Gatta Kushti 2 is, first and foremost, a vast improvement over the first film. There, Veera (Vishnu Vishal), a laundry list misogynist, who desires a wife with long hair and short CV, finds, instead, Keerthy (Aishwarya Lekshmi). She is a champion wrestler who not only has short hair and is more educated than him, but also has the gall to lie about both. They get hitched, and eventually, after the wig falls and the illusions fade, find each other in love. That film’s biggest issue was that in trying to do acrobatics around the story—furnishing plot twists and forced changes of heart at every corner—it forgot to convince us why they eventually fell in love. For example, Keerthy, dogmatically against marriage, melts immediately when Veera refuses a dowry. Is that all it takes? Men, take notes.
The sequel takes their story forward, where Veera and Keerthy now have a motormouth daughter, Mathi (Zara Zyanna), loud and demanding, saucy and oversmart—nothing new here. Keerthy is pursuing wrestling, moving up the ladder of championships, while Veera is a stay-at-home husband, who cooks nutritious meals, sweeps and swabs the floors, and leads acrobatics classes for the neighbourhood stay-at-home wives. When it comes to Mathi, he gives in to all her tantrums, never chiding her for following her passions—even if it is the sum total of dancing to ‘Appudi Pode’—or when she falls short of expectations, failing at school. If you squint closely, you might see his halo. Squint closer, and you can see the fibre from his shirts about to explode from being wound round his built body. Keerthy, on the other hand, is too busy at the wrestling ring and at work—she has a sports quota job at the railways—to notice her daughter falling behind academically and her husband letting it all slide.
Misunderstandings muddy this little paradise—Keerthy’s coach, out of malice, encourages Veera to medicate Keerthy’s food. It would make her less stressful, the coach coaxes Veera. Veera trusts the coach and starts poisoning his own wife with steroids. You can imagine in which direction this plot point is heading in. You can also imagine how grotesquely naive and desperately well-meaning you have to play Veera to make this plot point land, as it does. Vishal’s triumph is making this character feel plausible.
Mathi also has a class teacher who—with her long hair—has Veera smitten, but how much and to what ends, is left blank. Her presence in the film is meant merely to stoke the possibility of Keerthy’s jealousy, and not Veera’s desire. So she is used insofar as Keerthy is provoked.
These sub-plots are flimsy, but director Chella Ayyavu’s directorial language has such conviction, characters melt in his palm into clay he stretches and pulls in all directions. There is a point at which Keerthy, in anger, says Mathi should not grow up to become like Veera—and the malice here, the total lack of respect, is never resolved. Similarly, the slap-trifecta—Keerthy slaps Mathi, so, in anger, Veera slaps Keerthy—is an act that gets quickly swept up in the ‘larger’ drama of their marital woes. It is no easy feat to sweep up the character’s flaws by turning plot into a soup. Nothing of solidity remains. If you want to hold grudges on behalf of characters and watch this film—good luck.
Another reason that this film outranks its prequel is it does not spend too much time around the garden variety misogynists—irritating characters who speak of slapping their wives, poisoning them, thumbing them down, with a casual bravado, and a comic sound design to assure us that we are laughing at them. But are we, really?
These men are pathetic—that much is made clear—and these men are relentless—that much, too, is made clear—so what does having repeated scenes of them spouting their basest desires do? Cinema is, after all, slippery, and it takes very little to slip from laughing at someone to laughing with them.
In the second half of this film, these men appear and mope about their wives, and you recognise what it was about the first film that made it itch like a rash. As in the first film, Ayyavu intercuts this with women complaining about their husbands. But the tone is different—a comic soundscape for the men, a morose one for the women. As no serious scene stays serious for long in Ayyavu’s hands, even this turns to rib tickles and twists of logic. It is a marvel of his direction that scenes can swerve so suddenly, so starkly. They refuse to mean a single thing, by splintering so easily.
But something here rankles. Unlike, say, Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey (2022), where men’s comments, actions, gestures became a site of disgust or anger, Gatta Kushti 1 and 2’s treatment of the men’s antics as comical does something worrying to the film. It consciously denies women the cinematic right to rage. Catharsis is replaced by compromise.
Then, there is the fact that cleverly, in this film, we are alongside Veera and see him being framed and tricked—and so we never get to inhabit the rage in Keerthy when she realises she has been doping without knowing. She is the one who needs to catch up, who needs to give him a chance to explain, who needs to take a beat. Her career becomes an abstract thing as the more real aspect of her marital life pulls focus.
I am not sure Gatta Kushti 2 is a feminist film, because even if it champions Keerthy’s right to wrestle, and Veera’s right to steam idlis, it is ultimately a film that champions them as a unit. This film has a bizarre climax—again, the husband and wife in the wrestling ring—where the desire to bring them together trumps any other desire. It is so quick to assume the happy ending of their union that it forgets Keerthy is unconscious throughout. Ayyavu is so sure of the film he wants to make, the characters lose their humanity. It makes the film fun, but pierce the surface with a question, and the whole charade crumbles.
I suppose, then, what many would consider the film’s flaws—its brazen twists which you can see coming from a mile and dread the arrival of; the inability to stay with a character and, instead, get swept into a soup of plot, building plot often at the cost of character; the unwillingness to maintain a tone, moving from comedy to seriousness within the breadth of a dialogue—are also what makes it such an accomplished film. It knows exactly what it is doing, and Ayyavu has sharpened his skill as a director to give a film that moves so quickly between ideas and positions, character and plot, feminism and heroism, until nothing matters, really, except family. Find whatever feminism you want within it.