Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2 **
Dir: Luv Ranjan.
With: Kartik Aaryan, Omkar Kapoor, Sunny Singh, Nushrat Bharucha. 136 mins.
Cert: 12A
Although Luv Ranjan’s
battle-of-the-sexes comedy Pyaar Ka
Punchnama (off-putting English translation: Postmortem of Love) opened to
some commercial success back in 2011, it generated much the same mixed critical
response The Hangover had received
two years before. Introduced to three young bucks who swore, partied and
displayed the dismayed reactions to women common to many young men, plenty
simply relaxed into its company. Equally, though, there were those who found
the casual denigration of the fairer sex as scolds, teases and worse besides
suspect in the extreme. If Pyaar Ka
Punchnama 2, a more-of-the-same sequel, isn’t a Hangover II-style atrocity, it nevertheless perpetuates a
similarly divisive, problematic worldview.
It’s this worldview
that connects PKP2 to its
predecessor: in a vaguely daring conceptual coup, the original leads now play
entirely new characters, though the basic game – fruitless tail-chasing –
remains unchanged. Smarmy Thakur (Omkar Kapoor, an oft-shirtless cross between
Captain Scarlet and Brittas Empire-era
Chris Barrie) gets in a tizz about bankrolling artist flame Kusum (Ishita
Sharma). Colourless Gogo (Kartik Aaryan) struggles to separate new love Chiku
(Nushrat Bharucha) from her friends, female and male. And grouchy IT wonk Sid
(Sunny Singh) finds himself working overtime to woo modern girl Supriya
(Sonalli Sehgall) away from traditional parents who don’t consider him a
suitable match.
The first film won
over younger audiences by synthesising elements of popular US TV series: it
deployed the skittish, A-plot/B-plot structure of mainstream sitcoms within the
broader framing of those reality shows that cram attractive people in
well-appointed lofts with not enough clothes to go round. There were, and are,
truthful observations in Ranjan’s writing about the niggling passive-aggressive
standoffs that can occur in modern relationships – over Facebook statuses and
smartphone usage – and how new additions to social circles often upset
established group dynamics. Despite Aaryan’s catalogue-model anonymity, the
Gogo-Chiku strand yields the strongest material here, as he flails to keep up
with her party-hearty pals, and she interrupts the boys’ communal
cricket-watching like a lipglossed tropical storm.
The trouble – again –
is that its perspective is entirely one-sided. There’s no sense of how these
blustering, thrusting men might themselves be perceived as disruptive, and no
attempt to understand the women’s tactics as a form of self-preservation: even
Chiku, the most attentively characterised of the three, emerges as a spoilt
princess whose actions are presented as first questionable, then actively
hateful. The grievance extends beyond women to the very idea of relationships,
and how they take us out of ourselves: in demanding such punishing hard work,
such relentless second-guessing, they’re conceived of as an occupation
fundamentally at odds with the film’s preferred pastimes of sport, shopping and
selfie-taking.
That’s a lot of
resentment for a work as flimsy as this to hold in, and eventually it bubbles
up to the surface. Late on, Aaryan gets an eight-minute monologue – surpassing
his four-minute rant in the original – that lists in funny-tedious detail the
myriad things young men find frustrating about the opposite sex: it’s the film
in a nutshell, but also all too clearly untempered editorial. More succinct is
the slogan on a T-shirt Thakur deigns to put on at an earlier juncture: “In the
end, it’s all about sex.” During the course of this second night out, Ranjan’s
series reveals its true colours: those of a genial narcissist whose superficial
charm wears off very quickly. Swipe left.
Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2 is now showing in selected cinemas.
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