri plays of Bhikhari Thakur. 

Shaandilyaa is obviously working in a very different register from either of these, but it does seem glaring that Dream Girl offers no sense at all of how Karam thinks about his channelling of femininity. What does Karam feel about growing up as the boy his friends depend on to conjure up a fictitious mother or girlfriend; the guy who plays Sita and Radha and Draupadi with such aplomb that little children stop by to seek his blessings even when he’s out of costume? We have no idea. Does he enjoy the seductive power he has as ‘Pooja’ (his feminine alter ego)? We are never told.

Instead, Dream Girl seems to want us to think of Karam’s easy gender-switching falsetto as nothing more than a party trick, an unusual skill he happens to have mastered: it might as well have been juggling, or standing on his head.

And yes, Dream Girl is a comedy, and we could just have stayed at that level. Especially since Shaandilyaa makes sure to hand his hero a conventionally attractive girlfriend (Nushrat Bharucha), a depthless relationship whose existence seems intended only to stave off any doubts that might otherwise emerge about Karam’s masculinity.

But by having a whole host of men – and one woman – fall for ‘Pooja’ rather than any of the actual women that answer the call centre’s phone lines, the plot opens up a world of possibilities, only to immediately close them off. Why are all these people – the Gujjar teen ruffian (Raj Bhansali), the Haryanvi policeman-poet (Vijay Raaz), the virginal gau-sevak caught in a brahmacharya he doesn’t really want (Abhishek Banerjee), the lonely long-time widower (Annu Kapoor), the man-hating female journalist (Nidhi Bisht) – so attracted to ‘Pooja’?

Having once set up the question, the film doesn’t seem interested in the answer at all. The answer Khurrana’s character provides – in a preachy, boring speech at the end – strips the scenario of all reference to sex or gender by going on about loneliness and everyone needing a confidante. A much more honest – and honestly sexy – answer was provided by 2017’s delightful Tumhari Sulu, where Vidya Balan demonstrated that the sari-wali-bhabhi’s popularity as a late-night RJ was not about removing flirtatiousness from the equation with her listeners, but mixing empathy in.

Dream Girl, on the other hand, has its collection of lonely hearts falling for someone who is patently false – the high-pitched falsetto voice is a stand-in for femininity that is more imagined than real, and ‘Pooja’s appeal seems about becoming whatever the male caller wants, changing accents and persona, pretending to be a poetess for the secret versifier, or a dignified older lady for the widower.

But when faced with the possibility that love might actually transform you, Dream Girl can only mock it. Much of the film’s second half is taken up with a totally unexpected subplot in which ‘Pooja’ masquerades as Muslim as a way of putting off a Hindu suitor, only to have Annu Kapoor rise to the romantic challenge by preparing to convert to Islam. Bad jokes about flowery Urdu move swiftly into bandying around the worst stereotypes, about Muslim families being much larger than Hindu ones, for instance, or needing a masjid inside the house – which seemed not just in bad taste, but a powerful form of othering.

Meanwhile Dream Girl’s approach to its women characters is one of near-total disinterest. Other than the whiskey-swigging grandmother (who feels like a semi-rip-off from Vicky Donor), the actual women on screen – Bharucha, Bisht or the female phone-chatters who are Karam’s colleagues – are mere place-holders for Shaandilyaa’s plot. If you were imagining a nuanced challenge to gender stereotypes, Dream Girl’s only message is, dream on.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6 Oct 2019.

  

Celebrating Acceptance

My Mirror column:

The awkward event of a mature couple having a baby ends up offering an optimistic view of the Indian family in Badhaai Ho.

Since his debut in Vicky Donor (2012), Ayushmann Khurrana has emerged as the Hindi film industry’s go-to actor for good-humoured family films about matters sexual. If Vicky Donor addressed anxieties around infertility and ‘naturalness’, Dum Laga ke Haisha (2015) and Shubh Mangal Saavdhan (2017) took on marital sex life complications: pre-judgement about female attractiveness in one instance, the man’s erectile dysfunction in the other. Badhaai Ho, too, belongs to this growing genre: taking the dark, shameful things we were only ever supposed to sob about solitarily and making us giggle about them collectively.

Director Amit Ravindernath Sharma, whose 2015 feature Tevar didn’t get credit for its attempt at creating a masculine small-town hero who respects women, creates another rather optimistic protagonist here. Khurrana plays Nakul Kaushik, the twenty-something son of fifty-something parents who finds himself profoundly embarrassed when his mother gets unexpectedly pregnant. “Tu hi bata yaar, yeh bhi koi mummy-papa ke karne ki cheez hai kya?” he demands frustratedly of his girlfriend Renee, mid-intimacy. The mental vision of his parents getting it on is enough to ensure that Nakul and his girlfriend don’t.

