Pooja Meri Jaan opens with a dramatic Romeo and Juliet rendition on a Delhi stage. The Shakespearean tragedy ends with both deaths, there is applause, and the lead actors proceed to hijack the spotlight: ‘Romeo’ Aniket (Vikram Singh Chauhan) proposes to ‘Juliet’ Pooja (Mrunal Thakur) in front of a packed theatre. Seconds later, she rejects him backstage. He is devastated, her words hurt, he rides home in the rain like a broken Vishesh Films hero — and kills himself. Pooja is soon booked for abetment of suicide, and the rest of the film revolves around her trial in the court of public opinion.
Given that we live in an age where sexual assault survivors are slut-shamed and their abusers are sympathised with, Pooja’s plight is seen as her own; the case becomes a spectacle in a nation built on the fragility of male egos. A chauvinistic criminal lawyer (Vijay Raaz) leads the prosecution for Ani’s family; a common friend and corporate lawyer, Sana (Huma Qureshi), leads the defense for Pooja. Brace for tut-tutting monologues and chronically-online quotes masquerading as closing arguments.
Conceptually, Pooja Meri Jaan is very much a movie that’s conscious of our times. It makes the relatively difficult choice of saying the right things in a mainstream Bollywood landscape bristling with ‘misunderstood’ man-children, stylised misogyny, jilted lovers and bitter Romeos. At one point, rapists and acid-attackers are mentioned as the worst-case scenarios of rejection. Women directly bear the brunt of alphas who see rage as the currency of love, and statement movies like Pink are generated. But victimhood is the more insidious form of aggression. Religious majorities who cite historical oppression to ignite the masses are an extension of entitled men who threaten self-destruction to weaponise gender politics. Most modern blockbusters are shaped by this cinema of self-styled persecution and siege mentality, so it’s to the credit of Pooja Meri Jaan that it calls out the complicity of movies and pop culture in the erasure of consent and the glorification of heartbreak.
Ani’s personality is so coloured that he’s seen swearing by dialogue like “pyaar dosti hai (love is friendship)” when Pooja friendzones him, while the implications of casually sexist titles like Haseena Maan Jayegi (the beautiful girl will agree) and celebrated phrases like “uske naa mein haan hai (her No contains a Yes)” and “ek-tarfa pyaar” (one-sided love) are highlighted. Pooja’s idol is A.R. Rahman, whose music probably eases her into accepting ‘pushy’ heroes like the one in Dil Se. This film is essentially a revenge thriller, where the wronged man takes revenge by sacrificing himself. It’s supposed to be an indictment of all the storytelling that passes off toxic masculinity — or its siblings like hypernationalism and propaganda — as a reclamation of ‘rights’ and stifled identity. After all, there’s nothing more provocative than pretending to be the underdog in invisible wars.
But saying the right thing these days is not enough. The problem with Pooja Meri Jaan is a familiar one in the post-Rhea-Chakraborty-hounding era; it plays out like a toddler that has just learnt how to be woke. (A one-line review: The clumsiest person you know just made a great point). The craft lacks the maturity to deal with such themes. For instance, the intent early on is to lean into the male gaze and make the filmmaking itself reflect the perils of societal conditioning. The design is meant to feed our confirmation biases. Ani is presented as a Nice Guy who works at an NGO; his mother is a middle-class widow; he was generous to his colleagues; his sincere face screams for belonging and benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, Pooja is presented as an indecisive and flaky South Delhi girl with multiple ex-boyfriends (she even dares to sleep that night in her air-conditioned bedroom); she has a history of breaking hearts and minds. But the staging is so binary that it’s hard to tell if the gaze is a ruse or a reality.
Painting Pooja as a flawed woman (to bait viewers into wondering if she ‘deserves’ her fate) is one thing, but she’s shown as the kind of irredeemable brat that iffy men’s rights activists equate with performative feminism. Painting Ani as a misguided man is one thing, but the storytelling crosses the line while trying to reframe delusion as innocence. I get that the idea is for the film to tease popular perception and conflate the image of a troubled man with that of a hopeless romantic. However, it’s unclear where the gimmick ends and the opinion begins. A drunken meet-cute on a terrace is replayed through both perspectives — how the man imagined it versus how the woman testifies — but the contrast is too calculated.
The result is a bunch of stilted performances and characterisations; the actors are torn between being in a movie and chastising the role of movies. Mrunal Thakur looks a bit lost with the conflicting brief, Vikram Singh Chauhan fits the bill as a “led-on” stalker but overcooks the duality, Huma Qureshi explains subtext well, and except for a worryingly persuasive Vijay Raaz, the supporting cast barely registers. I like some of the greyness that the film attempts to explore. Take the fact that a pressured Pooja did consent to a relationship with Ani at some point; or her ‘memories’ that unfold like gentler flashbacks of half-truths and fictions; or the fact that Pooja willingly received support from Ani over the years despite suspecting his patterns. The narrative is willing to introspect about incel impulses and entrenched emotional manipulation. There’s a sense that Pooja is on trial for simply being human. Like millions of women across the world, she’s nearly gaslighted by the system into guilt for looking out for herself and owing nobody an explanation.
I also like that Pooja remains vulnerable and capable of making mistakes; she’s not some mellow girl who magically transforms into an unapologetic goddess. At some level, she believes that she’s paying the price for a ‘friend’ she took for granted; she sees it as a sign of culpability. Never mind that Ani may have been the sort of guy who says “I have a girlfriend, she just doesn’t know it yet”. But the treatment used to depict the change is dated: prison sequences, judgmental relatives and friends, a douche-y ex-boyfriend, Ani’s angry flatmate, a younger brother who sees perseverance as the key to romance, a half-baked female cop, unconvincing social media trolls who sound like they’re trolling themselves. The devil is in the details, but the film is preoccupied with broader demons.
It’s all very Gender Studies 101; the toll on Pooja barely shows, and the case wears enlightenment as an aesthetic. Having resolutions in such stories is tricky, and even though Pooja Meri Jaan weakly suggests that there is no coming back from the punishment of the process, it opts to end on the corniest note possible. Closing with a preachy moment beats the very purpose of social entertainment and cautionary tales; it implies that all issues can be fixed because it’s the responsibility of all movies to offer hope. Ironically, this is a story that means well, but stays too influenced by the vanity of pop culture to leave an impact. It’s also infected with rejection anxiety, sabotaging its own depth to teach us a lesson. Cinema can be a medium of change, but denial is the star of deep-state patriarchy