Other than the running joke of a #ForeverAlone brother, the film literally wages war on the concept of comic timing. You have the token Muslim best friend, the dastardly politician doubling up as the girl’s father, the dodgy orange-pant-sporting bachelor uncle (Oh, Pankaj Tripathi) out to sabotage the hero, the horridly loud neighbour aunty out to expose the unwedded blasphemy of the live-in couple, a background score that is more suited to a defunct Worli discotheque or a dancing circus monkey than the “relevance” of the theme…and so on and so third. I attribute to them the term ‘regressively woke,’ in the sense that they are clearly designed by a bunch of overzealous males desperate to mount the sermon bandwagon.
Most disturbingly, for a comedy with no outer peg, the characters are unfunny. Sure, it might be catering to a second-tier India (based in Mathura), but there is no excuse for insipid writing. The tired film cries itself hoarse about “live-in relationships” two decades too late.īoy and girl decide to shack together after brief romance, homicidal family discovers, couple fakes marriage while secretly trying to put a real ring on it. But its social message is so dated that it’s almost cute. Even the names Guddu Shukla and Rashmi Trivedi sound formulaic. It starts out by trying to be the quintessential small-town comedy: motormouth hero, “firebrand” heroine and two families full of assorted caricatures. Except Aaryan, who I still maintain is the human equivalent of a Twitter rant, is painfully one-note as the harried/henpecked chocolate boy, while Sanon is impressively unremarkable. Luka Chuppi is supremely unimaginative on these accounts it believes that the success of Kartik Aaryan and the dimples of Kriti Sanon are legitimate add-on genres. In short, there has to be a voice attached to the generic comedy – like a famous star attached to an average project, or a cable add-on pack piggybacking the primary package – in order to sell the social message. Those of yore devised the sociopolitical satire, some used the behavioral comedy-of-errors trope, some the sanitized situational comedy and others as recent as Stree even blended horror into the genre. The problem lies in how most of today’s filmmakers perceive the “comedy” part. Maybe the social message drama, but that’s a crisis for another day. There is nothing lazier in Hindi cinema these days than the social message comedy.
0 kommentar(er)