Nakul’s initial response is exactly what one might expect in a middle class Indian universe, where sex isn’t meant to exist except when given public ritual sanction by marriage, where it’s intended for the socially approved goal of procreation. Then, of course, the ‘success’ of a suhaag raat becomes the business of the whole family and community: think of both Dum Laga and Shubh Mangal. 

But Badhaai Ho shows us how quickly even that socially legitimised conjugal bed can turn into something transgressive. A baby bump makes visible the existence of a sex life where we’d rather not imagine it: in our parents’ beds.

Badhaai Ho sets out to be winsome, and part of that winsomeness lies in the particular parents it presents us with. Jeetender Kaushik (the marvellous Gajraj Rao) is a Northern Railways ticket collector who’s miserly with his money and his mangoes, but remains warmly attached to his spouse Priyamvada (Neena Gupta).

Priyamvada, for her part, supplements her domestic responsibilities with being the admiring audience for her husband’s amateur Hindi poetry written under the quasi-comic penname ‘Vyaakul’ (it is reading aloud his latest published poem that brings on a moment of passion). (Another recent portrayal of a middle-class couple, Love Per Square Foot on Netflix, had Supriya Pathak play an admiring wife to her railway announcer husband Raghuvir Yadav’s secret musical ambitions.)

Ayushmann Khurana in a still from Badhaai Ho

The believable affection between the two is used to charming comic effect through the film — during the shadi song sequence ‘Sajan Bade Senti’, for instance, when Jeetender tries to get closer to Priyamvada within the space of a big family photo. Later, when he compliments her, she seems secretly pleased but tells him off because it’s his “saying this sort of thing that has put us in this mess”.

More interestingly, though, the film takes a very warm view of the joint family, where privacy and politeness might be missing, but bonds are strong enough to create acceptance, even in the face of declared social norms. It is clear where Sharma wants to go when he pits the Kaushiks’ cramped Lodhi Colony life against the cavernous bungalow inhabited by Renee’s single mother. There's a neat reversal of assumptions about social class and liberal openness: Sheeba Chaddha as Renee’s mother emerges as more judgemental —and less likeable — than Priyamvada.

From the fading mehendi to the sindoor in her broadened hair parting, Gupta makes Priyamvada layered and utterly real. Priyamvada is not a character one would call feisty, but there is a clear line between what she takes as her duties — e.g. listening to her mother-in-law (Surekha Sikri) — and what she takes as her due, e.g. the right not to have an abortion. There is also a way in which the film extends her maternal role from the familiar mode of asking after physical well-being (“Khana khaya tune?”) to inquiring, gently but firmly, after her children’s emotional health. The mother who can teach her son when to apologise in a relationship is a truly significant mentor in a world where so many men seem to grow up ill-equipped for emotional labour.

Badhaai Ho appears on our screens in a time when the opposition to court-approved entry of women into the Sabarimala Temple has brought women’s menstruating bodies onto our front pages. Given that powerful women like Smriti Irani still see fit to body-shame their own gender for a perfectly natural biological function, Neena Gupta’s smiling, quiet defence of her character’s ageing, but still sexual, pregnant body seems particularly valuable.

The family, Badhaai Ho implies, can be a space of socialising for young men, a place to learn what female experience is like, through empathy with sisters and mothers and grandmothers, through simple things like learning that periods happen, or how to hold a baby. Its vision of joint family may be rose-tinted, but in these divided times it is a pleasure to watch proximity create acceptance, not its opposite.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 Oct 2018.

Slice of life, served warm

My Mumbai Mirror column last Sunday: 

Caught between too much Bengali-ness and too little, Shoojit Sircar's 'Piku' mines dysfunction for gentle comedy.

By the time you read this, you would have heard and watched the PR machinery grinding away for days, anointing director Shoojit Sircar as the new Hrishikesh Mukherjee. While this is only a symptom of how desperate we are for labels (and maybe of how much we secretly miss 'Hrishi Da'), Sircar has done something that counts as a rather fun tribute to Mukherjee. He's taken Bachchan's original quick-tempered, reserved 30-year-old Bhaskar Banerjee of Anand (1971), and aged him into the crabbily eccentric, garrulous 70-year-old Bhaskor Banerjee of Piku. More amusingly, the hypochondria of richer patients like Asit Sen's Seth Chandranath, that so annoyed Bachchan as a young doctor in Anand, has now become his own. The new old Bhaskor, nursing his boxful of homeopathic tablets as close as his now-generous paunch, lives in Delhi's Chittaranjan Park and spells his first name with a deliberately underlined Bengali 'o'. (That 'o' is a sign for you to wonder: did Amitabh Bachchan make a better Bengali when he wasn't trying so hard to play one?)

