Movie Review: Pati Patni Aur Woh Do

This is the kind of movie where homosexuality is played for laughs, adultery makes the husband look cool and TV channels have only one employee, the editor- in-chief. Ayushmann Khurrana movies have made a fetish of mocking regressive social attitudes, from sexual dysfunction to obsession with looks to casteism and parochialism. They have usually been mildly rebellious and quietly funny.

Khurrana’s characters have usually borne the brunt of social opprobrium for trying to conform to or confront such deep-seated prejudices. Therefore, it is with a heavy heart that one reports that in this movie, he has become the very thing he scorns. Despite a valiant speech at the end where he expounds on how seeing should not be believing in this age of instant judgement, Khurrana spends much of the movie pretending to be a forest officer who is wooing two women outside his seemingly perfect marriage.

One alleged lover is his colleague, and the other is a friend whom he is trying to help flee her future father-in-law, a casteist politician (Tigmanshu Dhulia). The three women in his life are smart and beautiful which makes this seedy enterprise with its cheap jokes even more intolerable.