Bubblegum(Telugu, A-ha)
Rating: *
When this monstrously misogynistic , wildly rudderless and painfully misguided Telugu film opened on 29 December 2023, there was some angry chatter over its offensive content.
Now that Bubblegum is out on a streaming platform (A-ha) it is time to say no to vitiated content. And it can’t get any more vitiated than this . The heroine at one point during their courtship actually tells the stalker hero, “You actually make stalking look romantic.”
Seriously?! Come again? Are we really going back to the era when women were relentlessly stalked and bullied into submission by rakish heroes while Mohammed Rafi sang, “Kaha chal diye idhar toh aao mere dil ko na tadpao bhole sitamgar maan bhi jao.”
By the time the song was over the heroine was smiling and simpering.
Well, bring it on all over again.
In Bubblegum , the boy Adi is a butcher’s son(this gives the screenwriter a chance to write in some father-son bonding scenes which seem as awkward as everything else) .Adi wants to be a “worldfamous” DJ. The girl Janhvi is a spoilt rich specimen of hedonism. Like Adi she too has a “cool” dad.
She claims to be a fashion designer . But I didn’t see her doing anything but partying and clubbing . During one such stretched out soiree that’s her life, Jahnvi meets Adi. And ,well, it is love at thirst sight.She gives him tips on how to dress, takes over his life and wardrobe,gifts him her car so that he can “drop her, pick her up”. The monotony inherent in that ritual sums up the girl’s life.
Then during her happy-burday party, Adi and Janhvi have a massive fight because she catches him smooching her bestfriend, or rather the bestfriend smooches Adi because, as she says, she was “consoling” him. I think the last time I heard this explanation for relationship-betrayal was when Dilip Kumar was locked up with Asma in room with a ‘phew’.
I could go on describing the trashy portrayal of how the young and the hip people of Hyderabad are shown to live in Bubblegum. If I were young and a Hyderabadi, I would sue the makers of Bubblegum(which should actually be called Babble Gum considerable how much nonsense the lead pair vomits on the screen) for showing the young upwardly mobile crowd as tawdry rather than trendy.
Just by having the young say ‘Cool, Bro’ and ‘Dirty Mind Alert’ you don’t achieve that windy zest for life which we saw in other recent films about the young from the South like Onnaman or even Hanu Man.
Coming back to the happy burday party, this is where Adi and Janhvi have their first serious fight.Before that , the two suddenly discovered the pleasures of smooching. For about 30-35 minutes of their courtship the two kept lunging for each other’s lips as if the need to lock lips originated from a respiratory disorder.The two actors Roshan Kanakala and Maanasa Choudhary,are terrible kissers, by the way.
Then at the aforementioned happy burday party Janhvi rather uncharitably reminds Adi that all the fancy clothes and shoes he was wearing was paid for by her.
Ouch! The next thing we know, Adi does a striptease right there at the party, right down to his shorts. Whether he kept the shorts on out of a sense of modesty or because she had not paid for it, we will never know.
What we do know is Bubblegum is the worst most toxic depiction of modern love where stalking is normalized. In the first-half it is the boy chasing the girl, in the second-half it is the girl chasing the boy. The two lovers, played by a pair of extremely uncharismatic actors,deserve each other.The audience deserves a lot better.