FUN BUT FORMULAIC GAY ROMANCE

For Jitendra Kumar, playing Aman would seem like a perfect launch to the big screen. His fans would previously know him from web series The Viral Fever. He carries that understated screen presence into playing Aman, the perfect Yin to Ayushmann’s Yang.

The chemistry between the two actors owes itself to an author-backed plot, but the lm wouldn't be the same without the supporting cast of Neena Gupta and Gajraj Rao. The elderly couple of Badhai Ho return to the screen as Aman's parents, primarily to shock as the supportive parents of their gay son.

Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan

STARRING: Ayushmann Khurrana, Jitendra Kumar, Neena Gupta

DIRECTOR: Hitesh Kewalya

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Despite sounding like a cliched Bollywood rom-com of two lovebirds ghting parental censure and societal diktats, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan was always going to be different. The lm grabbed eyeballs the day it was announced that the lovebirds weren't going to be a guy and a girl, going against the formula of Bollywood’s money-making love stories. Instead, this was commercial Bollywood's rst ever homosexual rom-com.

To retain every stereotype of the genre and turn the lucrative package into a quiet little snub at homophobes, amid standard hilarity and melodrama, is actually quite an experiment to pull off. Debutant writer-director Hitesh Kewalya deserves kudos if only for that much.

Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan is set against a small-town, middleclass backdrop. This is the world of Aman Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar), who completes a happy family album with his mother, father and siblings – till he is swept off his feet by Kartik Singh (Ayushmann Khurrana). Thus begins an affair that will leave his conservative family lost for words.

The struggle of the gay couple, as they try to convince their kin into acceptance, is played out with humour and Kewalya's script credibly avoids getting ippant about it. Rather, as Aman's family go on a desperate matchmaking spree to hook him up with a girl, you realise the joke's on homophobia.

Being Kartik Singh has to be Ayushmann Khurrana's toughest challenge among his recent lms if only because this role would seem at loggerheads with mainstream Bollywood heroes, but it continues his latest adventures in disrupting Bollywood tropes.