This is Sircar's second cinematic take on Dilli Bangalis. The first, Vicky Donor (2012), which still remains his finest film by far, had Ayushman Khurrana's persistent Lajpat Punjabi boy woo Yami Gautam's gently dignified Ashima Roy, resulting in wedding negotiations that bring out each community's most ungenerous view of the other: superior, killjoy Bengalis believe they're being forced to deal with moonhphat money-minded Punjabis -- and vice versa. But despite Sircar's penchant for broad stereotype, his affection for his characters shone through, as it does in Piku.

Here, Sircar seems to suggest that Padukone is a Delhi girl, her Bengaliness expressed as culture and not as language—note the scene where she dismisses a potential suitor for not having watched any Ray films. But even if she were cast as a Hauz Khas Enclave girl instead of a Chittaranjan Park one, Padukone's Bangaliyana would be too little, and Bachchan's too much. Still, despite Bachchan's overdone accent, I didn't completely cringe at the jaanishes that occasionally punctuate the father-daughter conversations. And drawing my half-Bengali self up to the full height of its limited authority, I shall vouch for the joyful appropriateness of both the Bangla song references: the playfully romantic Hemanta-Sandhya Mukherjee song from the Uttam Kumar-Suchitra Sen classic Saptapadi (1961) 'Ei Poth Jodi Na Shesh Hoye' ['What if this road were to never end'], which Bhaskor breaks into on their already interminable road journey, and Manna Dey's cheerful 'Jeebone ki paabo na, bhulecchi shey bhabona' ['What I won't find in life, I've stopped thinking about that'] to which a tipsy Bhaskor shakes a leg in much the spirit of Soumitra Chatterjee's original twist in the 1969 film Teen Bhuboner Paarey.

But the Bengaliness in Piku is at its best when least remarked upon: such as the fact that 'Piku' is what Padukone's character is known by, not just to family and friends, but pretty much to everyone. Colleagues and cowering taxi drivers alike call her Piku Madam, anointing with respectable publicness what would otherwise be *just* a nickname. There is probably a long and impressive bhalo naam, but it's so long and impressive that no-one ever uses it. I also loved the non-underlined way in which Sircar uses a ridiculous battle over a knife: it was about an old man's stubbornness, but it was also a gentle suggestion that what Hindi belt masculinity might consider a way of keeping safe (having a weapon in the car) is, to the Bengali bhadralok, a source of clear and present danger.

Another aspect of Bengaliness that the film quietly demonstrates is the family conversation as argument, with people quite happy to cut across each other and squabble joyfully over pointless things. (I must mention here that Moushumi Chatterjee, as Piku's aunt Chhobi Mashi, is an absolute gem. I've thoroughly enjoyed getting to know this grown-up, un-coy version of the actress in two wonderful Aparna Sen films, The Japanese Wife and Goynar Baksho, and I'm waiting for Hindi cinema to give her a truly meaty role to sink her teeth into.)

What's best about Piku, though, is not its droll Bengaliness, or its unending succession of alimentary conversations (which are not half as bad as I expected, and even contain some useful homespun wisdom on bowel-clearing from Irrfan Khan's fantastically wry Rana). It is the film's affecting ability to draw out our complicated feelings about our parents—the frustration at their embarrassing quirks, the reversal of positions that becomes inevitable as they age, and the fierce protectiveness with which we guard them from the criticisms of others. Piku's combination of annoyance and amusement, of being weighed down and standing tall alone, will strike a chord with every middle-aged person who's taken care of an irritable parent (often a parent irritable at having to be taken care of).

There is also the un-heavy-handed, thoroughly endearing way the film deals with the subject of ageing and death. Irrfan, playing a taxi company owner who ends up driving Bhaskor, Piku and their Man Friday Budhan (the servants in this film could do with a separate column) to Calcutta, gets some of the best lines: “Tapak gaye toh Banaras jaisi koi jagah nahin,” he announces as they drive past the city Hindus consider the holiest place to die. But to see how to meet death with a twinkle in your eye, you have to see the film. Perhaps it is an Anand homage, after all.

Film Review: Vicky Donor

Vicky Donor is that rare thing: a laugh-out-loud Hindi movie that has both irreverence and soul. Screenwriter Juhi Chaturvedi and director Shoojit Sircar have taken a hush-hush subject that most people would tiptoe around, and placed it bang at the centre of a film that’s both hilariously funny and wonderfully honest – without ever feeling sleazy.

