Badhaai Do Trailer Is Hugely Problematic

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.