As a child, I used to enjoy flipping through pages of the Limca Book of Records. There were the weirdest categories: longest moustaches, walking on hands, typing with noses. I always imagined that I could some day qualify by doing an outlandish feat that nobody else thought of. You must be wondering where this is going; who starts a review like this? Wonder no further (like the film at hand). The closest I’ve gotten to being in that book is today. The feat: watching a two-hour “laugh riot” without a single expression on my face. Forget chuckling, I think I anti-chuckled: minus-humour, if that’s a thing. Which surely must be some kind of record. The problem is I’m not the only participant. From the reactions in a cinema hall every other Friday, there’s plenty of competition. And there are sub-categories: watching a comedy without watching it (eyes glued to the phone), maximum yawns in a screening, most planted viewers to elicit reactions. I don’t know if I’ll win. As a film critic, though, I’m a strong contender.
If it isn’t evident yet, Pati Patni Aur Woh Do is brainrot comedy at its peak. I don’t mean that in a no-frills-fun way. A spiritual sequel to Pati Patni Aur Woh (2019), its brand of humour is aggressively juvenile. The theme is infidelity — sort of — so you know the writing is going to enter pre-teen-jokes territory and then call out its characters for having a dirty mind (it’s an Ayushmann Khurrana starrer: a last-ditch social message is par for the course). What else can explain introducing an effeminate, gay police constable as a gag? Or an obese boss who keeps fingering his own ears and extending handshakes as a gag? Or a woman in the passenger seat of a car leaning to pick up a vegetable and visually simulating oral sex to the man beside her? Or a girl whose sari comes undone when she falls into the arms of her male friend at the exact moment his wife notices them? Or a pun on a Muslim character named Nilofer: that “Nalli Nihari loafer”? Or a leopard getting caught only so that the hero can say it’s a female who encroaches on others’ territory? Or the word “kaan” (ear) being misheard as Hindi slang for posteriors (look at me acting all posh)? Or a shady hotel chain called ‘Moyo Rooms: Keep Coming’? At least the Govinda starrers in the 1990s managed to be funny while being a colourfully sexist product of its times. But movies like Pati Patni Aur Woh Do are neither.
The plot is designed to stage all kinds of offensive stereotypes so that it can claim to reflect the average viewer’s gaze in the end. “Don’t believe everything you see” and words like “homophobia and casteism” are used in an airport monologue to assure us that the movie was purposely being problematic as part of some master plan. As per the title, it’s about a married couple and two ‘other’ women. Prayagraj forest officer Prajapati Pandey (an over-the-top and uncomfortable Khurrana) and his reporter wife Aparna (Wamiqa Gabbi) are a happy couple; her best friend Nilofer (Rakul Preet Singh) works with him in the same department. The poor CGI leopard is sacrificed at the altar of Pandey’s hero-entry shot.
All is well (five minutes basically) until a blast from Pandey’s past arrives in his life: former college mate Chanchal Kumari (Sara Ali Khan) needs him in a crisis. She’s in an intercaste relationship (which is also code for interfaith relationships these days) and in grave danger, which means Pandey has to pretend to be her boyfriend for a while to deflect suspicion and spying goons. They go overboard with the lie — hotel rooms, PDA at weddings, cozy drives — so that every character sees them and draws their own conclusions. So technically nobody is cheating, and this isn’t a film that glorifies or trivialises adultery. Somehow, that makes it worse. A controversial approach would’ve been something. Instead, it’s like that harmless bully who teases everyone in class, and innocently claims that he was just building their character and educating them about slurs all along.
You know how the crossed wires go: the wife thinks he’s dating her best friend, everyone thinks he’s cheating with one lover in one city, and at some point he is accused of cheating with two women and one man across different cities. Even the chaos is predictable. Even the inanity is dull. There’s a moral-policing cop (Vijay Raaz), a powerful politician (Tigmanshu Dhulia) who can’t believe how secular Pandey’s infidelity is (“sex, caste, religion, species no bar?”), a distant aunt (Ayesha Raza Mishra) of Chanchal who adds to the confusion, Chanchal’s heartbroken boyfriend (Vishal Vashishtha; deserves better), and a climax that features a dog-coded wolf who is sleepy before he is tranquilised. I felt a lot like that wolf. Maybe I could enter the Limca Book of Records as the boy who cried (like a) wolf in a theatre. Or for cracking dad jokes in a review that has no way to be constructive about an unsmiling comedy.