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Release
date:
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October 18, 2018
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Director:
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Amit Ravindernath Sharma
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Cast:
Language:
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Neena Gupta, Gajraj Rao, Ayushmann Khurrana,
Sanya Malhotra, Surekha Sikri, Shardul Rana, Sheeba Chadda
Hindi
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What happens when a
woman gets pregnant in her twilight years. If some gentle ribbing is
all you are expecting, then you are out of touch with reality and the
subconscious prudery that even supposed liberals direct at the elderly.
Now imagine if the
expectant mother and her husband, the child’s father, are already parents of a
teenaged son and another who is in his 20s. The contempt they face within the
home then is no less than what the outside world inevitably throws at them, as
Priyamvada and Manoj Kaushik discover in Badhaai
Ho.
Manoj (Gajraj Rao)
is employed in the Indian Railways and Priyamvada (Neena Gupta) manages their
home. Their son Nakul (Ayushmann Khurrana) works in an advertising firm and is
dating his colleague Renee (Sanya Malhotra). The younger one, Gullar (Shardul
Rana), is in school.
Their family is
rounded off by a tetchy, demanding grandmother (Surekha Sikri). Or so they
think until a sudden bout of unease takes Priyamvada to the doctor and they
realise she is almost halfway through a pregnancy she was not aware of.
The Kaushiks live
in a congested house in a lower-middle-class Delhi locality with an old-world
air. Nakul’s office is in Gurgaon, the suburb characterised by its glitzy,
gigantic, modern buildings. Their worldview lies somewhere in between.
And so, first comes
the older couple’s shyness to announce what in their youth would have been
demanded of them as “good news” they owe to the human species. Then comes the
laughter and derision of family and their larger social circle. This much is
expected in such a story and makes Badhaai
Ho a lovable slice-of-life comedy.
What is most
telling and a departure from the expected is the nuance and sensitivity with
which director Amit Ravindernath Sharma (who earlier made the dreadful Tevar) and
his writing team (story: Shantanu Srivastava and Akshat Ghildial, screenplay:
Akshat Ghildial) examine Priyamvada and Manoj’s own response to their
situation, and the judgement they face from a seemingly forward-thinking
character who sees in their decision not to terminate the pregnancy a sign of
backwardness.
Messrs Sharma,
Srivastava and Ghildial’s work reminded me of an article I read a few years
back by a rape survivor who said she had to deal with considerable social
opprobrium in small-town America when she decided not to abort the child she
conceived from rape. Too many people who view themselves as liberal think that
pro-choice means pro-abortion. It does not. It means being in favour of the
right of every woman to choose for herself. So if you pressure her with your
expectation that she absolutely must, in certain specific circumstances,
exercise the option the law gives her, then how are you different from
fundamentalists who want to change the law that gives women this freedom?
Priyamvada holds
the conservative view that abortion is a sin, Manoj clearly does not and would
like her to
consider it. Badhaai
Ho for its part reveals its standpoint in
the position Manoj ultimately takes when he tells his beloved Priyamvada: “Kasht tera hai, final decision bhi tera hi hoga” (You are the one who
will go through the trouble that this pregnancy entails, therefore the final
decision too will be yours). That, and the fact that Badhaai Ho openly acknowledges abortion as an acceptable
possibility, takes it light years ahead of most Hindi cinema so far
including the Salman Khan-Anushka Sharma-starrer Sultan (2016) which steered
clear of the subject perhaps for fear of antagonising a traditionalist
audience.
This is what makes Badhaai Ho not just warm, funny and
realistic, but also thinking, intelligent and unobtrusively politically and
socially conscious. What makes it so enjoyable is that it wears its IQ
lightly.
The characters in
this film are not painted in black and white but in all the colours of the
rainbow. The middle-class protagonists are not portrayed as saints nor are the
upper classes presented as evil clichés. The screenplay, like these people,
does have its imperfections though. Halfway down the line it moves too far away
from Priyamvada and Manoj in its focus on Nakul and Renee. It’s not that we don’t
get to spend time with them – of course we do – but they are dears and it feels
like not enough. Since the young are the top priority of most cinema, it would
have been nice to get better acquainted with the older pair here and especially
know more about Priyamvada’s mindset, her goals and life-long dreams.
Still, what Badhaai Ho offers is precious – an insight
into the lives of real people rather than glossed-up specimens of humanity that
exist only in the imagination of commercial filmmakers. Sanu John Varughese’s camerawork
plays a part in highlighting the contrasting spaces Nakul in particular
inhabits. Varughese scales down while shooting the Kaushiks’ home milieu and
even Renee’s posh
residence, but his frames become more expansive when they shift to Gurgaon. The cast and Sharma’s vision are a match made in heaven.
Ayushmann Khurrana
is gradually becoming the Amol Palekar of his generation, yet different. This
young artiste is capable of top-lining conventional Bollywood cinema (as we see
even with the closing song and dance routine in Badhaai Ho), but chooses to work in small films where the star is
the story. He is completely convincing here as a well-intentioned though
conflicted son. He also shares a comfortable chemistry with his co-star Sanya
Malhotra, whose calling card as of now is her role as a wrestler in the Aamir Khan-starrer
Dangal (2016).
Within a span of just three weeks, Malhotra
has managed to display amazing versatility playing a sensible, urban, wealthy
woman of today in Badhaai Ho, a
character that is chalk to the cheese that is the loud, pugnacious sibling
living in rural Rajasthan that she was in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Pataakha.
Surekha Sikri is
rollicking good fun as the cantankerous Dadi who
turns out to be not quite as old-fashioned as you might think at first. Hers is
a character that occasionally is in danger of being overplayed, but Sikri holds
back just at the point where she needs to. The always wonderful Sheeba Chadda’s
turn as Renee’s mother is marked by her trademark restraint.
Neena Gupta plays
Priyamvada with the natural ease that has characterised all her performances on
film and TV. In addition it is worth noting how she has been styled and how she
chooses to carry herself in Badhaai Ho.
When she was young I never particularly thought of her looks, but in this film
I was struck by her luminous prettiness in a face filled out beautifully with
life experiences. Gajraj Rao is so credible as her reticent yet romantically
inclined partner, and they are so good together, that they bring to mind these lines from I Believe In You sung by the legendary American country musician Don
Williams: “But I believe in love / I believe in babies / I believe in Mom and
Dad / I believe in you.”
Badhaai Ho believes in Mom and Dad. And you know what, Mr Sharma? I
believe in you.
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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125 minutes 38 seconds
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A version of this review has also been published on Firstpost:
Poster
courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badhaai_Ho
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