When she gets a posting in Meerut, she doesn’t hesitate to accept the job, despite never having lived alone. (Fittingly, the first fight between Prem and Sandhya occurs in a library like a stern schoolteacher, she asks him to lower his voice.) She’s got guts too. Every now and then, it’s nice to be reminded that there are filmmakers who don’t think in English and write in Hindi. Prem yields to her overtures, and the next morning, he says to the head of the RSS-like organisation he’s a part of that he succumbed to his senses. The result of this purchase made me laugh my head off. The “comedy” scenes are beautifully low-key, like the one in which she goes to a neighbourhood store to buy lingerie because Prem doesn’t seem terribly interested in discharging his husbandly duties. It would have been easy to make Sandhya the (big) butt of jokes, like Guddi Maruti was in the films of the period. We see her dancing with others at weddings, full-on jhatkas that find fruition in the adorably tacky ‘90s-style song over the closing credits. In other words, the people around her (including her bratty younger brother) may be fat-shaming her, but she’s not fat-shaming herself, which is – to use the appropriate word here – huge. She knows her weight is a function of her body’s “metabolism” – her use of this word when mocked lightly about her size by Prem’s aunt (Sheeba Chaddha) is one of the film’s most delightful moments. Sandhya’s self-esteem is fine, thank you very much. She’s no Bridget Jones, determined to knock off the kilos in order to gain self-esteem. Sandhya is a sweet-looking woman, a little on the heavier side – but she isn’t terribly conscious about it. That’s the first of a series of surprises. This may be the only rom-com where the leads – Prem (an effectively subdued Ayushmann Khurrana) and Sandhya (Bhumi Pednekar) – meet in a temple, surrounded by their families. The frames buzz with life – someone is always flitting in and out. Within his rom-com template, Katariya resurrects the Piya Ka Ghar-type drama, filled with large, tradition-bound families whose members couldn’t take a step without everyone else voicing an opinion. The film’s heart, though, is from the 1970s. Mile sur mera tumhara wafts out of television sets, but Bhimsen Joshi has nothing on Kumar Sanu, who’s everywhere. In Dum Laga Ke Haisha, he transports the rom-com – a traditionally urbane genre – to Haridwar of the 1990s. ![]() In his first feature, 10ml Love, he relocated A Midsummer Night’s Dream to modern-day Mumbai. Sharat Katariya likes to take familiar stories and set them in places you don’t expect.
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