The plot is as follows. Vicky Arora, 25, lives with his widowed mother Dolly and his grandmother Biji in a small house in the very middle class neighbourhood of Lajpat Nagar IV. He seems like a nice boy, but he doesn’t have a job and isn’t trying terribly hard to look for one either. He seems more-or-less content to spend his days mall-hopping and playing cricket in the park with his buddies, while effectively living off his mother’s earnings from the beauty parlour she runs downstairs. Enter Dr Baldev Chadda, who runs a fertility treatment clinic and sperm bank in Daryaganj, and is always on the lookout for sperm donors who can come to the aid of his stressed-out, “insecured and highly ambitious” clients. Chadda spies Vicky when he’s in the process of fobbing off his pet white Spitz on someone (because it failed to bark at a thief), and decides at first sight that this is the man to solve his current crisis of ‘quality sperm’. “Shakal dekh ke bande ka sperm pehchaan jaata hoon,” as he says to the bewildered Vicky. So begins Chadda’s long and hilarious campaign to convince the reluctant Vicky that donating sperm is neither funny nor obscene, but simply a natural thing that he can do – and earn good money doing.

Chaturvedi’s hilarious dialogue for Dr Chadda is absolutely spot-on, from assuring Vicky that sperm donation “is an ancient science” to telling him that he’ll be doing a social service. But it’s the brilliant Annu Kapoor who breathes life into this amalgam of bizarre Aryan race purity theories and sheer dogged business sense, turning him into a character who’s as familiar as he is memorable. Ayushmann Khurana, a television star and ex-IPL anchor making his filmic debut here, is a complete natural as Vicky, combining the requisite Dilli macho bluster with an artless vulnerability that has thankfully little drama about it.

In fact, Vicky Donor steers clear of high drama for most of its running time. The relationship between Vicky’s rum-swigging mother (the superb Dolly Ahluwalia) and eccentric old grandmother (Kamlesh Gill), for example, brings to life a daughter-in-law–mother-in-law dynamic that’s often hilarious while staying refreshingly honest: “Hangover jitta banda kucch bhi keh jaanda hai (When one has a hangover, one can say anything at all),” says a drunkenly apologetic Beeji in advance for being crabby in the morning.

Even Vicky’s persistent wooing of pretty bank employee Ashima (debutante Yami Gautam) stays light and frothy almost all the way through, even with the romance culminating in the inevitable over-the-top Bengali-Punjabi family face-off. The caricatures that Vicky’s mother and Ashima’s father (veteran theatre actor Jayanta Das) respectively draw of the ‘other’ community are broad and predictable – loud, uncultured Punjabis who flaunt their money, versus miserly monkey-cap-wearing Bengalis who don’t know how to have a good time – but the sharply-scripted wedding negotiation scene seems entirely believable. And by the time you’ve gotten to the end of their happily tipsy wedding, you’re really not likely to complain.

The post-interval section is somewhat less fun, mostly because the filmmakers up their drama quotient as they propel us towards a fuzzy feelgood climax. But the emotional twist in the tale – which I’m not going to give away here (other than to tell you that Chaturvedi wanted to call her film Phool Khilein Hain Gulshan Gulshan) – does give everyone a chance to display their acting chops. Gautam turns a tad too screechy (and then perhaps a little too maudlin), but Khurrana acquits himself marvelously, as do Ahluwalia and Gill.
It’s also worth mentioning that Vicky Donor is a Delhi film, though like with everything else about it, it wears its city-ness lightly. It doesn’t make too big a deal of its locations – the Daryaganj clinic with its slightly dodgy associations, the Lajpat Nagar terrace across which Beeji quarrels incessantly with the bitchy neighbour ‘Pepsi Aunty’, or Dr. Chadda’s terrace with its too-good-to-be-true view of the Jama Masjid – but each of them is nicely captured. And the dialogue is a pitch-perfect rendition of Dilli-Punjabi-speak, studded with English words in exactly the right places: “Gents ko samjhein aisi ladies bhagwan ne banai kitthe hai? (Where has God made the sorts of ladies who will understand gents?)”

Vicky Donor shares with last week’s Bittoo Boss a likeable debutante hero, a script that’s almost wholly in Punjabi and a desire to address a serious topic with a light and frothy touch. Unlike Bittoo Boss, though, Shoojit Sircar’s second directorial outing (after 2005’s watchable Kashmir-shot romance Yahaan, in which Minissha Lamba made her suitably coy debut) the emotional-moral core of Vicky Donor never feels like a politically correct add-on. Sure, it doesn’t cling very hard to the possibility that there might actually be people who don’t need children to feel ‘complete’, and neither does it want to argue too aggressively against the desire for biological children rather than adopted ones – but then every film must pick its battles. Vicky Donor has picked one, and fights it most disarmingly.

Published in Firstpost.