A ripple of nostalgia courses through you at the sight of stacks of cassettes in a recording shop. The kind of a shop in the bazaars of your hometown, where an obliging attendant took a playlist scribbled on a piece of paper and gave you back a cassette brimming with sweetness. And you tried to roll back errant loops of tape in the cassette with fumbling fingers. Dum Laga Ke Haisha is a love letter to the 90s, to the times when built-in alcoves in bedrooms held your prized music collection along with a cranky tape recorder. And you rented a VCR for the night and stayed up watching the latest Yash Chopra release and tuned into cable TV between exam preparations and sessions of family gossip. When pastries from a local bakery were the height of indulgence during birthdays and Kumar Sanu’s voice wafted out from every shop, every home. And when families slept together on cramped terraces in middle-class mohallas and fought and made up in full public view.
Writer and director Sharat Katariya however does not beyond a point romanticise the stifling era when the lack of individual space and excessive parental control damaged individual aspirations. And when it was perfectly acceptable to arrange marriages for economic reasons, to tell your daughter to never answer back to her in-laws or her husband, to beat up grown-up kids because they did not do your bidding and feign surprise if a new bride opened her mouth and answered an insult. Watch Seema Pahwa, the docile Badki of the mother of all soaps in India, Hum Log, playing the incredulous mother of a young woman here who has no intention to be docile, to stay in a loveless marriage and who even dares to slap her husband for a public insult. The end of marriage in the mother’s book is the end of life. Watch Alka Amin who in the 80s played Shahrukh Khan’s wife in a soap and here, is the groom’s mother. A woman who was once beaten up by her husband for an over-salted dish and who now gets her way by feigning fainting spells and carrying her saline water drip bottle to a divorce court so that she can prevent the unthinkable.
She hears everything. Even the creaking sounds from her son’s marital bed to make sure that everything is just the way it is supposed to be in her world. And there is the patriarch Sanjay Mishra who is one of the finest actors we have in India today chasing his son with a chappal, sharing his widowed sister’s grief, trying to have his way till the son tells him one day, “Front seat pe main baithoonga.’’
And there is the boy. Prem Prakash Tiwari (Ayushman Khurana), clumsy, awkward, bullied by his family, wistfully listening to Kumar Sanu’s songs in his recording shop and dreaming perhaps of a love that does not from any angle look like the woman he is forced to marry. Sandhya Verma (Bhumi Pednekar) is the woman in question and her weight is ridiculed even by her own family. But she has a ferocious intelligence, a brave love for life and inviolable self-worth. She is not self-conscious about dancing in public, holding her man’s arm or shopping for lingerie. She doesn’t know though, that the man she has come to like has been forced to marry her because she is more educated than him and is likely to bring home a salary. In her naivety, she tries to initiate intimacy, to fit into his dysfunctional, unexciting life but without success. She is a romantic though and even a scooter ride through the streets of Haridwar at night, watching her husband smoke and eat a kachori is enough to make her happy. But things begin to unravel and there is this fantastic scene when she gives it back to him and a nasty bua, and plays song after song of defiance on the tape recorder.
The two young actors seep into the story, live and breathe it. The scene where Prem (who like Sooraj Barjatya’s heroes, lives with his family but unlike them, wants to break free) has a meltdown and demolishes all the facades he is forced to put up with and tells Sandhya how she has been duped not just into marriage but into giving him a second chance, is the first true moment of intimacy between the two. This is the first time he sees her as a woman who has been wronged and she realises just how much repression and manipulation he has been putting up with. The dialogue where he tells her, “No point trying to lose weight…the man who falls for you will fall anyway… the rest is just nonsense,’’ is pure gold as are their little courtesies towards each other, their conversations and the final scene where he carries her, extra pounds and all on his back towards a finishing line that is actually the beginning of their love story.
Some of you may grow misty eyed at the sight of Kumar Sanu and find yourselves waiting eagerly for Anu Malik’s signature tribute to the 90s, “Dard karara”. Trust me, it will be worth the wait, just like this little gem of a movie that dares to steer clear of the nihilism of new-age filmmakers and the glossy packaging of the 100-crore lollypops. After a long time, here is a story that engages the eye, mind and the heart. Go, fall in love with the India of narrow, bustling streets, immense visual textures and characters that tell your stories and mine.
with
Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be silent with her cats.
Loved the film and was desperate tonread your review just to compare notes. Thanks