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.

  

My Movies of the Year - I

My Mirror column:

A year-end list of the films I most enjoyed in 2018, in no particular order. The first of a two-part column. 

The season of lists is upon us, and so here I am with mine. But a caveat before I begin: this is not, repeat not, a list of the best films of 2018. I cannot make that claim, simply because there are too many 2018 releases I haven't yet watched – in Hindi, in English, in the many Indian languages, and in countries across the world. Instead, if you will all indulge me at the end of a taxing year, here is a list of films that -- in my eyes -- did their bit to redeem 2018.

Let me begin with the Hindi films, in no particular order.

Mukkabaaz: Anurag Kashyap began the year with a bang, giving us a zingy film about an aspiring boxer where all the real drama takes place outside the ring. The last time Kashyap used the poor-boxer-as-underdog-hero trope, Ranbir Kapoor's performance bit the dust along with the massive misguided missile that was its vehicle, Bombay Velvet. This time, the superb Vineet Kumar Singh (who is also the originator of the script) makes the sad-eyed struggler at the film's heart as credible as the desperate New India that surrounds him. Singh's performance as Shravan is more than matched by Jimmy Sheirgill's masterful turn as a casteist coach. Backed by a brilliant, addictive soundtrack, Kashyap crafts the caste and communal politics of Bareilly into a cinematic universe that is equal parts depressing dysfunction and joyful subversion.

Raazi: Meghna Gulzar's nailbiting thriller, based on the real-life tale of a Kashmiri Muslim woman who married into a Pakistani army family expressly to scout out state secrets, was also the most marvellously subversive Hindi film in ages, playing around with popular assumptions about gender, religion and nationalism at so profound a level that you barely know you're being played. The doll-like Alia Bhatt as a spying dulhan who sweetly smiles her way into the innermost circles of the military establishment is a masterstroke, playing not just on the anxieties of the India-Pakistan relationship but the familial anxieties around the otherness of all bahus in all sasurals. Raazi also gives us a rare burka-clad heroine who needs no saving (unlike say, the two Muslim female characters in the otherwise praiseworthy Lipstick Under My Burkha, or the award-winning 2016 short film Leeches), and a rare India-Pakistan romance that is based on mutual respect for each other's patriotism. 

Mulk: Anubhav Sinha's response to the growing representation of India's Muslims as the enemy within is a moving portrait of a middle class Banaras family that's vilified and harassed after one of its members turns out to have perpetrated a terrorist attack. Rishi Kapoor, one of those lucky male stars to get his best roles after 50, is wonderful as the portly, bearded, devout Murad Ali Mohammad, who is suddenly reduced from the respected neighbourhood Vakeel Sahab to a man in the dock as a member of a hated community. Less feted but crucial to the film's sense of tragedy is Manoj Pahwa's superb portrayal of Murad's younger brother Bilal: a not-so-clever man whose absence of judgement can appear, in a courtroom and a country arraigned against him, as the presence of guilt. Mulk etches the ordinary mixedness of both mohalla and family with warmth and lightness, but its extended courtroom sequences are a bit overwrought. But given the bigotry tearing us apart, this is the bludgeoning we need.

Stree: Director Amar Kaushik and scriptwriters Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK (themselves directors, of Shor in the City fame) have crafted a rare creature: a Hindi genre film that subverts gender stereotypes while being clever enough to never be preachy. Stuffed with great comic turns (of which Rajkummar Rao's ladies tailor hero and Pankaj Tripathi's local faux-historian are the highlights), Stree combines the chills and thrills of a small town ghost story with effortless humour. Kaushik doesn't shy away from laughter in any direction, embracing both situational goofiness and the perfectly positioned political joke: a line about the ghost being able to identify people by their Aadhar cards, or the cameo by Vijay Raaz in which we're told that the Emergency has never ended.

Andhadhun: Sriram Raghavan returns to the screen with another film that proves his irreplaceability to contemporary Hindi cinema. The film's principal ingredients suggest a chef who's having a lot of fun: an attractive blind pianist, a fading Hindi film hero playing a version of himself, Tabu doing a brilliant riff on a character she has played before – Lady Macbeth. The performances are pitch-perfect for a film that is meant to keep us guessing: Ayushmann Khurrana is sympathetic but suave; the magisterial Tabu is somehow both controlled and manic. Add a sweet old woman who may not be that sweet, a nosy Parsi neighbour who gets her just deserts, and an even more nosy child who... let me not give it away – and you get a deliciously dark confection, with Raghavan's usual bonus layers for film buffs.

Badhaai Ho: Amit Ravindernath Sharma's film is a fine new addition to several growing genres: middle class comedies, Delhi films -- and most crucially, family films that want to talk about deep, dark, once-considered-top-secret topics, eg. sex, while making us giggle. Ayushmann Khurrrana as the son of a Northern Railways TT and Sanya Malhotra as his posh girlfriend are cute together, but Neena Gupta and Gajraj Rao walk away with the honours for the warmest, most winsome couple of Hindi cinema this year.

(To be continued next week)

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Jan 2018.