New Delhi:
A marriage annulled returns to haunt a man all set to move on in life in the lovey-dovey company of another woman. Love quickly flies out the window when the ex-wife, with a massive axe to grind, decides to do everything in her power to queer the pitch and picks up cudgels against the bride-to-be. Isn’t that the stuff that zany rom-coms are usually made of? Yes, but only in an ideal world.
Mere Husband Ki Biwi, caught in a yawning gap between intent and execution, gropes in the dark for inspiration and fresh ideas and finds none worth a mention.
The breakup has left a sorry trail of bitterness and the new hookup is riddled with challenges created by the man’s messy past. That is an obvious boilerplate for a cocktail of emotional bedlam, romantic recriminations, and much triangular to-ing and fro-ing. It’s all sufficiently flighty and frothy and yet painfully tedious. To biwi or not to biwi? That is the question the film runs concentric circles around and does not formulate a convincing answer.
Working lazily and unimaginatively with building blocks that have been done to death, writer-director Mudassar Aziz serves up what is no more than a shiny but stale broth, passably droll in parts and wholly vacuous in all others.
The two women, poles apart in disposition and demeanour, go hammer and tongs at each other while the man caught in the crossfire feigns hurt innocence. Aziz, the maker of films like Happy Bhaag Jayegi, Pati Patni Aur Woh, and Khel Khel Mein, tries to squeeze drama and comedy out of a situation that he is at home with as a director. The union of the two impulses is stillborn, resulting in a middling rom-com that is too all-over-the-place for its own good.
Lead actor Arjun Kapoor, coming off his outlandish villainous act in Singham Again, is back in his comfort zone. He is a gentleman who exists in something akin to the real realm. The role should have been a walk in the park for him. It isn’t because the character, who is meant to be the focal point of a woke-ish gender clash rigmarole, is pulled in different directions and is rarely able to hold our attention.
The film receives pretty much the same treatment — half-hearted and confused — although by virtue of being a break from the turgid historicals and opportunistic and coloured recreations of contemporary events that Bollywood pedals these days it is likely to be regarded as a harmless and half decent entertainer. That it never comes anywhere near finding a steady comic rhythm or sustained dramatic logic is not only disappointing but also proof, if proof were ever needed, that scattershot efforts such as these are destined to flounder.
The script takes an inordinate amount of time to set up the central premise and then loses its way completely on its way to a cluttered, confused climax. Like the film, the actor is kind of left stranded midstream, gasping for breath.
The hero is a Delhi professional who has parted ways with his journalist-wife, Prabhsimran (Bhumi Pednekar) whose focus on professional advancement riles the man. The film strives for gender balance one moment and slips into problematic positions the very next. The script does not think that Ankur (Kapoor) is an absolute oaf unable to come to terms with his spouse’s success.
A wisecracking best friend (Harsh Gujral) is always at hand to lighten the mood when the going gets overly intense due to the sly games Prabhsimran and Ankita (Rakul Preet Singh) play in order to strengthen their respective claims on the man. It is hard to fathom why two bright young ladies should feel the need to slug it out for a guy who struggles to prove that he means what he says.
That is not unlike the biggest problem that besets Mere Husband Ki Biwi. It believes it is a marital comedy for the times but it is hardly able to fully shed its regressive notions about what makes or breaks a marriage. It points a finger at the wife but disguises the accusatory tone in tangential fluff. The things that Mere Husband Ki Biwi would have us believe do not pass muster even when they are couched in seemingly innocuous jokes.
The film seems to want to pat itself on the back each time it manages to string together a one-liner, so rare are they. It is like that loquacious, attention-seeking man at a party who thinks that every sentence he utters is not only a pearl of wisdom worth preserving but is also as witty as hell. Genuine wisdom and wit are traits Mere Husband Ki Biwi sorely lacks.
Pednekar plays a hard boiled Punjabi woman who will not die wondering. Rakul Preet Singh is all swag and saccharine. The two are hard-pressed to emerge out of the wreck that is Mere Husband Ki Biwi. They do make it at times. But Arjun Kapoor looks like a man totally foxed by the over-familiarity of the circumstances the film concocts.
Do not go looking for saving graces in Mere Husband Ki Biwi – one could count them on a single finger. Save yourself the pain of being witness to an exercise that delivers well-done tropes without a semblance of originality.
Mere Husband Ki Biwi, a stoop and stumble affair, sets the bar conveniently low but, strangely, struggles to top even that. It isn’t a victim of its ambition, but of the singular lack of it.
