By: Vanshika Luthra
Another day at the box office, and yet another banger by Ayushmann Khurrana. Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan is your present dose of ‘not-so-mainstream’ family drama.
A step forward in the realm of commercial cinema, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan is a half-hearted attempt to address a sensitive social issue. The movie encapsulates the struggle of coming out in a traditional Indian family, and fighting the subsequent stereotypes and prejudices that come with it.
The movie opens with a recreation of the iconic DDLJ train scene, but this time not with Raj and Simran but with Kartik (Ayushmann Khurrana) and Aman (Jitendra Kumar). Kartik is an ‘out and proud’ man who came out to his parents as a teenager, and has had no sense of embarrassment since, whereas Aman is a small town boy who still dreads the idea of coming out to his conservative family. The story takes pace in the first half itself when Aman’s father, Shankar Tripathi (Gajraj Rao) catches the two boys kissing in a train coach. What follows is an hour and forty minutes worth of mainstream Bollywood drama, involving a wedding, bickering relatives, bride running away on a horse, bizarre rituals, forced marriages and desperate attempts at humor.
In between attempts to entertain the audience and at the same time bringing to light a sensitive issue, somewhere the film loses a sense of it own cause and fails to capture the reality of everyday struggles in the lives of the people from the LGBTQ community. The audience fails to form an emotional connect with either of the characters or resonate with any component of the story.
However, the movie does contain certain key scenes that at least partly compensate for the movie as a whole. These include a heartfelt expression of Aman’s feelings for Kartik to his parents and towards the end, a great relief for the entire family brought in by the supreme court’s verdict of abolishment of section 377. However, the highlight of the the two-hour movie was a moving speech by Khurrana’s character, shirtless with only a pride flag hanging on the back, addressing the stigma around homosexuality.
Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan sure is ,to a larger extent, an eye opener for its audience. It’s a much needed attempt at normalising homosexuality and sure would have been a benchmark had it done its job in a less dramatic and unnecessarily comedic manner. However, Ayushmann Khurrana once again proves his worth, and makes Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan a mass entertainer.
Tabeer 