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Release date:
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August 11, 2017
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Director:
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Shree Narayan
Singh
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Cast:
Language:
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Akshay Kumar,
Bhumi Pednekar, Divyenndu, Sudhir Pandey, Shubha Khote, Rajesh Sharma, Anupam
Kher
Hindi
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We’ve heard Vidya Balan’s soothing voice in government ads on radio and television since 2012,
urging India to end open defecation, exhorting Indians to build toilets in
homes and telling us stories of battles being fought across the country in the
name of the loo. One such ad had Balan placing the spotlight on a bride fromUttar Pradesh called Priyanka Bharti who left her marital home and returned
only when her husband built her a toilet. In the same year, a young woman called Anita Narre from Madhya Pradesh made news for the same reason, refusing
to go back to her sasural until her
spouse built a toilet in the house with the help of district officials, as recorded
by media reports from back then.
Toilet: Ek Prem Katha tells us the story
of Jaya, a fictional woman just like these two. In text flashing on screen
before the end credits, Toilet informs
us that it is based on the story of Anita and her husband Shivram. That’s funny
though since Anita’s potty revolution took place two years before the Narendra
Modi government came to power, yet this film pointedly sets its heroine’s
actions in Modi’s time, implies credit to him and is, in fact, an ode to the
present prime minister cleverly disguised as an ode to sanitation instead.
It is a pity that
director Shree Narayan Singh chose to soil his film with pro-government
propaganda, because until the Modi spiel sneaks up on us in the second half, Toilet: Ek Prem Katha drives home an
important – even if simplistically handled – point.
Keshav (Akshay
Kumar) and his brother Naru (Divyenndu) run a cycle shop in a village in Uttar
Pradesh. At 36, Keshav is single because his accursed kundli can be countered only by a marriage to a buffalo and, if he
does subsequently find himself a human bride, she has to be double-thumbed. So,
he weds the beast and not long after, falls in love with Jaya (Bhumi Pednekar).
She is highly educated, he has just completed school. Her family is modern, his
father’s mentality is stuck in the Stone Age.
To add to the
hurdles in the path of their inevitable union, their relationship starts off on
a misunderstanding, as it is with all conventional Hindi film couples. And of
course there is the question of her thumb. How many does she have?
Never mind how Keshav gets past
these problems, but as you already know from the trailer, he does marry her.
The big Mahabharat of their lives comes when she discovers, on the morning
after her suhaag raat, that her new
house does not have a shauchalay and
she must walk kilometers in the company of all the village women, to relieve
herself in distant fields and foliage. A miserable Jaya decides to leave her
husband unless he builds a toilet in their home.
Toilet:
Ek Prem Katha
is about how Keshav, with some help from her, gets rid of this final hurdle in
their path.
So far so good, if you can get
past a very problematic opening half hour and the silliness of a
nearly-50-year-old Kumar (his birthday is next month) playing a 36-year-old
youth. The age disparity between the hero and the actor playing him is in
keeping with a custom followed by generations of senior male Bollywood actors.
The film faithfully adheres to
two other Hindi film traditions.
First, Kumar is 22 years older
than Pednekar. Yeah yeah, Jaya mocks Keshav about his age, but such mockery is
now a cliché in films headlined by men from Bollywood who are in the vicinity
of 50 and insist on acting with women young enough to be their children.
Second, Keshav stalks Jaya into
falling in love with him, going to the extent of photographing her without her
permission and using her picture in posters for his shop, again without her
say-so. These scenes are all presented as comedy, which is typical of an Akshay Kumar film. The irony is that just this week Kumar had spoken up about the
stalking and attempted abduction of Varnika Kundu by the son of Haryana’s BJP
chief, yet Toilet: Ek Prem Katha
adopts the same jestful tone towards stalking that Union Minister Babul Supriyo did in the context of Kundu’s case, when he joked about “boy chase girl” scenes
in reel and real life.
Sad, because Jaya and Keshav are
the sort of people who are worthy of a film sans socially reprehensible
formulae. And there is so much in this one that works: Kumar’s comic timing is
slamdunk impeccable, Pednekar – the sweet debutant from 2015’s Dum Laga Ke Haisha – is truly gifted,
and there is both humour and poignancy in their interactions once he is done
being a creepy pest (despite the distracting truth that she looks like his
daughter). The songs Has mat pagli pyaar
ho jayega (in the voices of Sonu Nigam and Shreya Ghosal) and Subha ki train (Sachet Tandon and
Parampara Thakur) capture the ache and affection that such a couple might feel.
Just as you start rooting for
these two though, the film takes the shine off them by rooting for the present
government. Shree Narayan Singh has a right to be a fan of Modi, but he has no
right to play fast and loose with facts or play political games with the
viewer. It begins with Jaya looking at reports about toilet-related corruption
scams into which a dialogue is casually snuck in: she tells her granddad that
all of them took place four years back (meaning: in 2013, meaning: before the
present government came to power). We are then repeatedly told that the lack of
toilets in the country is our fault and not the fault of the government. While
it is true that many rural folk have a caste-and-religion-related mind block
against building toilets within their homes, but can someone please tell
me how citizens are to blame, for one, for the lack of clean, safe toilets on
highways and in other public places?
Anyway, a TV reporter
specifically announces that the sarkar
has built three million toilets in the past three years. Three years, meaning,
since 2014 when the present government was voted in, get it? Who knows anything
of the India that existed before that year.
As if that is not glaring enough,
the UP chief minister in the film decides that the only way he can get his
toilet schemes implemented by lazy bureaucrats is to lock the toilets in their
offices until they clear the necessary files (cinematic populism at its best,
since it is tempting for a citizenry tired of lazy babus to excuse such autocratic, unlawful moves) and adds for good
measure: if Modiji could introduce notebandi
(a.k.a. demonetisation) then why can I not lock these toilets for the good of
the country? (words to that effect)
I kept waiting for someone to
also praise Aadhaar and the implementation of GST, to complete the sucking-up
agenda. Small mercy that Toilet stops
at its devotion to notebandi.
The tragedy of Toilet: Ek Prem Katha is that minus the
stalking and the chamchagiri, it
could have been a good film. Yes it is simplistic in its take on the prejudices
against toilet building in our country, yes it implies that this is a
Brahmin-specific – or at least upper-caste-specific – issue, yes it ignores the
trauma of Dalits who are forced to clean the faeces of upper castes in both
rural and urban areas (highlighted in Divya Bharathi’s recent documentary Kakkoos), yes it lacks the nuance and
realism of the lovely Malayalam feature film Manhole by Vidhu Vincent which is about manuel scavengers in our
cities, yes it displays a bizarre gender skew when it makes the need for
toilets a women’s-only issue (though women are most affected due to the security
risk in using fields and other public spaces, hygiene and dignity are human
concerns across genders), yes it misses
the complexities in women’s reactions to public defecation (studies have shown that some rural women actually prefer that morning walk over privacy because
that is the only time their families allow them to leave the four walls of
their homes), yes the film is guilty of all these flaws but at least it has
taken the initiative to throw light on certain aspects of a crucial,
contentious issue in a commercial venture with the potential to reach large
sections of the masses.
Unfortunately, that intention and
all its positives are completely overshadowed by its cringe-worthy keenness to
bow and scrape before the present government and its head, an aspect of the
film that lingers as much as its pluses because all the obsequiousness is
packed into the latter half. What should have been a paean to the potty has
ended up being a dishonest paean to Modi. It may as well have been named Toilet: Ek Toady Ki Katha.
Rating
(out of five stars): *1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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155 minutes
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This
review has also been published on Firstpost:
1.5 stars, you are kidding me.
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