After watching the trailer of Junglee Films’(don’t get them wrong ; they don’t franchise the Tarzan series) Badhaai Do I was left with many questions. The most obvious: why Badhaai? Junglee had a freak hit in Badhaai Ho in 2018. I love that film. Who doesn’t! Wisely its brilliant director Amit Sharma has stayed away from the supposed follow-up.
“Mujhe jo kehna ttha maine keh diya(I said what I had to). Aage baat khichne se koi matlab nahin nikalta(stretching the story makes no sense),” he told me, and I couldn’t agree more.
The congratulatory part of Badhaai Do is that it has no connection with the wonderful Badhaai Ho. So when Badhaai Teen comes along , don’t go expecting to know anything about what happens to Neena Gupta and Gajraj Rao after their belated parenthood.
To my guarded amusement I find Badhaai Do to be one of those pseudo-liberal films that Ayushmann Khurrana has made a career out of. I wonder how he missed out on this one. Apparently he didn’t have the time as his beefy avatar was busy wooing a transgender in Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui. Khurrana’s loss is Rajkummar Rao’s gain; Rao plays a brawny cop named Shardul Thakur who makes an offer to Sumu Singh(Bhumi Pednekar) that she can’t refuse.
He is gay. She is gay. Agay dekhte jao.
The laughs in Badhaai Do are so strenuous it feels like the team decided to get fashionably liberal.There are jokes about Pednekar North-Eastern partner(Chum Darang) trying to pass off as cousins(curious disbelieving stares from the supporting cast); there is even a joke about Rao not being able to bear children because “it” is too tiny. Ha ha.
Rao and Pednekar,both safely straight in real life, get a chance to feel superior by playing homosexual characters. This is the film that the two actors can show to their children when they reach the age of consent and brag about how liberal they are.
If the truth be told there is nothing funny, let alone liberal, about such tragic marriages of convenience. Gay men and straight women trapped in convenient “arranged” marriages is bad enough. Here you want to show two homosexual individuals acting as each other’s beards and you want to generate laughter out of this tragic circumstance.
Last year there was a dreadful film about a relationship between a gay man and a lesbian waman: Akele Hum Akele Tum. At least it didn’t try to raise laughter out of the couple’s mutual deviancy. Here in Badhaai Do seasoned actors like Sheeba Chaddha, Loveleen Mishra and Seema Pahwa join in the “fun”. Decency be damned.
