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Get It Up With Ayushmann

space in the cluttered canvas to give the couple breathing, if not breeding, space. Their first (aborted) sexual encounter in a cramped MIG flat in Delhi with sounds of songs and everyday conversation seeping subtly into their activity is done in a lengthy flurry of furious foreplay signifying nothing. It’s a sequence filled with clumsy groping and slurpy smooching, played out with endearing honesty.

Another brilliantly written sequence of foiled passion has Sugandha trying to seduce Mudit at a picnic with a plunging neckline and groaning tips from an orgiastic song that goes “Come to me, Danny Boy”.

Shubh Mangal Saavdhan

STARRING: Ayushmann Khurrana, Bhumi Pednekar

DIRECTOR: R.S. Prasanna

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It’s okay if you can’t get it up. There. I said it. It’s taken Hindi cinema years and years to be liberated from the shackles of libidinous machismo. An actor called Ayushmann Khurrana has done it. He plays an ordinary guy with a routine problem with such conviction.

Ayushmann’s Mudit in Shubh Mangal Saavdhan suffers from performance anxiety whenever he tries to make out with his bride-to-be, played with spunk and spontaneity by Bhumi Pednekar who is rapidly emerging as the voice of the mofussil woman.

In many ways, Bhumi is the hero of this remarkable film that’s eventually bogged down by too many stereotypical characters associated with the smalltown joint families.You know them, quirky, cantankerous, eccentric, whimsical but cute and honest.

Bhumi’s Sugandha is one of the most sharply-written female heroes in recent films. Sugandha is deeply middleclass and proud of it. She resolves to marry the sexually dysfunctional (albeit temporarily so, but who knows!) Mudit not out of any false sense of bravado but because... well, this is the best she can get. And he is so goddamned devoted.

Once she makes up her mind to go with Mudit she will see her resolve to its logical (?) conclusion.

Screenwriter Hitesh Kewalya finds

HEY, GOOD LOOKING

A Gentleman

STARRING: Siddharth Malhotra, Jacqueline Fernandez

DIRECTOR: Raj-DK

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It’s not easy to make a smart sassy film with two airheaded non-actors in the lead. Co-directors Raj and DKA, known to perform miracles with stars (remember Tusshar Kapoor in Shor In The City?) do the near-impossible.

A Gentlemen is a suave, sexy pyramid of posh locations and peachy leads who know how to hold their sushis and Guccis in place without looking like ‘wannabes’. The film is a clever reworking of the doppelganger formula where the co-directors have cheekily manipulated the timeline in the narrative to make us think there are two Sidharth Malhotras in the plot.

Malhotra socks his punches and sucks on those over-painted lips like a flee-market version of Tom Cruise. He even does a gay act in a bar with a government official (Chittranjan Tripathy, excellent) to get confidential information. But like many of the cleverly staged comic action sequences this one too overstays its welcome.

The actor is fully aware that this is his do-or-die attempt at Cruise control. Malhotra gives it his best shot - the gun or the tequila, take your pick. He gets to do two different looks. The assassin in Mumbai wears a grimace and the white collar worker in Miami wears a loopy grin.

Raj and DK’s direction is sharp and witty. The script seems original most of the time. The writing is sharp, sometimes a bit too clever. The narrative tends to trip over its own smartness. This happens more than once and after a while the storytelling tires us out with its indefatigable energy-boosted antics.

Danny Boy’s reactions of smothered frustration are priceless. Though the script constructs a case for the girl’s bourgeois heroism (if you can’t have cake, have the crumbs), for me the real hero of the film is Ayushmann Khurana’s Mudit. A man who loses his ‘manhood’ but holds on to his dignity even as the entire family scoffs at his condition, and emerges a hero in the most unforeseen ways.

Ayushmann expresses Mudit’s erectile disenchantment with just a whisper of a look, a hint of despair... subtle sly and chic, this is an Everyman played with reined-in vigour and unostentatious valour. Though his character suffers from performance anxiety, this is performance supremely devoid of any anxiety. Lamentably, the script crowds Mudit’s dignified anxieties with sniggering friends and scoffing relatives. I wish the couple had been left alone by the screenplay to sort out their mutual problem. By bringing the entire family from both the sides into the picture to thresh out the problem on hand, the film ironically mocks the very malady that it so sensitively puts forward. Some of Ayushmann’s scenes with his father and his future father-in-law with both the patriarchs trying to bully him out of his temporary dysfunction, are way too high-pitched and clamorous.

The Big Indian wedding and the activities surrounding it, have for some time now been a source of great colour vibrancy and irony in our cinema. But the wedding festivities have now become a cliché. We need to move on now.

Shubh Mangal Saavdhan serves a dish that’s provocative and tongue-incheek. Director RS Prasanna steers the situations away from cheesiness even when a doctor tells Mudit: “You are making a big thing out of a small thing,” and Mudit replies: “That’s exactly what I am not able to do.”

Ayushmann says such loaded lines and dips glucose biscuits into hot tea to explain his poignant plight to his wife-to be, with heartbreaking earnestness. This is a brave and bright film with its heart in the right place and its gaze refreshingly free of a gender bias fixed firmly at the crotch level.

Subhash K Jha

Admittedly the stunts are trippy and enticing. And the action is refreshingly calm and unhurried. In one lengthy crisply choreographed sequence, a car is wedged between two skyscrapers as Malhotra and his adversary played by Darshan Kumaar (sadly misused) indulge in a ferocious fistfight.

Indeed, the narrative derives its energy from its elaborately conceived action scenes. These, ironically, also suck the life out of the characters, making them look robotic and over-groomed.

Nonetheless the co-directors manage to pull off an engaging film, more remarkable for its isolated but striking sense of upwardly-mobile aesthetics than for instilling habitable emotions in its characters. More often than not, the film seems a vehicle to promote Sidharth’s versatility.

We go from a feeling of watching a cleverly constructed film to a sense of over-constructed but nevertheless engaging spry spy comedy. Subhash K Jha

Qaidi Band

STARRING: Aadar Jain, Anya Singh

DIRECTOR: Habib Faisal

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In Qaidi Band, there is a hotshot lawyer played by Ram Kapoor, who agrees to help innocent undertrials free of cost. Such miracles don’t happen in real life. But when they do in this film, we sigh in relief.

In Faisal’s fast-flowing anthem to imprisoned angst, Sanju (played with bridled vigour by debutant Aadar Jain) tells Bindu (Anya Singh, a prized find)