One heart sketched, and another broken. Sweety Chaudhary harbours a crush on a classmate; but this isnt the type of infatuation usual for Hindi cinemathe kind thats typically the outcome of a meet-cute in a library aisle.
The object of her affection here is another girl, Gurwinder; and she chooses to vent her feelings by silently inscribing the outline of one heart within another, proceeding to colour both with an almost feverish intensity.
Its a budding romance thats not meant to be. Two little fingers interlock before longonly one of those belonging to a girland the thwarted kid resigns herself to seclusion as a way of life. She may well be a modern-day Rapunzel, who is trapped in an antiquated tower of her own; theres, however, no savior princess in sight.
Director Shelly Chopra Dhars movie is all about what it means to be on the other side of the fence. It undeniably scores on intent, but what we get is a sanitised, Disneyesque rendering of what could genuinely have been a groundbreaking movie.
Hailed as Bollywoods first-ever mainstream venture to tackle the theme of lesbian relationships, the film goes one step further in its ambition: this is a story of unspoken truths, the embracement of identity, and acceptanceboth societal and of the self. In a funny but obvious aside, we also see how matrimony can be a five-tiered hurdle in this country: a dot-com-themed obstacle course, where prospective grooms shrug off concerns about trustworthiness, intellectual faculty, statuesqueness (or the lack of it), the number of zeroes in their paycheck, and caste, and not necessarily in that order.
Even the jalebis here are designer in nature. A carefully manicured movie, its predictably more about letting others love than about love itself. And the first time our two heroines meet, its in the middle of what is arguably the definitive Bollywood cliché: a big fat Punjabi wedding.
Sonam Kapoor plays the kudi of this boisterous householda coy, bashful romantic who cant quite wrap her head around why a simple, straight-lined relationship is unnecessarily contorted into a triangular-shaped mess. Wedlock doesnt become her, and its her sexual inclination that drives her family to speak of sharminda and beizzati. Log kya kahenge!, as always, is the question on everyones mind.
Kapoor is passable enough, but I suspect a more nuanced actressone on the lines of a Kalki Koechlin or a Konkona Sen Sharmawould have lent this story the gravitas it deserved. Before trying to yank a tear or two, this movie first needed an actress who could convincingly shed one.
Anil Kapoor, as he so wonderfully demonstrated in Zoya Akhtars Dil Dhadakne Do, is adept at playing a patriarch with first world problems. And its his performance along with Rajkummar Raos that results in some of the most endearing moments in the movie. This is a hypocrite who halts a love affair in its tracks while simultaneously embarking upon another, and his is a romance that unfolds over a skewerful of chicken tikka and a generous helping of barfis.
Balbir Chaudhary thinks he knows what his daughter wants, but is mostly oblivious of the fact that shes playing on a completely different, and queerer, pitch. He likes his pineapple, but this movie is about all things pink.
One can describe the movie as an overdose of confectionery, with chocolatey lovers frequently musing over not-so-chocolatey things. It might be far too tame and heavy-handed for its own good, but one can’t emphasise on its timeliness enough.
In paving a post-Victorian road to emancipation, we might have neglected a few important milestones along the way. Years pass and legislations come and go; prejudices, however, are cast in stone, usually. Love Goes Beyond Tags, as some of our LGBTQ brethren would rightly attest to. We shouldnt think the way we did in 1942.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Shreehari H. is a lover of films and an even greater lover of writing.