'Bun Butter Jam' Movie Review: Utterly, Bitterly Ridiculous

Can watching a film ever make you nauseous? Director Raghav Mirdath’s Bun Butter Jam seems to be a philosophical exploration of this one question. Why else would the director of a light rom-com want to zoom in so closely on the shot of a man clipping his nails? Or the reason why so many scenes are set in the toilet, including one that has the hero talk to a friend while holding a used toilet brush? Or the strange ways in which the film keeps trying to crack the same double-meaning joke by using unending shots of a tissue box and what the hero needs it for at night?

For a film titled Bun Butter Jam, it’s impossible to explain just how unappetising all of this can be. It’s a seemingly simple plot about two old friends who decide to live next to each other with the hope of getting both their kids to fall for each other. Hence the caption, “An arranged love marriage” in the film’s title. Yet the performances, the jokes and the plot points are so stale and predictable that you can write down exactly what’s going to happen on a piece of tissue, i.e if the film’s hero decides to spare one.

The film has also marketed itself as a multilingual and this only makes the matters worse because you can see how almost the entire film is shot within an artificial looking set. We get a handful of shots sets outside, and even then, none of it looks like the city the film is supposed to be set in.

It’s also the sort of film in which the characters do not really have to think at all. Whatever they are experiencing, one can be rest assured that we get a monologue in which the character himself explains what he’s feeling using just as many words; this could be that he’s hungry or that he’s angry but most likely, it is that he's horny. Instead of one line explaining the matteru, we get the actors shouting their lines and by using so much of their body that you’d think they’re performing for a play meant for the 1930s.

There’s almost nothing clever about what happens later. From a silly rom-com, the film transforms into a heightened friendship drama about two friends and the one woman that comes in between them. As fresh as that sounds, Bun Butter Jam only gets worse from thereon when we see a long, single take in the rain about the two boys, their broken friendship and the misunderstanding that ruined it. It’s an emotional scene, one that’s meant to make you tear up. Yet even at the peak of this drama, we see our film’s hero look straight at his bestie and mouth the lines that translates roughly to, “Do you know how close we were? We were so close that my mother thought we were both gay, dammit!”

The rest is made up of several such pearls of wisdom in a loud comedy that’s as crass as it is upsetting. Of the many films that affect both the heart and the head, here’s a cringe classic that affects your tummy, the same way you feel when you take a sip of milk that went stale over two months ago.