Parivarak ManuRanjan is about a soft 40-year-old bachelor, Ranjan Dubey (Pankaj Tripathi), who grows feelings for his new housekeeper and property manager, Helen (Aditi Rao Hydari). He is single because he spent his life getting his sisters married off; his duty is over, he works at the electricity board and lives alone. The story unfolds in the gossipy bylanes of Lucknow. If you close your eyes and think of a nosy neighbour, it’s a failure of Hindi cinema that Sunita Rajwar instantly comes to mind. Blame this setting and voice-over on Gullak, the virtuous protagonist on Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi and Raksha Bandhan, and the thorny premise on Rohena Gera’s Sir. This romantic comedy aims to be warm and feel-good, but there’s something uncomfortable about the way it stages its social framework. You don’t have to be woke to see through its nature.
The idea, of course, is to reveal how middle-class society is trained to see an obedient wife as a glorified caretaker; the ‘job’ is not too different. Helen arrives from Delhi, cooks up a storm, runs his ancestral home like a pro, and gets his untidy life in order. She becomes the talk of the town as the “live-in partner” he’s never had, but Ranjan treats her with respect and dignity. His colleagues wait for her office-tiffin visits; the neighbours wait for her to hang clothes on the terrace. He ‘protects’ her from undue attention, like any partner would. It’s all so Rab Ne-coded that he even spends a day out with her around the city over the course of a song. He’s so gentlemanly that it is nearly her responsibility to accept his heart. She is disarmed by his inability to be toxic; that’s how low the bar is.
The film succumbs to its own self-awareness, though. There’s no escaping the fact that Ranjan falls for Helen because she provides the domestic utility of a partner without actually being one; she fixes him and nurtures him on a monthly stipend. Her dramatic Koyla-coded backstory tries to justify his transformation (where he suddenly views her as a human rather than an employee), but it cannot outrun its DNA. The writing never quite comes to terms with the inner workings of the controversial bond, relying mostly on the charm of the performers (like the age-gap romance in Bethlehem Kudumba Unit) — except it’s not as alive to the world it claims to be. There are shades of the Colin Firth track from Love, Actually too, but it comes from a place of judging this arrangement before exoticising it.
There are signs early on. Ranjan’s colleague (co-writer Brijendra Kala doing his broken-English shtick again) accompanies him to a series of match-making dates, and the candidates range from a divorcee and a single mother to a desperate older lady, all of whom are supposed to be funny. It’s the classic male-gaze device: the ‘defectiveness’ of women who do not conform to patriarchal norms. Given that Ranjan has housemaid problems, it’s never clear if this colleague’s video uploaded on social media invites applications for a housekeeper or a potential bride; this ambiguity, too, is played for laughs. When Helen appears at his doorstep, Ranjan’s first reaction is an innuendo: “Your name is Helen (a nod to the legendary Bollywood dancer) and your work is this?”. It’s obvious that her identity will become a plot point, but Aditi Rao Hydari plays her as someone who seems to be performing the role of a male fantasy: the “Sir” in every sentence and the dewy-eyed deference to him sound a bit unnatural.
It’s not that the film doesn’t mean well. But it’s just not grown-up enough to address things like class prejudice, beta masculinity and gender politics. It’s essentially the small-town-Ayushmann-Khurrana-sermon comedy disguised as a broad-strokes entertainer. The casting of Pankaj Tripathi is supposed to advertise the man’s enlightenment, and absolve Ranjan of the skewed power dynamic he betrays. It’s hard to perceive him as a creepy bachelor if it’s Tripathi, who exudes the crowd-pleasing chivalry of a late bloomer. He says all the right things and his monologues are so carefully delivered that you wonder if he’s a product of his environment or a mythological hero. When the sisters turn on Ranjan, it’s a variation of all those movies about older widows or widowers being criticised by their adult children for daring to love and live on their own terms. The fiction thrives on magical apologies, but it delves into science-fiction territory when it suggests that the inherent classism of such units are overnight problems that can be solved.
The resolutions are too simple (one speech always does the trick), and the family-ness of it all is designed to offset the awkward chemistry between the protagonists. All along, it’s difficult to imagine why a preachy romcom urges us to admire the forward-thinking benevolence of the man rather than the conflicted agency of the woman. It’s about Ranjan’s defiance and his middle finger to a “what will people say?” culture, but rarely about Helen and her inclination to reciprocate only because he’s a Good Guy. There’s no evidence that she feels strongly, but there’s a sense that her lack of resistance is her consent. His nobility almost guilts her into seeing love as a language of obligation. In other words, if Parivarik ManuRanjan were a person, it’d be the uncle who dismisses allegations of sexism by declaring that his mother was a househelp and his father was a landlord.