Pati Patni Aur Woh Do

दिसंबर, 2019 में आई मुदस्सर अज़ीज़ की ‘पति पत्नी और वो’ असल में 1978 में आई दिग्गज निर्देशक बी.आर. चोपड़ा की फिल्म ’पति पत्नी और वो’ का रीमेक थी। मूल फिल्म में संजीव कुमार, विद्या सिन्हा और रंजीता थे जबकि 2019 वाली फिल्म में कानपुर में सरकारी नौकरी कर रहा इंजीनियर कार्तिक आर्यन अपनी पत्नी भूमि पेढनेकर से छुपा कर अनन्या पांडेय से अफेयर कर रहा था। यह रीमेक ओरिजनल फिल्म की तरह क्लासिक भले ही नहीं थी लेकिन मसालेदार थी, सो कामयाब भी हुई। उस फिल्म के रिव्यू में मैंने लिखा था कि अब क्लासिक फिल्में किसे चाहिएं? जब दर्शक जंक-फूड से खुश हों तो फिल्म वाले भी क्यों ज़ोर लगाएं।

Pati Patni Aur Woh Do belongs to that familiar subgenre of Hindi comedy where men create catastrophes through lies and cowardice, then expect applause for surviving the consequences. Ayushmann Khurrana plays Prajapati Pandey, a forest ranger introduced with the kind of exaggerated masculinity the film both mocks and indulges. When on a mission to trap a roaming leopard in Prayagraj, where Mudassar Aziz locates the chaos, Prajapati is described as a “leopard Casanova.”

As a child, I used to enjoy flipping through pages of the Limca Book of Records. There were the weirdest categories: longest moustaches, walking on hands, typing with noses. I always imagined that I could some day qualify by doing an outlandish feat that nobody else thought of. You must be wondering where this is going; who starts a review like this? Wonder no further (like the film at hand). The closest I’ve gotten to being in that book is today. The feat: watching a two-hour “laugh riot” without a single expression on my face. Forget chuckling, I think I anti-chuckled: minus-humour, if that’s a thing. Which surely must be some kind of record. The problem is I’m not the only participant. From the reactions in a cinema hall every other Friday, there’s plenty of competition. And there are sub-categories: watching a comedy without watching it (eyes glued to the phone), maximum yawns in a screening, most planted viewers to elicit reactions. I don’t know if I’ll win. As a film critic, though, I’m a strong contender.

Trade analysts say, the film has no buzz. But the content is fun and fizz. It takes a short while to get used to forest officer Prajapati Pandey (Ayushmann Khurrana) and his over-the-top decibel. But by the time “Casanova” leopard catcher nets his “tenduyi” and reaches home to wife and TV journalist Aparna Trivedi (Wamiqa Gabbi), his effervescence catches on. The viewer is all in as writer-director Mudassar Aziz rolls out the chuckles with Prajapati stepping in to help distressed collegemate Chanchal Kumari (Sara Ali Khan), unwittingly letting loose a string of misunderstandings.

At some point in the utter nonsense of a film called Pati Patni Aur Woh Do — calling it a comedy would be an insult to the genre — a character tells another: “Bakloli ki pratiyogita ho toh kirtimaan honge aap”. In language that you and I would perhaps understand (and, of course, I had to Google this), it means that when it comes to foolishness or clownery, the person addressed would win a competition hands down. How we wish Pati Patni Aur Woh Do was about clownery, which is an art in itself. But art, craft, skill, storytelling and everything in between is grossly missing in this Mudassar Aziz-directed film which follows the filmmaker’s own Pati Patni Aur Woh, released in 2019, starring Ananya Panday and Bhumi Pednekar, which, in many ways, benefited from Kartik Aaryan’s goofy charm (and we can’t really believe we are writing this).