Language: Hindi
The body's excreta and moist spit — that's how both Shardul (Rajkummar Rao) and Sumi (Bhumi Pednekar) meet their respective, same-sex lovers. It's a subversion of not just the romance genre, where dirt and disgust are preferred outside the purview of love, but also a subversion of the queer genre of storytelling that is comfortably, comfortingly sanitized — think of Vaani Kapoor playing the paragon of femininity in Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, Ayushmann Khurranna as the swelte man in Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, Sonam Kapoor’s lonely, longing self in Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, draped in couturiers Rimple and Harpreet Narula’s fabric, where hand-holding and mooney gazes suffice to show love.
Written by Suman Adhikary and Akshat Ghildial, and directed by Harshavardhan Kulkarni, Badhaai Do takes a sharp left turn from this convention. Sumi has to deposit the stool sample of her father, and falls in love with the woman conducting the tests. Shardul, a muscular police officer — whose love for bodybuilding is seen as both an erotic and an aspirational act — stops a young man who is driving in a haze, to breathe into his hand to detect the smell of alcohol. “Phoonk,” Shardul yells. The young man, panic-struck in his drunken state, spits instead, registering Phoonk and Thoonk, and they fall in love. Love is dirty, too. The film even adds a soft layer — imperceptible if you aren’t looking — of the exhausting, entertaining negotiations around gay sex: who will top, who will bottom, and what does the word “versatile” mask?
Set largely in Dehradun, Badhaai Do takes forward the legacy of Badhaai Ho — a legacy that involves taking an uncomfortable issue — middle-aged parenting — and finding both humour and pathos in it. You are not laughing at the characters as much as you are at their plight. But even when you are laughing at them, it is never out of spite. You are not happy that they are bumbling and incoherent, merely amused. The kind of viewership that requires kindness, in fact insists on it.
Shardul and Sumi enter what is known as a “lavender marriage” — a marriage of convenience where gay men and lesbian women marry to perform heterosexuality in public, while their inner privations are as queer as they come, a streets-sheets dichotomy. Shardul is in love with a much younger man — and this is commented upon, laughed at, and mourned with when it frays — while Sumi finds herself drawn to Rimjhim (Chum Darang), whom Shardul calls Tim Tim, perhaps because he doesn’t like her very much or perhaps he finds her North-Eastern features too alienating.
But soon, the demands for a child — from characters around, mothers and mother-in-laws, played by Seema Pahwa and Sheeba Chaddha — and also the inner longing for one, complicates this marriage. If Rimjhim also wants to co-parent, how does that work? Three people as parents? What would the logistics of this arrangement even look like? This question itself is radical, one that can come off as needlessly provocative as it did in the novel Detransition, Baby — where a detransitioned man, wants to co-parent a child he is expecting with his cis-gender girlfriend, along with his ex-girlfriend, a maternal trans-woman.
The film, however, has a sympathetic, if simple glaze of a solution, and merely points at hope as the way forward. This involves smiling at the camera, rousing music played up, a comforting pat before we are lulled out of the film and out of the theatre, charmed but not convinced. I go back to what Sumi tells Shardul, “Yaar koi samajhta nahi… Aur samjhana kyun hai?” Why should it be explained? Let it be lived, instead.
But even as the film ends in personal catharsis, the systemic claws — laws, social standing, public presentations — weigh the characters down. The film doesn't have answers, perhaps, because there aren't. But at least, unlike Made In Heaven and Inside Edge it doesn't pretend its characters are fighting legal cases for the emancipation of its queer characters, overhauling systems and centuries of hate and exclusion. This, despite one of the characters — a Gulshan Devaiah cameo — even being a lawyer. It lets the personal and the systemic remain separate.
For all its verve, Badhai Do certainly has its limitations. For example, Sheeba Chaddha’s character — Shardul’s mother, widowed — is so lost in her own world, is she grieving or tired or restless? It’s all played for pranks, even as we recognise the emptiness that she walks around with. She’s sapped of spirit, and I wanted to see more of why. The film also doesn't tackle caste in any profound, dialectical way — the way it does with homosexuality — but, nevertheless, highlights it, emphasising the largeness of caste, its clunkiness, its insistence, and its reductive ridiculousness. We laugh at characters who ask for one’s caste ("title") and at Whatsapp groups that foreground the surname as caste pride (Thakur Rocks). But the world is so insular, it doesn’t even offer space for pushing back. Maybe, that’s the limitation of the film’s world itself, and not the film.
Besides, Badhaai Do is largely, and rightfully preoccupied with the characters sexuality, characters who are not paragons but people, they burp and fart and have loose anger and dark circles. They chafe at their limitations.
Shardul slaps a lover. Sumi reduces her lover's job to dust in a fit of rage. Rajkummar Rao has one of the sweetest smiles in Hindi cinema, it's goofy, innocent, and exaggerated and gives the muscle on his body an un-intimidating sheen. When he tells Sumi that he will take care of her by patting his muscles draped in khakee with the police symbol, we don’t know if he is referring to the muscularity of his body or of the institution he is part of. Bhumi Pednekar provides the balance here, without being the dampener. They both weep with their heart baring, and if I heard correctly, so did members in the theatre I was in.
There was a rumbling in the queer corners of the internet when the trailer of Badhaai Do came out, worried that the film would be another vapid, flat story in the garb of a promise of progress. But the animosity was so striking, so insistent, so righteous. Some pointed out to the Straight Pride Flag being used — a mistake which I think has been corrected in the film. Others took a depiction of stalking as an idealisation of it, and a short clip in the trailer to be a plot point and ran with that assumption. (The number of times I have been saved by an editor who said: breathe, wait, are you sure? should we wait?) What I found pertinent in that discourse is not the issues raised itself, but the larger distrust of Bollywood.
There is an automatic oppositional, ironic stance that is struck when a movie is announced. This isn't entirely unfounded — Bollywood is an industry after all, churning our basest instincts into green paper — but neither is it a kind, patient way to interface with a cultural behemoth. Irony has become the weapon of the online angst-ridden, urgency and passion is preferred to patience and poise. I go back to the poet Adam Zagajewski who wrote
“Who has once met
irony will burst into laughter
during the prophet’s lecture.”
Maybe we need to have more faith, or maybe we have outgrown prophets.
Badhaai Do is playing in theatres
Rating: 4/5
Prathyush Parasuraman is a critic and journalist, who writes a weekly newsletter on culture, literature, and cinema at prathyush.substack.com.
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