Delhi might be battling its worst smog in recent history, and even that doesn’t beat the toxicity in the trailer of 2019’s Pati, Patni Aur Woh. A remake of BR Chopra’s film of the same name (from 1978), the film is so unsure of its ambitions, that it goes to the extent of force-fitting a Kartik Aaryan rant. In the rant, Aaryan (who got most of his fame through his rants in Luv Ranjan’s Pyaar Ka Punchnama films) goes on to explain how ‘poor men’ like himself have to resort to jugaad to procure sex from their wives, and then get branded rapists. It’s a fleeting moment in the trailer’s duration (of nearly three minutes), that sees women through a typical Luv Ranjan lens.
The women in Luv Ranjan’s universe – a) LOVE to shop, and torment their partners with their indecisiveness b) Use men for personal gains c) They’re consistently scheming about something or the other. These aren’t *human* characters as much, as they’re a dude-bro’s revenge characterisation of an ex-girlfriend after a bitter break-up.
And this ‘formula’ continues in Kartik Aaryan’s latest film, which takes Bhumi Pednekar’s talent and asks her to make a lazy sex joke as the ‘spunky girl’ from a small town. With Ananya Panday, the trailer does only a marginally better job than Student Of The Year 2, while making her seem like a real actor and not just a product of clueless nepotism.
1978’s original film, starring Sanjeev Kumar, Vidya Sinha and Ranjeeta Kaur, was meant to be a light-hearted take on the misadventures of the philandering man. What Mudassar Aziz (director of the Happy Bhag Jayegi films) has done to the original film’s message is hard to describe at the moment. But if the trailer is anything to go by, he’s turned the original film into an early 2000s Anees Bazmee/Indra Kumar film – the kind where the men compare their wives/girlfriends to Dal & Biryani respectively.
It’s easy to deduce why a Mudassar Aziz would go down this path. After two marginally successful attempts with the Pyaar Ka Punchnama films, Luv Ranjan broke out with 2017’s Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety – a formula that has been replicated into last year’s Luka Chuppi, De De Pyaar De, and recently Ujda Chaman. Nobody’s saying that such films don’t have a right to exist, but when films like these result in only more shameless/toxic/insensitive films parading under the garb of being ‘politically incorrect’, you know something’s wrong. Right?
Watch the trailer of Pati Patni Aur Woh here:
