By Subhash K Jha

Doctor G

Written & Directed by Anubhuti Kashyap

Rating: *** ½

There is a rather serio-comic sequence in this film about a gender-challenged hero who discovers he is not scared of vaginas, after a woman screams molestation when he examines her the way any professional gynaecologist should.Except that this one is a male And women are habitually suspicious of men who probe into their private space.

All this plotting pranking is like one lengthy joke where the punchlines never allowed to grow into ‘paunch’lines, and the storytelling so toned it never grow a tonde(potbelly).

Lean and fatfree, perky and precocious Doctor G is filled with scenes of feisty women gynaecologists ragging and bullying Ayushmann Khurrana.He wants to be the elephant in the operation theatre.

The cast is uniformly entertaining, both on and off duty. Sheeba Chadha as Khurrana’s mom is habitually spaced out. Can’t she ever ne normal? And the astounding Shefali Shah. I can’t remember the last time she smiled.

Luckily for us, the film is suffused in smiles, some of them rather risqué.You have a nurse telling a woman petrified of an injection, “You weren’t scared of the big injection that your husband gave you, now you are scared of this small injection.”

If a male director was behind this kind of innuendo he would be branded lewd.

Anubhuti Kashyap gets away with a lot of innuendoes since…well,women can do it. Men can’t. No arguments, please.

To me, the meat of the matter is the last half hour when Dr Ayushmann must rescue an underage girl(Ayesha Khaduskar) from a life-threatening abortion. This is drama in unreal-life but it works in instilling a fresh impetus to the at-times sluggish storytelling.

It is heartening to see Khurrana remain in the jerk territory to the end. Yes, he changes his point of view as a doctor. But he doesn’t reform. Who does, for God’s sake! But as a human being losing the ‘man touch’ an endeavour which the screenplay rates so high, this is a far cry from the way the gender differences hope to normally smoothen out at the end of a film. Rakul Preet as a doctor impresses and looks her part and does justice overall to the plot.

There are no easy solutions to complicated gender issues in Doctor G. I like that. Everything doesn’t have to be either black or white, wrong or right, vagina or penis. And one doesn’t have to be a gynaecologist to know that.