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 small-town joint families.
You know them, quirky, cantankerous, eccentric, whimsical, bit cute and honest.
Bhumi’s Sugandha is one of the most sharply-written female heroes in recent films. Sugandha is deeply middle-class 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 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 slurply 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.”
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 Khurrana’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 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. It’s like shooting down an injured bird with a cannon.
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-in-cheek. Director R. S. 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.
R. S. Prasanna couldn’t stop heaving sighs of relief. “We were very sure we weren’t making a sleazy nudge-nudge-wink-wink film about a man who can’t get it up. It happens to so many of us. But no one talks about it, not in real life, not even in the movies. I asked my wife what do women find hot in men. She made me realize it is more important for a man to stand up for his woman than to be a superman in bed. Of course sex is important. But what really turns on women is not an oversized organ below the waist but the organ above the waist. A large heart in the right place is worth infinitely more for a woman than a large reproductive organ.”
Luckily for him, Ayushmann Khurrana agreed with him. “I had absolutely no problem in convincing him to do the film. He was my first choice. He had earlier done a film like Vicky Donor. So he wasn’t squeamish about addressing sexual themes. The redefining of the screen hero comes naturally to him. He knew he wasn’t playing the typical hero. He wasn’t afraid to show himself as vulnerable.”
Shubh Mangal Saavdhan was first made in Tamil as Kalyana Samaya Sadham. But the two versions of the same theme are completely different. “I made sure our writer Hitesh Kewalya didn’t watch the original Tamil film. I just gave him the essence of the original. You see, when I made the Tamil film I wanted to do a story set during a big Indian wedding. I wanted to do a crisis that the couple faces as the celebrations are on. While the Tamil version took us 45 days to write, the Hindi version took 8 months. I wanted Shubh Mangal Saavdhan to be bigger on every level than the original.”
How did the idea of an erectile dysfunction come to Prasanna? “We normally don’t address sex-related problems for men. I mean, there isn’t even a medical term for men with sexual ailments whereas for women we have gynecology. Why are we so coy about men with sexual malfunction? If a man can’t get it up, why is that seen as a topic to be hushed up?”
Prasanna hoped Shubh Mangal Saavdhan opens up a dialogue on male sexual ailments. “We wanted to make a film about a couple who can’t have sex. But we didn’t want it to be sleazy. My producer Aanand Sir (Rai) believed in what we were doing. He told me, ‘Beta, you make the film that you want to.’ He left it to me.”