Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhaniya

A boorish film with one-dimensional acting, this is a poor parody of DDLJ

Sent with love, from one fanboy to another, this movie is essentially a parody. A homage to Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge is acceptable, but the idea of making a movie on Humpty Dumpty’s ‘dulhaniya’ is a joke—producer Karan Johar’s flippant idea of what he thinks is ‘camp’.

The intellectual elevators in the films Johar produces are always stuck on the first floor—part of his ‘dumbing down’ strategy—but Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhaniya goes a little beyond that and becomes a mockery of that landmark film. In conversation, setting and acting style, it takes the earthy rural Punjab background of DDLJ and turns it on its head.

The attitude in the movie says, ‘Yaar, that was 1995, nobody speaks like that now’—girls like Kavya (Alia Bhatt) can drink boys under the table these days, hop into bed with them, even use foul language and be savvy about money. Boys can have ridiculous names like Humpty (Rakesh) Sharma, so long as they can carry it off with slick chatter and goofy behaviour; so long as they know how to earn a few bucks by black mailing people and so long as they know how to ‘buddy talk’ the girl’s father and badger him into being their ‘yaar’. The old-world manners of the landed gentry in Punjab are history— boy now gets girl by kicking some ass.

Kavya is engaged to be married to an NRI (Siddharth Shukla) who is just too perfect to be true—medical profession, good looks, great cook. Humpty (Varun Dhawan) and his two sidekicks have a hunch that his is the face of the ‘gay NRI’; and that seducing him with a coy boy is the tactic that will help Humpty get his ‘dulhaniya’.

The two lead actors are lively, but their performances are one dimensional. They stay on the same pitch from first to last—in keeping with the zone of boorishness in which this movie is written.

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Ajit Duara