Jeevan Ya Bheema Con? is what happens when Delhi Belly tries (but fails) to be a Kunal Kemmu comedy from the 2010s. It’s the sort of chaotic middle-class gag that occasionally remembers that it’s a movie. It begins with the title itself: a play on the name of the government life-insurance scheme (Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojna), where the premise features broke characters called Jeevan, Yojana and Bheema stumbling through a last-ditch insurance con. Unfortunately, there’s nobody named Pradhan, Mantri and Jyoti — why stop halfway?
The film opens with the funeral of the protagonist, Jeevan Kapoor (Arshad Warsi). Among the mourners are his wife Yojana (Sanjeeda Sheikh), his landlady Yashika (Pooja Chopra), and a silver-tongued goon named Vinayak (who else but Vijay Raaz). Jeevan was in grave debt, so it’s obvious that the death is staged. This is confirmed when a glassy-eyed Yojana returns after all the rituals only to reveal that her husband is hiding in the house. This is their masterplan to secure a fat insurance cheque and fly the coop. We learn, through marital-squabbling exposition, that the body burnt was of an alcoholic Jeevan doppelganger named Bheema (Warsi); the couple feel guilty, but they needed this divine intervention (otherwise known as Bollywood plotting). Things get hairy, though, when unexpected guests arrive and stay: Vinayak, his fellow goon (Brijendra Kala) with a bowel problem, the saucy landlady who lusts for Jeevan and loves groping him, and a suspicious insurance agent named Sachin Agarkar (only so that a cop named Ajit Tendulkar can tell him that he’d thrash him if his name were Inzamam Afridi).
The setting is Pune because the entire second half unfolds in the couple’s house, and a Mumbai apartment would’ve been too cramped for this crowd. The rented place is what we call Designer Middle-Class: spacious, full of IKEA furniture, colour-coded walls, but the struggle is real because there’s a rusted ceiling fan and no air-conditioner. Jeevan, it is disclosed, lost his restaurant during the pandemic, while Yojana is a lowly nurse. It’s hard to associate their bankruptcy with the space (unlike the chawls and streets and seedy lanes of a spirited con-com like Lootcase), but Jeevan Ya Bheema Con? has other issues. It somehow chooses the least interesting map of one-location entertainment after a promising setup. If it stuck to the essence of the title, the movie might have been able to mine the twisted question it asks at the midway mark: Was it Jeevan or Bheema who died? My ears perked up when Yojana herself is thrown into doubt and the script teases the identity coup. There’s something inherently dark about these people and their actions, so a campy quasi-thriller is ripe for the taking.
But the film opts for the conventional direction of toilet humour, silly twists, curated quirk, horse tranquiliser injections, ricocheting bullets, missing diamonds, and creepy characters who are supposed to be funny (why is the landlady so insistent on being a homewrecker, and then seducing the goons by licking an ice-cream cone?). What remains is an assortment of sticky situations with cartoon sound effects that paints itself into a high-pitched corner. It relies too much on Vijay Raaz’s reaction shots, his old-but-effective gangster shtick, and Brijendra Kala’s tomfoolery. Arshad Warsi is always watchable (particularly his throwaway lines like “he’s blowing himself” when he sees the goon blowing on his own wound), but even a double role isn’t enough to create a compelling case. It feels like all of them are just biding time and improvising, suspended in some kind of strange black-comedy limbo.
At times, I don’t think the movie knows that the central couple is difficult to root for; they’re pretty homicidal for cash-strapped normies, not blinking an eye before scheming and threatening and striving to kill. It’s hard to trust the screenplay when it claims that Bheema died of natural causes and wasn’t murdered (a prospect infinitely more interesting within the righteous moral fibre of this genre). One could, at most, see them as a reflection of average citizens pushed to the brink in this economy, but that’s giving too much credit to a film which is simply not interested in acting human. A few chuckles here and there are par for the course. Yet one can’t help but notice that there’s an urgent social satire buried deep within the formulaic volume. Maybe the problem is that the film becomes its own insurance policy. Or maybe it’s that there are too many rooms in a house where everyone wants to survive but nobody wants to live. Those Pune rents are quite the punchline for a Mumbai-sized storyline.