Ginny Wedss Sunny 2

Bollywood’s arranged-marriage factory fires up again with a rom-com that feels cliched and worn out. The spiritual sequel to the 2020 original, once again trots out the familiar template: a gruff, Rishikesh-based wrestler (Avinash Tiwary) and an effervescent Delhi girl (Medha Shankr) thrown into an arranged match built on mutual lies and family fabrications.

हिंदुस्तानी समाज में शादी जितनी जरूरी मानी जाती है, इस रिश्ते में मन का मीत मिलना उतना ही जटिल भी होता है। शादी के इसी उतार-चढ़ाव भरे रिश्ते को हल्के-फुल्के ढंग से दिखाने की कोशिश है फिल्म ‘गिन्नी वेड्स सनी 2’, जो साल 2020 में फिल्‍म का स्‍प‍िरिचुअल सीक्‍वल है। तब फिल्‍म में विक्रांत मैसी और यामी गौतम थे। इस बार अविनाश तिवारी और ‘12वीं फेल’ फेम मेधा शंकर हैं। यह भी कम दिलचस्‍प नहीं है कि 6 साल पहले आई पहली फिल्म ने कोई खास वाहवाही नहीं बटोरी थी, लेकिन बावजूद इसके मेकर्स ने इसका सीक्वल सिनेमाघरों में लाने की हिम्मत दिखाई है।

She is nursing a heartbreak and a broken engagement. He is trying to cope with repercussions of a fake viral video. She is educated and hails from New Delhi. He was once a wrestler who had a tryst with infamy. Clearly, it’s a mismatch from the word go… and not even a classic case of opposites attract. A rather open-minded Ginny (Medha Shankr) and Sunny (Avinash Tiwary) with a small-town mindset meet in the world of arranged matches, where a lie here and there, pretending to be what you are not, is the norm.

I have to get this out of my system. We need to talk about the dying — nay, extinct — art of the background score in mainstream Hindi cinema. The setup of Ginny Wedss Sunny 2 somewhat brings to mind Haseen Dillruba (2021), the romantic thriller about semi-toxic newlyweds in Haridwar; she’s a siren, he’s a Nice Guy, she cheats, then he becomes the madness and badness she craves for. I remember disliking Haseen Dillruba until a haunting theme in the climax made me rethink my reading of the entire film — a rare case of a score urging the viewer to feel a story rather than judge it. That’s the job of background music and supplementary sound: an extension of unfilmable text, not lazy mood-prompts for the audience.

Ginny Wedss Sunny 2 is exactly the kind of rom-com that Bollywood is constrained to doing these days, in an era swinging wildly between minority drubbing and bhajan clubbing: empty of fresh ideas, trying to please the conservatives and the so-called moderns, going exactly nowhere High-school dropout Shivansh aka Sunny (Avinash Tiwary) is a kushti-loving fellow who is careful to wear a langot which looks more like a pair of shorts. His big ambition is to wrestle at the national level, but a wrong video going viral puts paid to that plan, leaving him unhappy and unfulfilled in his Rishikesh house, which he shares with his father (Sudhir Pandey), and older brother and bhabhi, and a tenant who doubles up as the ‘hero ka BFF’.