REVIEW 351: PYAAR KA PUNCHNAMA 2

Release date:	October 16, 2015
Director:	Luv Ranjan
Cast: Language:	Kartik Aaryan, Nushrat Bharucha, Sonalli Sehgall, Ishita Sharma, Omkar Kapoor, Sunny Nijjar Hindi

If it wasn’t trying to cash in on the success of the first film, Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2 could have been called All Women Are Bitches, All Men Think With Their Penises.

The template is exactly the same as PKP1: three young men who are flatmates and best buddies get romantically involved with women who are manipulative witches from the word go. The men are unhappy almost from the start of these relationships but are too stupid to see it (actually, the film portrays it as innocence and natural goodness, not stupidity). Their lives go downhill as the women get meaner by the day, until the men finally finally put them in their place and escape.

So determined is director Luv Ranjan to stick to the prototype that gave him a sleeper hit in 2011, that he retains four out of the six members of PKP1’s lead cast. The tall strapping curly-haired model Raayo S. Bakhirta has been replaced with another tall strapping curly-haired model type (Sunny Nijjar). The song Bandh gaya patta, dekho bann gaya kutta (The leash has been tied / Look, he’s become a dog) is also repeated here. And actor Kartik Aaryan, who delivered a many-minutes-long woman-bashing monologue in Part 1, is given a similar tirade of a similar length in Part 2 too. This is unapologetically repetitive and unoriginal fare.

Like PKP1, PKP2 too is an all-out anti-women hate fest pretending to be a comedy. It also unwittingly degrades men – so subtly that the fellows laughing their guts out in the hall where I watched the film did not seem to get it. It’s possible the writers and director haven’t got it either.

As with PKP1, the women in PKP2 too are all nasty, rotten creatures. If they’re not nagging and lying, acting spoilt or downright unpleasant, they are cheating on their boyfriends or mooching off them, and a male character actually explains that the men still tolerate them because of that one thing they have to offer. Err, will someone tell him he could get that one thing with no strings attached by paying for the services of a sex worker? He seems to know nothing of this.

PKP2’s three male leads are in relationships bereft of a single redeeming feature – no warmth, no understanding, no friendship, yet they persist in permitting their girlfriends to treat them like turds. It appears to be this film’s contention that men are so lacking in self-respect, so foolish and so enslaved by their crotches that they will swallow insults, infidelity and lack of integrity, just so long as there is sex at the end of the tunnel.

The film’s unrealistic screenplay lacks balance, as was the case with PKP1. It is telling that between these two films, Luv Ranjan went all-out feminist with Akaash Vani, a film on a subject that’s anathema to most people: marital rape. While dealing with a women’s rights issue, he gave us a ton of good guys as a counterpoint to one bad man. He claimed in a recent interview to The Indian Express that PKP1 happened because “I wanted to do a film against love…I wanted to show how in love the whole concept of relationship can become troublesome”. How come a film that’s supposedly “against love” turned out to be against women only?

Tut tut, the director thinks those who call him a misogynist are too touchy. “Our metropolitan societies have become hypersensitive and we can’t take a joke,” he says. Oh puhlease, Mr Ranjan, at least be honest about the fact that these two films are a transparent bid to cash in on the prevailing misogyny among Hindi cinema’s male-dominated audience. If that were not the case, what are the chances that you will make PKP3 with gender roles swapped, an equal measure of unbridled male-bashing and not even one halfway decent man anywhere in the picture? For the record, such a concept is equally contemptible.

Since PKP2 is almost a carbon copy of PKP1, what’s right with it is exactly what was right with the first film: the cast has potential and the production values are slick. Since the team has rolled out pretty much the same film again, I’m not bothering to repeat all the points I made in 2011: do read the review I wrote back then (link).

Here’s an additional point: women often turn on their own to earn brownie points with men in this patriarchal world, but guys, in a world where you hold all the aces, can you be so foolish as to celebrate a film that unwittingly portrays you too so poorly? Do you agree with PKP2’s contention that your lives revolve entirely around the demands of your nether regions?

Your call.

Rating (out of five): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	136 minutes

Photograph courtesy: https://www.facebook.com/PKP2Official